Definition:
The systematic study of the nature, structure, and variation of language, including the subfields of phonetics, phonology, morphology, grammar, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
See also:
- Linguist
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Corpus Linguistics
- Paralinguistics
- Psycholinguistics
- Sociolinguistics
- Discourse Analysis
- Six Common Myths About Language
- Why Should I Study the English Language?
Etymology:
From the Latin, "tongue, language"Observations:
- "Linguistics will have to recognize laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another."
(Ferdinand de Saussure) - "[Linguistics] has a twofold aim: to uncover general principles underlying human language, and to provide reliable descriptions of individual languages."
(Jean Atchison, in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Tom McArthur, 1992) - "Linguists today understand their job as that of description, their purpose being to describe how people use language, not to prescribe how they should use it. Linguists don't invent rules; they discover them."
(Martha Kolln and Robert Funk, Understanding English Grammar, 5th edition, 1998) - "Linguists believe that their field is a science because they share the goals of scientific inquiry, which is objective (or more properly intersubjectively accessible) understanding. . . .
"Language . . . contrasts with other aspects of human behavior precisely in its regularity, what has been called its rule-governed nature. It is precisely this property of language and language-related behavior that has allowed for great progress in our understanding of this delimited area of human behavior."
(Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller, Introduction, The Handbook of Linguistics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2003)
Pronunciation: LING-gwiss-TIKS
