Linguistics
Linguistic features may be studied through a variety of perspectives: synchronically (by describing the structure of a language at a specific point in time) or diachronically (through the historical development of a language over a period of time), in monolinguals or in multilinguals, among children or among adults, in terms of how it is being learnt or how it was acquired, as abstract objects or as cognitive structures, through written texts or through oral elicitation, and finally through mechanical data collection or practical fieldwork.
Western trends in historical linguistics date back to roughly the late 18th century, when the discipline grew out of philology, the study of ancient texts and oral traditions.
[11] Despite a shift in focus in the 20th century towards formalism and generative grammar, which studies the universal properties of language, historical research today still remains a significant field of linguistic inquiry.
Internal reconstruction is the method by which an element that contains a certain meaning is re-used in different contexts or environments where there is a variation in either sound or analogy.
[13][better source needed] The reason for this had been to describe well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had detailed documentation and long written histories.
This is generally hard to find for events long ago, due to the occurrence of chance word resemblances and variations between language groups.
[18] In modern historical linguistics, we examine how languages change over time, focusing on the relationships between dialects within a specific period.
Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, constituency,[20] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning.
[21][22] Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning.
Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech, and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number, tense, and aspect.
Linguists focusing on structure attempt to understand the rules regarding language use that native speakers know (not always consciously).
The capacity for the use of language is considered by many linguists to lie primarily in the domain of grammar, and to be linked with competence, rather than with the growth of vocabulary.
Stylistics also involves the study of written, signed, or spoken discourse through varying speech communities, genres, and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media.
Stylistic features include rhetoric,[36] diction, stress, satire, irony, dialogue, and other forms of phonetic variations.
In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida, for instance, further distinguished between speech and writing, by proposing that written language be studied as a linguistic medium of communication in itself.
A semiotic tradition of linguistic research considers language a sign system which arises from the interaction of meaning and form.
[42] Structural analysis means dissecting each linguistic level: phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and discourse, to the smallest units.
These are collected into inventories (e.g. phoneme, morpheme, lexical classes, phrase types) to study their interconnectedness within a hierarchy of structures and layers.
This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular species is "better" or "worse" than another.
However, with the rise of Saussurean linguistics in the 20th century, the focus shifted to a more synchronic approach, where the study was geared towards analysis and comparison between different language variations, which existed at the same given point of time.
[68] Before the 20th century, the term philology, first attested in 1716,[69] was commonly used to refer to the study of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus.
[81] An early formal study of language was in India with Pāṇini, the 6th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology.
Pāṇini's systematic classification of the sounds of Sanskrit into consonants and vowels, and word classes, such as nouns and verbs, was the first known instance of its kind.
The first insights into semantic theory were made by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue, where he argues that words denote concepts that are eternal and exist in the world of ideas.
Towards the end of the century the field of linguistics became divided into further areas of interest with the advent of language technology and digitalized corpora.
Amongst the structures of the brain involved in the mechanisms of neurolinguistics, the cerebellum which contains the highest numbers of neurons has a major role in terms of predictions required to produce language.
Depending on the country, this interview is conducted either in the asylum seeker's native language through an interpreter or in an international lingua franca like English.
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.
Further, the task of documentation requires the linguist to collect a substantial corpus in the language in question, consisting of texts and recordings, both sound and video, which can be stored in an accessible format within open repositories, and used for further research.
Translation is also conducted by publishing houses, which convert works of writing from one language to another in order to reach varied audiences.
