In the West, we can trace back to Plato an almost unbroken line of grammatical treatises and commentaries. Among the humanities, linguistics is an unusually exact and highly structured discipline. The direct origins of modern linguistics lie in the 18th and 19th centuries, when scholars turned from philosophical speculation about language to systematic observation and description of languages. Contemporary linguistics has been decisively shaped by the ideas and the work of Noam Chomsky, whose approach to the study of language is referred to as generative grammar. The best way of gaining a concrete understanding of what linguistics is all about is by taking up some of the typical problems studied in the subdisciplines.
Syntax is concerned with the rules used to combine words into larger units of phrases and sentences.
Kim appeared to Jill to like her. Kim appealed to Jill to like her. The opposite holds in the second sentence, where her cannot refer to Jill, but refers either to Jill or some third party. Semantics studies the meanings of linguistic units and how they are combined to form the meanings of sentences. Phonetics deals with the sounds of languages.