Outline of linguistics

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.
Linguistics can be theoretical or applied.

Branches of linguistics

Subfields of linguistics
General linguistics
Phonetics – the study of the speech faculty
Phonology – the usage of vocalized sounds and systems of sounds to form language
Morphology – the property of sound and meaning dynamics in language
Syntax – the property of grammar that governs sentence structure
Semantics – the study of meaning as encoded in grammar
Pragmatics – the study of how context contributes to meaning
Graphemics – the study of writing systems
Graphetics – the study of writing shapes as assigned to sounds or ideas
Theoretical linguistics – the study of language as an abstract object
Generative linguistics – an approach which seeks to ground grammar in a specialized
language module
Formalism (linguistics) – the theory of language as a formal system with mathematical-
logical rules and a formal grammar
Functional linguistics – language as used and coming from use
Quantitative linguistics – the study of quantitative language laws and corresponding
general theories
Formal semantics – the study of semantics through formal logic-based models
Descriptive linguistics – describing how a particular language is used
Anthropological linguistics – the place of language in its wider social and cultural
context, and its role in making and maintaining cultural practices and societal structures
Historical linguistics – study of historical language change over time
Comparative linguistics – comparing languages to find similarities and historical
connections
Etymology – the study of word histories and origins
Lexicology – the study of vocabularies and the structural relationships between many
different words
Sociolinguistics – the study of society's effects on language
Discourse analysis – analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)
 Linguistic typology – comparative study of the similarities and differences between
language structures in the world's languages.
Applied linguistics – finding solutions to real-life problems related to language
Computational linguistics – the use of computation applied to language databasing,
analysis, translation, and synthesis
Forensic linguistics – language science applied to the processes of law and justice
Internet linguistics – the study of language usage on the Internet
Language assessment – assessing first or second language faculty in individuals
Language documentation – comprehensive description of the grammar and use
practices of languages of a particular group
Language revitalization – is an attempt to halt or reverse the decline of a language or to
revive an extinct one
Language education – teaching specific language and language science
Linguistic anthropology – study of how language influences social life
Psycholinguistics – is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable
humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language
Cognitive linguistics – an approach which seeks to ground grammar in general cognition
Language acquisition – the study of how children and adults acquire language
knowledge and ability
Language development – the study of early language formation
Second-language acquisition – the study of how a second language is learned

Subfields, by linguistic structures studied

Sub-fields of structure-focused linguistics include:

Phonetics – study of the physical properties of speech (or signed) production and perception
Phonology – study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind
that distinguish meaning
Morphology – study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified
Syntax – study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
Semantics – study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations
(phraseology), and how these compose to form the meanings of sentences
Pragmatics – study of how utterances are used in communicative acts – and the role played
by context and nonlinguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning
Discourse analysis – analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)
Linguistic typology – comparative study of the similarities and differences between language
structures in the world's languages.

Subfields, by nonlinguistic factors studied

Applied linguistics – study of language-related issues applied in everyday life, notably
language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed language fits under Applied
linguistics.)
Biolinguistics – the study of the biological and evolutionary components of human language.
Clinical linguistics – application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language
Pathology.
 Computational linguistics – study of linguistic issues in a way that is 'computationally
responsible', i.e., taking careful note of computational consideration of algorithmic
specification and computational complexity, so that the linguistic theories devised can be
shown to exhibit certain desirable computational properties implementations.
Developmental linguistics – study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals,
particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.
Historical linguistics – study of language change over time. Also called diachronic linguistics.
Language geography – study of the geographical distribution of languages and linguistic
features.
Neurolinguistics – study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and
communication.
Psycholinguistics – study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying
language use.
Sociolinguistics – study of variation in language and its relationship with social factors.
Stylistics – study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.

Other subfields of linguistics

Contrastive linguistics
Corpus linguistics
Dialectology
Discourse analysis
Grammar
Interlinguistics
Language learning
Language teaching
Language for specific purposes
Lexicology
Orthography
Rhetoric
Text linguistics

Schools, movements, and approaches of linguistics

Cognitive linguistics
Danish functional linguistics
Functionalism
Generative grammar
Geneva School
Interactional linguistics
Kazan School
Neogrammarian
Prague linguistic circle
Prescription and description
Soviet linguistics
Stratificational linguistics
 Structural linguistics
Systemic functional linguistics
Tagmemics

Related fields
Semiotics – study of 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.
Terminology – study of terms and their use.
Terminology science – study of special vocabulary
Philosophy of language – takes a philosophical approach to language. Many formal
semanticists are philosophers of language, differing from linguist semanticists only in their
metaphysical assumptions (if at all).
Philosophical logic
Topic / Theme
Discourse

History of linguistics

Timeline of discovery of basic linguistics concepts

When were the basic concepts first described and by whom?

Ancient Sanskrit grammarians

Ancient Greek study of language
Roman elaborations of Greek study
Medieval philosophical work in Latin
Beginnings of modern linguistics in the 19th century
Behaviorism and mental tabula rasa hypothesis
Chomsky and the cognitive revolution
The Linguistics Wars
Compositional formal semantics arises from the work of Richard Montague and Barbara
Partee
Alternate syntactic systems develop in the 1980s
Computational linguistics becomes feasible in the late 1980s
Neurolinguistics and the biological basis of cognition
Deep learning in the 2010s

Questions in linguistics
1. What is language?
2. How did it/does it evolve?
3. How does language serve as a medium of communication?
 4. How does language serve as a medium of thinking?
5. What is common to all languages?
6. How do languages differ?

Basic concepts
What basic concepts / terms do I have to know to talk about linguistics?

Morphology
morpheme, inflection, paradigm, declension, derivation, compound
Phonology
phoneme, allophone, segment, mora, syllable, foot, stress, tone
Grammar
category, tense, aspect, mood and modality, grammatical number, grammatical gender,
case
Syntax
phrase, clause, grammatical function, grammatical voice
Lexicology
word, lexeme, lemma, lexicon, vocabulary, terminology
Semantics
meaning, sense, entailment, truth condition, compositionality
Pragmatics
presupposition, implicature, deixis

Languages of the world

Languages by continent and country

Linguistics scholars
People who had a significant influence on the development of the field

J.L. Austin
Leonard Bloomfield
Franz Bopp
Noam Chomsky
Jean Berko Gleason
Joseph Greenberg
Paul Grice
M.A.K. Halliday
Louis Hjelmslev
 Roman Jakobson
Sir William Jones
William Labov
George Lakoff
Ronald Langacker
Richard Montague
Pāṇini
Barbara Partee
Kenneth L. Pike
Rasmus Rask
Edward Sapir
Ferdinand de Saussure
August Schleicher
Lucien Tesnière
Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Benjamin Lee Whorf

Linguistics lists
Languages
Language families and languages
ISO 639
Official languages
Definitions by language
Alphabets & Orthography
List of writing systems

Arabic Aramaic Armenian Braille Coptic Cyrillic

Georgian Gothic Korean Hebrew IPA English IPA

Kannada Hiragana Katakana Morse code ICAO spelling Phoenician

Runic SAMPA chart English SAMPA Shavian Thai

Ideograms - Chinese and Japanese

Syllabaries - Korean
Mixed: Ancient Egyptian
Common misspellings
English words without rhymes
Acronym
Wiktionary:Definitions of acronyms and abbreviations
The placement of linguistics within broader frameworks
Linguistics can be described as an academic discipline and, at least in its theoretical subfields, as a field
of science,[1] being a widely recognized category of specialized expertise, embodying its own
terminology, nomenclature, and scientific journals. Many linguists, such as David Crystal, conceptualize
the field as being primarily scientific.[1]

Linguistics is a multi-disciplinary field of research that combines tools from natural sciences, social
sciences, formal sciences, and the humanities.[2][3][4][5]

Historically, there has been some lack of consensus on the disciplinary classification of linguistics,
particularly theoretical linguistics. Linguistic realists viewed linguistics as a formal science; linguistic
nominalists (the American structuralists) viewed linguistics as an empirical or even physical science;
linguistic conceptualists viewed linguistics as a branch of psychology and therefore a social science;
others yet have argued for viewing linguistics as a mixed science.[5]

Linguistics is heterogeneous in its methods of research, so that each area of theoretical linguistics may
resemble methodologically either formal science or empirical science, to different degrees. For example,
phonetics uses empirical approaches to study the physical acoustics of spoken language. On the other
hand, semantically and grammatically, the usability of a formal or natural language is dependent on a
formal and arbitrary axiomatization of rules or norms. Furthermore, as studied in pragmatics and
semiotics, linguistic meaning is influenced by social context.[5]

To enable communication by upholding a lexico-semantic norm, the speakers of a shared language need
to agree on the meaning of a sequence of phonemes; for instance, "aunt" (/æ/, /n/, /t/) would be
acknowledged to signify "parent's sister or parent's sister-in-law", instead of "drummer" or "guest".
Likewise, grammatically, it may be necessary for the interlocutors to agree on the morphological and
syntactic properties of the sequence; say, that the sequence (/æ/ , /n/, /t/) would be treated as a singular
noun convertible morphologically to plurality by the addition of the suffix -s, or that as a noun it must not
be modified syntactically by an adverb (for instance, "Let's call our immediately aunt" would thus be
recognized as a grammatically incoherent structure, in a manner similar to a mathematically undefined
expression).

See also

Linguistics portal

Number of words in English

Lexicography

References
1. Crystal, David (1990). Linguistics. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-013531-2.
2. Spolsky, Bernard; Hult, Francis M. (February 2010). The Handbook of Educational
Linguistics (https://books.google.com/books?id=8nc6nRRbMSQC&pg=PA13). John Wiley &
 Sons. ISBN 978-1-4443-3104-2.
3. Berns, Margie (20 March 2010). Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (https://books.
google.com/books?id=EUMqGSbeEXAC&pg=PA23). Elsevier. pp. 23–25. ISBN 978-0-08-
096503-1.
4. "The Science of Linguistics" (https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/science-linguistics).
Linguistic Society of America. Retrieved 17 April 2018. "Modern linguists approach their
work with a scientific perspective, although they use methods that used to be thought of as
solely an academic discipline of the humanities. Contrary to previous belief, linguistics is
multidisciplinary. It overlaps each of the human sciences including psychology, neurology,
anthropology, and sociology. Linguists conduct formal studies of sound structure, grammar
and meaning, but they also investigate the history of language families, and research
language acquisition."
5. Behme, Christina; Neef, Martin. Essays on Linguistic Realism (https://philarchive.org/rec/PIT
WKO) (2018). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 7–20

External links
Glottopedia, MediaWiki-based encyclopedia of linguistics, under construction (http://www.glo
ttopedia.org)
Subfields according to the Linguistic Society of America (https://web.archive.org/web/20071
126121113/http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-fields.cfm)
Glossary of linguistic terms (http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/index.ht
m) and French<->English glossary (http://www.sil.org/linguistics/glossary_fe/) at SIL
International
"Linguistics" section (https://web.archive.org/web/20080906110954/http://www.unizar.es/dep
artamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/bibliography.html) of A Bibliography of Literary Theory,
Criticism and Philology, ed. J. A. García Landa (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
Linguistics and language-related wiki articles on Scholarpedia (http://www.scholarpedia.org/
article/Language) and Citizendium (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Linguistics)

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