BS Honours/MA English Linguistics Important Terms Description
Introduction to Linguistics
The scientific study of language is referred to as linguistics, and its primary focus is the systematic examination of the characteristics of particular languages as well as languages as a whole.
Because it involves a comprehensive, methodical, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure, it is referred to as a scientific study.
The social and cognitive aspects of language are the focus of linguistics. It is regarded as both an academic discipline and a scientific field; It has been categorized as a natural science, cognitive science, social science, or humanities field.
The philosophy of language, stylistics and rhetorics, semiotics, lexicography, and translation are all related to linguistics. Philology, from which linguistics emerged, is sometimes referred to as a related field, a subfield, or even as having been abandoned entirely.
What is Phonetics in Linguistics?
Phonetics is the study of the sounds of human speech or, in sign languages, the sounds of signs. Phoneticians and linguists with a focus on phonetics study the physical properties of speech. The field of phonetics typically falls into three subdisciplines based on the questions being investigated: the study of articulatory, acoustic, and auditory phonetics.
These subfields investigate how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech and how sound waves are converted into linguistic information. In contrast to the phonological unit of the phoneme, the phone, which is a speech sound in a language, has traditionally been the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics. A conceptual classification of phonetic sounds is the phoneme.
One of the earliest known phonetic studies in the Indic subcontinent was the Hindu scholar Pini's articulatory description of voicing in the sixth century BCE. However, the primary focus of this groundbreaking work was on the relationship between spoken vernacular languages and written Vedic texts.
After the development of modern phonetics in the 19th century CE, the physical properties of speech became the primary focus of academic research. Before recording devices were widely available, phoneticians collected and shared data using phonetic transcription systems. The International Phonetic Alphabet is just one of many systems that phoneticians continue to use.
What is Phonology in Linguistics?
Phonology is a subfield of linguistics that focuses on the systematic organization of sounds in spoken languages and signs in sign languages. In the past, it was just the study of spoken language phoneme systems (also called phonemics or phonematics).
Still, it can also include any linguistic analysis below the word (like a syllable, onset, rime, articulatory gestures, articulatory features, etc.). or at any level of language where sound or sign structure is used to convey meaning. Sign languages have a phonological system that is comparable to that of spoken languages. Signs are made up of details about handshape, location, and movement.
What is Morphology in Linguistics?
Morphology studies words, their formation, and how they relate to other words in the same language in linguistics. It looks at the parts and structures of words, like stems, roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at the details of speech, intonation, and stress, as well as how a word's meaning and pronunciation can be affected by its context.
Morphology is distinct from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages according to how they use words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they contribute to a language's vocabulary. Morphology also differs from morphological typology.
What is Syntax in Linguistics?
The study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units like phrases and sentences is known as syntax in linguistics. Word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the connection between form and meaning (semantics) are the primary concerns of syntax.
The syntax can be approached in various ways, each with its own set of fundamental assumptions and objectives. In layman's terms, Syntax is the study of how sentences, clauses, and phrases are constructed and how their constituent parts relate to one another.
What is Semantics in Linguistics?
Semantics is the branch of linguistics and logic that studies meaning. Lexical semantics, which studies word meanings and their connections, and logical semantics, which studies concepts like sense, reference, presupposition, and implication, are the two main areas.
Semantics can address the meaning of words, phrases, sentences, and other larger units of discourse. Two fundamental issues in the field of semantics are compositional semantics (about how smaller parts, like words, combine and interact to form the meaning of larger expressions, like sentences) and lexical semantics (about the nature of the meaning of words).
Other important issues include presumptions, ambiguity, entailment, and the significance of context in interpreting. A wide range of methods and disciplines have had an impact on the contentious field of semantics. One of the central issues that unite various approaches to linguistic semantics is the connection between form and meaning.
Both pragmatics and the syntax–semantics interface, two related fields, contributed significantly to semantics research between 1980 and 1990. The semantic level of a language interacts with other levels or modules, such as syntax, into which it is typically divided. Interactions like these between levels or modules are frequently referred to as "interfaces" in linguistics.
Pragmatism, phonology (prosody and intonation), and syntax (the syntax-semantics interface) are thought to be the most significant semantics interfaces.
What is Pragmatics in Linguistics?
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics that studies how people who use a language interact with native speakers. Conversational implicatures, or what a speaker implies and what the listener infers, are the focus of pragmatics. Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies how meaning is affected by context.
Pragmatics includes philosophical, sociological, linguistic, and anthropological approaches to language behavior such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, and talk in interaction.
Pragmatics, in contrast to semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or "coded" in a specific language, examines how the transmission of meaning is affected by more than just structural and linguistic knowledge (grammar, lexicon, etc) of both the speaker and the person listening, in addition to the context of the utterance, any prior knowledge of the parties involved, the speaker's implied intent, and other factors.
Pragmatics explains how language users can overcome apparent ambiguity because meaning is dependent on context, place, and time. of an assertion.
What is Stylistics in Linguistics?
A subfield of applied linguistics, stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts and spoken language in terms of their linguistic and tonal style. Style refers to the particular variety of language used by various individuals and/or in various situations or settings.
The vernacular, or everyday language, may be used among casual friends, despite the fact that more formal language, in terms of grammar, pronunciation or accent, lexicon, or word choice, is frequently used in a cover letter and resume and when speaking during a job interview.
Similarly, the study of linguistic form is known as linguistics. Linguistics uses the term "style" to describe the options available to a user of language in addition to those required for the straightforward expression of a meaning.
What is Semiotics in Linguistics?
The study of any activity, behavior, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning, is referred to as the signing process (semiosis). A sign is anything that, to an interpreter, conveys a meaning that is not the sign itself.
The meaning can be unintentional, as when a symptom is a sign of a specific medical condition, or intentional, as when a word is spoken with a particular meaning.
Signs can be understood using any sense—visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory. The semiotic tradition focuses on the study of signs and symbols as a crucial part of communication. Non-linguistic sign systems are also the subject of study in semiotics, in contrast to linguistics.
Semiotics encompasses the study of signs and their processes, as well as likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.
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