BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS

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Ashish Prasad & Apurv Verma
WHAT IS LINGUISTICS?

 Scientific study of human language.

 Aims of linguistic theory:

What is knowledge of language? (Competence)
How is knowledge of language acquired?
(Acquisition)
How is knowledge of language put to use?
(Performance/language processing)

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LANGUAGE
“Language is a purely human and
non-instinctive method of
communicating ideas, emotions and
desires by means of voluntarily
produced symbols.”
--Edward Sapir (1884-1939):
Language: An Introduction to the
Study of Speech (1921)

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“From now on I will consider
language to be a set (finite or
infinite) of sentences, each
finite in length and constructed
out of a finite set of elements.”
--Noam Chomsky (1928- ):
Syntactic Structures (1957)

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IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE

 The most important tool ever invented.

Distinguishes us from other creatures.
Provides a medium to think effectively, communicate
interpersonally and collaborate with other people in
work.

 Impossible to imagine a world without language.

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LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
MAIN BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS
 Phonetics
 Phonology

 Morphology

 Syntax

 Semantics

 Pragmatics

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PHONETICS
 Phonetics studies speech sounds, including
Production of speech, that is how speech sounds are
actually made : Articulatory Phonetics
Transmission and receipt of speech : Acoustic
Phonetics and
Perception of the transmitted sound by human brain :
Auditory Phonetics.

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PHONOLOGY
 Studies the sound system of languages.
Distinctive sounds within a language,
Nature of sound systems across the languages.

 Phoneme (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a

sound uttered") is the smallest segmental unit of
sound employed to form meaningful contrasts
between utterances.

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MORPHOLOGY
 Studies the formation of words from smaller units
called morphemes.

 Morpheme: minimal meaningful language unit.

 Phoneme(s): smallest linguistically distinctive units
of sound) in spoken language.
 Grapheme(s): written symbol to represent speech.

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SYNTAX
 Rules that govern the formation of sentences from
words.
 Syntactic phrases include:
Noun Phrase : a tall man, the bus
Verb Phrase : roam around, hit the ball
Prepositional Phrase : in the class, at the club
Adjective Phrase : Very good, nice girl
 The Grammatical Rules:
SOV: eg. Hindi
SVO: eg . English

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GRAMMAR

 The syntax of a language deals with the

grammatical structure of a language.

 Grammar is the structural foundation of our ability

to express ourselves.
Descriptive grammar : structure actually used by
speakers and writers.
Prescriptive grammar : structure that should be used.

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HIERARCHY OF LANGUAGE: STRATIFICATION

Phonemes
Syllables
Morphemes
Words
Phrases
Clauses
Sentences/utterances
Texts/discourses
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SEMANTICS

 Study of language meaning.

 Concerned with not only the meaning of words, but

also that of morphemes and of sentences.

 Lexical semantics study how and what the words of

a language denote.

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SEMANTIC RELATIONS

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EXAMPLES
 Pretty and attractive are synonyms.
 Good and bad are antonyms.

 Animal is a hypernym of mammal which is a

hypernym of dog.
 Dog is a hyponym of mammal which is a hyponym
of animal.
 Bark is a meronym of tree which is a meronym of
forest.
 Forest is a holonym of tree which is a holonym of
bark.
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PRAGMATICS
 Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context.

 How language is used to communicate rather than

how it is internally structured.

 Govern a number of conversational

interactions, such as sequential organization, repair
of errors, role and speech acts.

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REFERENCES

 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics

 en.citizendium.org/wiki/Linguistics

 Lecture Slides

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THANK YOU

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