Linguistics

Linguistics is the study of language. People who study language are called linguists. Linguistics is not to be confused with language-learning.

There are five main parts of linguistics: the study of sounds (phonology), the study of parts of words, like "un-" and "-ing" (morphology), the study of word order and how sentences are made (syntax), the study of the meaning of words (semantics), and the study of the unspoken meaning of speech that is separate from the literal meaning of what is said (for example, saying "I'm cold" to get someone to turn off the fan (pragmatics). 

Some linguists are theoretical linguists and study the theory and ideas behind language, such as historical linguistics (the study of the history of language, and how it has changed), or the study of how different groups of people may use language differently (sociolinguistics). Some linguists are applied linguists and use linguistics to do things. For example, forensic linguistics is used in crime investigations, and computational linguistics is used to help make computers understand languages, as in speech recognition. 

 Specialties 
There are many different specialties (subfields or sub-disciplines) within linguistics. 

Linguistics can be theoretical or it can be applied. Theoretical linguists try to develop theories on how people think about language. Applied linguists try to find ways that linguistics theories can be used in the real world (technology, coding, speech and language therapy, artificial intelligence etc,). There are theoretical linguists and applied linguists in every specialty of linguistics. 

 Syntax 
Syntax is the study of grammars. A linguist who studies syntax is called a syntactician. A language's grammar is a set of rules that language users follow in order to form sentences. A language's grammar is created (often subconsciously) by native speakers of that language, and is always changing and evolving. 

A language usually does not have just one grammar; different groups of people speaking the same language may have slightly different grammars because of differences in the specific dialect (or variety) of that language they speak. Only native speakers of a language or dialect can determine what the "correct" grammar of their language looks like. In other words, this means a native speaker can never use their own language incorrectly, which also means all syntax theories are based on the way native speakers speak and which utterances they consider to be correct. Linguists call this a "grammaticality judgment": sentences or phrases that sound unnatural or incorrect to native speakers are ungrammatical, and phrases that sound natural and correct are grammatical phrases.

The aim of syntax is to understand how languages' grammars work and to develop a theoretical structure, or framework, to represent them. Syntacticians observe native speakers and use their grammacticality judgments to understand how the rules of a language are structured in a language user's brain.

Topics in syntax include:

 Syntactic categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, determiners, pronouns)

 Aspects of verb conjugation (case, tense, declension)
 Grammatical gender

 Phonetics 
Phonetics is the study of the physical expression of language. In languages that are spoken, phonology is the study of the sounds that are produced by the mouth, throat, and nose. In languages that are signed, phonology is the study of the signs and gestures that are produced by the hands, arms, torso, and face. 

Topics in Phonetics include:

 International Phonetic Alphabet
 Pronunciation
 Articulator
 Acoustics

 Semantics 
Semantics is the study of how humans use language to communicate meaning. Linguists who study semantics are interested in what words mean, both literally and metaphorically. They are also interested in literary expressions or innuendo, which are words or phrases that have more than one meaning.

Semantics has a lot of overlap with the philosophical study of Logic.

 Other fields in linguistics 

 Evolutionary linguistics 
Evolutionary linguistics explores the origins of language as a whole. Historical linguistics studies how languages change over time, and how languages were used in the past. This includes etymology, the study of the history of words. Comparative linguistics compares different languages to find similarities between them. That makes it possible to find things shared by all the languages of the world, and to learn the languages that are related in a language family.

 Cognitive linguistics 
Cognitive linguistics looks at how language and thoughts are organised in the human brain. This includes psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; and neurolinguistics, which looks at language processing in the brain. Linguistics additionally draws on and informs work from fields such as acoustics, anthropology, biology, computer science, human anatomy, informatics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and speech-language pathology.

 Language acquisition 
Language acquisition looks at how humans recognize and understand language. First language acquisition explores how children acquire (learn) their first language; second language acquisition explores how adults learn languages.

 Sociolinguistics 
Some sub-disciplines of linguistics focus on understanding how languages are used in society or in the world. Sociolinguistics studies how language is used in society; for example, how factors such as gender and social class can impact how language is used. Discourse analysis is the study of entire conversations or texts.

 Semiotics 
Semiotics is the general study of signs and symbols both within language and outside it. Literary theorists study the use of language in literature.

History

The study of language began in India with Pāṇini, the 5th-century BC grammarian who wrote about the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit grammar, which described the different kinds of vowels and consonants of Sanskrit as well as its verb and noun classes. In the Middle East, Sibawayh (سیبویه) wrote a book about Arabic in 760 AD, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar) and was the first known author to talk about the difference between sounds and phonemes.

Linguistics started in the West as early as it did in the East, but Western linguistics was then more like philosophy and less the study of language. Plato was the first western philosopher to write about semantics in his Cratylus in which he argues that words represent concepts that are eternal and exist in the world of ideas. The word etymology is first used to talk about the history behind a word's meaning.

For many centuries most linguistic work was "philology".

References