Linguistics a Brief Summary
Autor: MR TOWERS | Publicado: 2011-02-09T03:58:00-08:00


Linguistics&nbsp;is the scientific study of&nbsp;human&nbsp;language.Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields: the study of language form, of language meaning, and of language in context.The first is the study of language structure, or&nbsp;grammar. This focuses on the systems of rules that are followed by speakers or a language. It encompasses&nbsp;morphology&nbsp;(the formation and composition of words),&nbsp;syntax&nbsp;(the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and&nbsp;phonology&nbsp;(sound systems).&nbsp;Phonetics&nbsp;is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds, nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.The study of language&nbsp;meaning&nbsp;is concerned with how language users make the inferences required to understand another's speech, how meaning is assigned and processed, and ambiguity. This subfield encompasses&nbsp;semantics&nbsp;(how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and&nbsp;pragmatics&nbsp;(how meaning is inferred from context).Language in its broader context includes&nbsp;evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language;&nbsp;historical linguistics, which explores language change;&nbsp;sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures;&nbsp;psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind;&nbsp;neurolinguistics, which looks at language processing in the brain;&nbsp;language acquisition, how children or adults acquire language; and&nbsp;discourse analysis, which involves the structure of texts and conversations.Although linguistics is the scientific study of language, a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to language and influence its study.Semiotics, for example, is the general study of signs and symbols both within language and without.&nbsp;Literary theorists&nbsp;study the use of language inliterature. Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse fields as&nbsp;psychology,&nbsp;speech-language pathology,&nbsp;informatics,&nbsp;computer science,philosophy,&nbsp;biology,&nbsp;human anatomy,&nbsp;neuroscience,&nbsp;sociology,&nbsp;anthropology, and&nbsp;acoustics.Terminology for the disciplineBefore the 20th century, the term "philology", first attested in 1716,[5]&nbsp;was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus.[6]&nbsp;SinceFerdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of&nbsp;synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted[7]&nbsp;and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition", especially in the United States,[8]&nbsp;where it was never as popular as it was elsewhere (in the sense of the "science of language").[5]Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641,[9]&nbsp;the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847.[9]&nbsp;It is now the usual academic term in English for the scientific study of language.The term&nbsp;linguist, used for one who studies language, applies within the field to someone who either studies linguistics or uses linguistic methodologies to study groups of languages or particular languages. Outside the field, this term is commonly used to refer to people who speak many languages fluently.
Fundamental concerns and divisionsLinguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of human language. Fundamental questions include what is universal to language, how language can vary, and how human beings come to know languages. Linguistic fields can then be broadly divided into those that distinguish themselves by a focus on linguistic structure and grammar, and those that distinguish themselves by the nonlinguistic factors they consider.
Fundamental questionsAll humans achieve competence in whatever language is used around them when growing up, with apparently little need for explicit conscious instruction (setting aside extremely pathological cases). Linguists assume that the ability to acquire and use language is an innate, biologically based potential of modern human beings, similar to the ability to walk, because nonhumans do not acquire human language in this way (although many nonhuman animals can learn to respond to language, or can even be trained to use it to a degree).[11]There is no consensus, however, as to the extent of humans' innate potential for language, or the degree to which such innate abilities are specific to language. Some theorists claim that there is a very large set of highly abstract and specific binary settings coded into the human brain; the combinations of these settings would give rise to every language on the planet. Other linguists claim that the ability to learn language is a product of general human cognition. It is, however, generally agreed that there are no strong&nbsp;genetic&nbsp;differences underlying the differences between languages: an individual will acquire whatever language(s) he or she is exposed to as a child, regardless of parentage or ethnic origin. Nevertheless, recent research suggests that even weak genetic biases in speakers may, over a number of generations, influence the evolution of particular languages, leading to a nonrandom distribution of certain linguistic features across the world.&nbsp;[12]
Divisions based on linguistic structures studiedLinguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form. Any particular pairing of meaning and form is a&nbsp;Saussurean&nbsp;sign. For instance, the meaning "cat" is represented worldwide with a wide variety of different sound patterns (in spoken languages), movements of the hands and face (in signed languages), and written symbols (in written languages).Linguists who focus on structure attempt to understand the rules regarding language use that native speakers know (not always consciously). All linguistic structures can be broken down into component parts that are combined according to (sub)conscious rules, over multiple levels of analysis. For instance, consider the structure of the word "tenth" on two different levels of analysis. On the level of internal word structure (known as morphology), the word "tenth" is made up of one linguistic form indicating a number and another form indicating ordinality. The rule governing the combination of these forms ensures that the ordinality marker "th" follows the number "ten." On the level of sound structure (known as phonology), structural analysis shows that the "n" sound in "tenth" is made differently from the "n" sound in "ten" spoken alone. Although most speakers of English are consciously aware of the rules governing internal structure of the word pieces of "tenth", they are less often aware of the rule governing its sound structure. Linguists focused on structure find and analyze rules such as these, which govern how native speakers use language.Linguistics has many sub-fields concerned with particular aspects of linguistic structure. These sub-fields range from those focused primarily on form to those focused primarily on meaning. They also run the gamut of level of analysis of language, from individual sounds, to words, to phrases and up to discourse.Sub-fields of structure-focused linguistics include:Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech (or signed) production and perception
Phonology, the study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning
Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified
Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical&nbsp;sentences
Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the&nbsp;meanings&nbsp;of sentences
Pragmatics, the study of how&nbsp;utterances&nbsp;are used in&nbsp;communicative acts, and the role played by context and nonlinguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning
Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in&nbsp;texts&nbsp;(spoken, written, or signed)
Many linguists would agree that these divisions overlap considerably, and the independent significance of each of these areas is not universally acknowledged. Regardless of any particular linguist's position, each area has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and research.
Divisions based on nonlinguistic factors studiedAlongside the structurally motivated domains of study are other fields of linguistics. These fields are distinguished by the kinds of nonlinguistic factors that they consider:Applied linguistics, the study of language-related issues applied in everyday life, notably language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed language&nbsp;fits under Applied linguistics.)
Biolinguistics, the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals, compared to human language.
Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the field of&nbsp;Speech-Language Pathology.
Computational linguistics, the study of computational implementations of linguistic structures.
Developmental linguistics, the study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals, particularly&nbsp;the acquisition of language&nbsp;in childhood.
Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the origin and subsequent development of language by the human species.
Historical linguistics&nbsp;or diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time.
Language geography, the study of the geographical distribution of languages and linguistic features.
Linguistic typology, the study of the common properties of diverse unrelated languages, properties that may, given sufficient attestation, be assumed to be innate to human language capacity.
Neurolinguistics, the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and communication.
Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.
Sociolinguistics, the study of variation in language and its relationship with social factors.
Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.
Semiotics&nbsp;is not a discipline within linguistics; rather, it investigates the relationship between signs and what they signify more broadly. From the perspective of semiotics, language can be seen as a sign or symbol, with the world as its representation.
Variation and universalityMuch modern linguistic research, particularly within the&nbsp;paradigm&nbsp;of&nbsp;generative grammar, has concerned itself with trying to account for differences between languages of the world. This has worked on the assumption that if human linguistic ability is narrowly constrained by human biology, then all languages must share certain fundamental properties.In&nbsp;generativist theory, the collection of fundamental properties all languages share are referred to as&nbsp;universal grammar&nbsp;(UG). The specific characteristics of this universal grammar are a much debated topic.&nbsp;Typologists&nbsp;and non-generativist linguists usually refer simply to&nbsp;language universals, or&nbsp;universals of language.Similarities between languages can have a number of different origins. In the simplest case, universal properties may be due to universal aspects of human experience. For example, all humans experience water, and all human languages have a word for water. Other similarities may be due to common descent: the&nbsp;Latin language&nbsp;spoken by the&nbsp;Ancient Romansdeveloped into Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy; similarities between Spanish and Italian are thus in many cases due to both being descended from Latin. In other cases,&nbsp;contact between languages&nbsp;— particularly where many speakers are bilingual — can lead to much borrowing of structures, as well as words. Similarity may also, of course, be due to coincidence. English&nbsp;much&nbsp;and Spanish&nbsp;mucho&nbsp;are not descended from the same form or borrowed from one language to the other;[13]&nbsp;nor is the similarity due to innate linguistic knowledge (see&nbsp;False cognate).Arguments in favor of language universals have also come from documented cases of&nbsp;sign languages&nbsp;(such as&nbsp;Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) developing in communities of congenitally deaf people, independently of spoken language. The properties of these sign languages conform generally to many of the properties of spoken languages. Other known and suspected sign language&nbsp;isolates&nbsp;include&nbsp;Kata Kolok,&nbsp;Nicaraguan Sign Language, and&nbsp;Providence Island Sign Language.StructuresFerdinand de SaussureIt has been perceived that languages tend to be organized around&nbsp;grammatical categories&nbsp;such as noun and verb,&nbsp;nominative&nbsp;and&nbsp;accusative, or present and past, though, importantly, not exclusively so. The grammar of a language is organized around such fundamental categories, though many languages express the relationships between words and syntax in other discrete ways (cf. some&nbsp;Bantu languages&nbsp;for noun/verb relations,&nbsp;ergative-absolutive&nbsp;systems for case relations, several&nbsp;Native American languages&nbsp;for tense/aspect relations).In addition to making substantial use of discrete categories, language has the important property that it organizes elements into&nbsp;recursivestructures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to contain another noun phrase (as in "the chimpanzee's lips") or a clause to contain a clause (as in "I think that it's raining"). Though recursion in grammar was implicitly recognized much earlier (for example by&nbsp;Jespersen), the importance of this aspect of language became more popular after the 1957 publication of&nbsp;Noam Chomsky's book&nbsp;Syntactic Structures,[14]which presented a formal grammar of a fragment of English. Prior to this, the most detailed descriptions of linguistic systems were of phonological or morphological systems.Chomsky used a&nbsp;context-free grammar&nbsp;augmented with&nbsp;transformations. Since then, following the trend of Chomskyan linguistics, context-free grammars have been written for substantial fragments of various languages (for example&nbsp;GPSG, for English). It has been demonstrated, however, that human languages (most notably Dutch and Swiss German) include cross-serial dependencies, which cannot be handled adequately by context-free grammars.


Selected sub-fields
Historical linguisticsMain article:&nbsp;Historical linguisticsHistorical linguistics studies the history and evolution of languages through the&nbsp;comparative method. Often the aim of historical linguistics is to classify languages in&nbsp;language familiesdescending from a common ancestor. This involves comparison of elements in different languages to detect possible&nbsp;cognates&nbsp;in order to be able to reconstruct how different languages have&nbsp;changed&nbsp;over time. This also involves the study of&nbsp;etymology, the study of the history of single words. Historical linguistics is also called "diachronic linguistics" and is opposed to "synchronic linguistics" that study languages in a given moment in time without regarding its previous stages. In universities in the United States, the historic perspective is often out of fashion. Historical linguistics was among the first linguistic disciplines to emerge and was the most widely practiced form of linguistics in the late 19th century. The shift in focus to a synchronic perspective started with&nbsp;Saussure&nbsp;and became predominant in western linguistics with&nbsp;Noam Chomsky's emphasis on the study of the synchronic and universal aspects of language.
SemioticsMain article:&nbsp;SemioticsSemiotics&nbsp;is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems, including the study of how meaning is constructed and understood. Semioticians often do not restrict themselves to linguistic communication when studying the use of signs but extend the meaning of "sign" to cover all kinds of cultural symbols. Nonetheless semiotic disciplines closely related to linguistics are&nbsp;literary studies,&nbsp;discourse analysis,&nbsp;text linguistics, and&nbsp;philosophy of language.
Descriptive linguistics and language documentationMain article:&nbsp;Descriptive linguisticsSince the inception of the discipline of linguistics linguists have been concerned with describing and documenting languages previously unknown to science. Starting with&nbsp;Franz Boas&nbsp;in the early 1900s descriptive linguistics became the main strand within American linguistics until the rise of formal structural linguistics in the mid 20th century. The rise of American descriptive linguistics was caused by the concern with describing the languages of indigenous peoples that were (and are) rapidly moving towards extinction. The ethnographic focus of the original Boasian type of descriptive linguistics occasioned the development of disciplines such as&nbsp;Sociolinguistics,&nbsp;anthropological linguistics, and&nbsp;linguistic anthropology, disciplines that investigate the relations between language, culture and society.The emphasis on linguistic description and documentation has since become more important outside of North America as well, as the documentation of rapidly dying indigenous languages has become a primary focus in many of the worlds' linguistics programs. Language description is a work intensive endeavour usually requiring years of field work for the linguist to learn a language sufficiently well to write a reference grammar of it. The further task of language documentation requires the linguist to collect a preferably large corpus of texts and recordings of sound and video in the language, and to arrange for its storage in accessible formats in open repositories where it may be of the best use for further research by other researchers.[16]
Applied linguisticsMain article:&nbsp;Applied linguisticsLinguists are largely concerned with finding and&nbsp;describing&nbsp;the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all language.&nbsp;Applied linguistics&nbsp;takes the result of those findings and "applies" them to other areas. The term "applied linguistics" is often used to refer to the use of linguistic research in language teaching only[citation needed], but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas as well, such as&nbsp;lexicography&nbsp;and&nbsp;translation. "Applied linguistics" has been argued to be something of a misnomer[who?], since applied linguists focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply "applying" existing technical knowledge from linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g. conversation analysis) and anthropology.Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics.&nbsp;Speech synthesis&nbsp;and&nbsp;speech recognition&nbsp;use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of&nbsp;computational linguistics&nbsp;in&nbsp;machine translation,&nbsp;computer-assisted translation, and&nbsp;natural language processing&nbsp;are areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints.Linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify the claimed&nbsp;nationality&nbsp;of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim.[17]&nbsp;This often takes the form of an&nbsp;interview&nbsp;by personnel in an immigration department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted in either the asylum seeker's&nbsp;native language&nbsp;through an&nbsp;interpreter, or in an international&nbsp;lingua franca&nbsp;like English.[17]&nbsp;Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved.[17]&nbsp;Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis, which can be done by either private contractors or within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.[17]
Description and prescriptionMain articles:&nbsp;Descriptive linguistics,&nbsp;Linguistic prescriptionLinguistics is&nbsp;descriptive; linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature is "right" or "wrong". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a&nbsp;zoologist&nbsp;studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular animal is better or worse than another.Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favouring a particular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aim of establishing alinguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see&nbsp;Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among&nbsp;censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be destructive to society.
Speech and writingMost contemporary linguists work under the assumption that&nbsp;spoken&nbsp;(or signed) language is more fundamental than&nbsp;written language. This is because:Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and hearing it, while there have been many&nbsp;cultures&nbsp;and speech communities that lack written communication;
Speech evolved before human beings invented writing;
People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than&nbsp;writing;
Linguists nonetheless agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on&nbsp;corpus linguistics&nbsp;and&nbsp;computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typicallytranscribed&nbsp;and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of&nbsp;computer-mediated communication&nbsp;as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.The study of&nbsp;writing systems&nbsp;themselves is in any case considered a branch of linguistics.
HistoryMain article:&nbsp;History of linguisticsSome of the earliest linguistic activities can be recalled from&nbsp;Iron Age India&nbsp;with the analysis of&nbsp;Sanskrit. The&nbsp;Pratishakhyas&nbsp;(from ca. the 8th century BC) constitute as it were a proto-linguistic&nbsp;ad hoc&nbsp;collection of observations about mutations to a given&nbsp;corpus&nbsp;particular to a given&nbsp;Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the&nbsp;Vedanga&nbsp;discipline ofVyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of&nbsp;Pāṇini&nbsp;(c. 520 – 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to.&nbsp;Pāṇini&nbsp;formulates close to 4,000 rules which together form a compact&nbsp;generative grammar&nbsp;of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the&nbsp;phoneme, the&nbsp;morpheme&nbsp;and the&nbsp;root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to "human readable" programming languages).Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries;&nbsp;Patanjali&nbsp;in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Pāṇini. In the later centuries BC, however, Pāṇini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it.&nbsp;Bhartṛhari&nbsp;(c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation) and third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.Western&nbsp;linguistics begins in&nbsp;Classical Antiquity&nbsp;with grammatical speculation such as&nbsp;Plato's&nbsp;Cratylus. The first important advancement of the&nbsp;Greeks&nbsp;was the creation of the&nbsp;alphabet. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the&nbsp;Homeric poems&nbsp;became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of&nbsp;philology&nbsp;and&nbsp;critic. The&nbsp;sophists&nbsp;and&nbsp;Socrates&nbsp;introduced dialectics as a new text genre.&nbsp;Aristotle&nbsp;defined the logic of speech and the argument, and his works on&nbsp;rhetoric&nbsp;and&nbsp;poetics&nbsp;developed the understating of tragedy, poetry, and public discussions as text genres.One of the greatest of the&nbsp;Greek&nbsp;grammarians&nbsp;was&nbsp;Apollonius Dyscolus.[18]&nbsp;Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology,&nbsp;prosody,orthography,&nbsp;dialectology, and more. In the 4th c.,&nbsp;Aelius Donatus&nbsp;compiled the Latin grammar&nbsp;Ars Grammatica&nbsp;that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.[19]&nbsp;In&nbsp;De vulgari eloquentia&nbsp;("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"),&nbsp;Dante Alighieri&nbsp;expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.[citation needed]In the Middle East, the&nbsp;Persian&nbsp;linguist&nbsp;Sibawayh&nbsp;made a detailed and professional description of&nbsp;Arabic&nbsp;in 760, in his monumental work,&nbsp;Al-kitab fi al-nahw&nbsp;(الكتاب في النحو,&nbsp;The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished&nbsp;phonetics&nbsp;from&nbsp;phonology.[citation needed]Sir William Jones&nbsp;noted that&nbsp;Sanskrit&nbsp;shared many common features with classical&nbsp;Latin&nbsp;and&nbsp;Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the&nbsp;case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung from a common source and to the discovery of the&nbsp;Indo-European&nbsp;language family. He began the study of&nbsp;comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches.In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were&nbsp;Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as&nbsp;Grimm's Law&nbsp;– in 1822;&nbsp;Karl Verner, who formulated&nbsp;Verner's Law;&nbsp;August Schleicher, who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" ("family tree"); and&nbsp;Johannes Schmidt, who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872.Ferdinand de Saussure&nbsp;was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e. nonhistorical) explanations for language form.In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the Bible) and anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field of&nbsp;anthropology&nbsp;in the United States,[20][21]&nbsp;linguistics is now considered a separate scientific discipline in the US, Australia and much of Europe.Edward Sapir, a leader in American structural linguistics, was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His methodology had strong influence on all his successors.&nbsp;Noam Chomsky's formal model of language,&nbsp;transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher&nbsp;Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly influenced by&nbsp;Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant model since the 1960s.The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative grammar in the 1950s and 60s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal and language specific rules.&nbsp;Noam Chomsky&nbsp;remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such frameworks such as&nbsp;Transformational grammar,&nbsp;Generative Semantics,&nbsp;Relational Grammar,&nbsp;Generalized phrase structure grammar,&nbsp;Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar(HPSG) and&nbsp;Lexical Functional Grammar&nbsp;(LFG). Other linguists working in&nbsp;Optimality Theory&nbsp;state generalizations in terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon the traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in generativist linguistics.Functionalist linguists working in&nbsp;functional grammar&nbsp;and&nbsp;Cognitive Linguistics&nbsp;tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus differing significantly from the formal approaches.
Schools of studyThere are a wide variety of approaches to linguistic study. These can be loosely divided (although not without controversy) into formalist and functionalist approaches. Formalist approaches stress the importance of linguistic forms, and seek explanations for the structure of language from within the linguistic system itself. For example, the fact that language shows&nbsp;recursion&nbsp;might be attributed to recursive rules. Functionalist linguists by contrast view the structure of language as being driven by its function. For example, the fact that languages often put topical information first in the sentence, may be due to a communicative need to pair old information with new information in discourse.
Generative grammarMain article:&nbsp;Generative grammarDuring the last half of the 20th century, following the work of&nbsp;Noam Chomsky, linguistics was dominated by the&nbsp;generativist school. While formulated by Chomsky in part as a way to explain how human beings&nbsp;acquire language&nbsp;and the biological constraints on this acquisition, in practice it has largely been concerned with giving formal accounts of specific phenomena in natural languages. Generative theory is&nbsp;modularist&nbsp;and formalist in character. Formal linguistics remains the dominant paradigm for studying linguistics,[22]&nbsp;though Chomsky's writings have also gathered much&nbsp;criticism.
Cognitive linguisticsMain article:&nbsp;Cognitive linguisticsIn the 1970s and 1980s, a new school of thought known as cognitive linguistics emerged as a reaction to generativist theory. Led by theorists such as&nbsp;Ronald Langacker&nbsp;and&nbsp;George Lakoff, linguists working within the realm of cognitive linguistics posit that language is an&nbsp;emergent&nbsp;property of basic, general-purpose cognitive processes, though cognitive linguistics has also been the subject of much criticism.[23]&nbsp;In contrast to the generativist school of linguistics, cognitive linguistics is non-modularist and functionalist in character. Important developments in cognitive linguistics include&nbsp;cognitive grammar,&nbsp;frame semantics, and&nbsp;conceptual metaphor, all of which are based on the idea that form-function correspondences based on representations derived from&nbsp;embodied experience&nbsp;constitute the basic units of language.