Intoduction to Linguistics

What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is the science of language, including the sounds or signs, words, and grammar rules. Words in languages are finite, but sentences are not. It is this creative aspect of human language that sets it apart from animal languages, which are essentially responses to stimuli.
The rules of a language, also called grammar, are learned as one acquires a language. These rules include phonology, the sound system, morphology, the structure of words, syntax the combination of words into sentences, semantics, the ways in which sounds and meanings are related, and the lexicon, or mental dictionary of words. When you know a language, you know words in that language, i.e. sound units or signs that are related to specific meanings. However, the sounds or signs and meanings of words are arbitrary. For the most part, there is no relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning.

Morphology?

Morphology is the study of words. Morphemes are the minimal units of words that have a meaning and cannot be subdivided further. There are two main types: free and bound. Free morphemes can occur alone and bound morphemes must occur with another morpheme. An example of a free morpheme is “bad”, and an example of a bound morpheme is “ly.” It is bound because although it has meaning, it cannot stand alone. It must be attached to another morpheme to produce a word.
Free morpheme: bad
Bound morpheme: -ly
Word: badly
When we talk about words, there are two groups: lexical (or content) and function (or grammatical) words. Lexical words are called open class words and include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. New words can regularly be added to this group. Function words, or closed class words, are conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns; and new words cannot be (or are very rarely) added to this class.
Affixes are often the bound morpheme. This group includes prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes. Prefixes are added to the beginning of another morpheme, suffixes are added to the end, infixes are inserted into other morphemes, and circumfixes are attached to another morpheme at the beginning and end.

Syntax?

Syntax refers to word order and depends on lexical categories (parts of speech.) You probably learned that there are eight main parts of speech in grammar school. Linguistics takes a different approach to these categories and separates words into morphological and syntactic groups. Linguistics analyzes words according to their affixes and the words that follow or precede them. Hopefully, the following definitions of the parts of speech will make more sense and be more useful than the old definitions of grammar school books.

Sociolinguistics?

One of the goals of the MLC is to equip students with a solid knowledge – both theoretical and practical – of the tools we use to analyze social life from a linguistic perspective. The toolkit that students acquire during their time in the MLC is composed of the diverse analytical methods of three areas in linguistics: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.
Sociolinguistics is concerned with language in social and cultural context, especially how people with different social identities (e.g. gender, age, race, ethnicity, class) speak and how their speech changes in different situations. Some of the issues addressed are how features of dialects (ways of pronouncing words, choice of words, patterns of words) cluster together to form personal styles of speech; why people from different communities or cultures can misunderstand what is meant, said and done based on the different ways they use language. Sociolinguistics encompasses a range of methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative.

Language Acquisition

Language is a cognition that truly makes us human. Whereas other species do communicate with an innate ability to produce a limited number of meaningful vocalizations (e.g. bonobos), or even with partially learned systems (e.g. bird songs), there is no other species known to date that can express infinite ideas (sentences) with a limited set of symbols (speech sounds and words).
This ability is remarkable in itself. What makes it even more remarkable is that researchers are finding evidence for mastery of this complex skill in increasingly younger children. Infants as young as 12 months are reported to have sensitivity to the grammar needed to understand causative sentences (who did what to whom; e.g. the bunny pushed the frog (Rowland & Noble, 2010).
After more than 60 years of research into child language development, the mechanism that enables children to segment syllables and words out of the strings of sounds they hear, and to acquire grammar to understand and produce language is still quite an enigma.

Historycal Linguistics

Historical linguistics, the study of language change, is the oldest subfield of modern linguistics. The success of historical linguistics in the nineteenth century was a major force behind the growth of synchronic linguistics in the twentieth. This page gives a short overview of the classical theory of lingustic change, the comparative method, modern perspectives on language change, and the use of language as a tool in the study of prehistory. A fewreading suggestions are given as well.

Phonetics?

There are three types of the study of the sounds of language. Acoustic Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of sounds. Auditory Phonetics is the study of the way listeners perceive sounds. Articulatory Phonetics  is the study of how the vocal tracts produce the sounds. This article will only describe articulatory phonetics.
The orthography (spelling) of words in misleading, especially in English. One sound can be represented by several different combinations of letters. For example, all of the following words contain the same vowel sound: he, believe, Lee, Caesar, key, amoeba, loudly, machine, people, and sea.

Phonology?

Whereas phonetics is the study of sounds and is concerned with the production, audition and perception of of speech sounds (called phones), phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language and operates at the level of sound systems and abstract sound units. Knowing the sounds of a language is only a small part of phonology. This importance is shown by the fact that you can change one word into another by simply changing one sound. Consider the differences between the words time and dime. The words are identical except for the first sound. [t] and [d] can therefore distinguish words, and are called contrasting sounds. They are distinctive sounds in English, and all distinctive sounds are classified as phonemes.

   Semantics?

     The branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. There are a number of branches and    

     subbranches of semantics, including formal semantics, which studies the logical aspects of meaning, such     

     as sense, reference, implication, and logical form, lexical semantics, which studies word meanings and   

     word relations, and conceptual semantics, which studies the cognitive structure of meaning.

the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text.

Neurolinguistics 

Neurolinguistics is the study of how language is represented in the brain: that is, how and where our brains store our knowledge of the language (or languages) that we speak, understand, read, and write, what happens in our brains as we acquire that knowledge, and what happens as we use it in our everyday lives. Neurolinguists try to answer questions like these: What about our brains makes human language possible – why is our communication system so elaborate and so different from that of other animals? Does language use the same kind of neural computation as other cognitive systems, such as music or mathematics? Where in your brain is a word that you've learned? How does a word ‘come to mind’ when you need it (and why does it sometimes not come to you?)

If you know two languages, how do you switch between them and how do you keep them from interfering with each other? If you learn two languages from birth, how is your brain different from the brain of someone who speaks only one language, and why? Is the left side of your brain really ‘the language side’? If you lose the ability to talk or to read because of a stroke or other brain injury, how well can you learn to talk again? What kinds of therapy are known to help, and what new kinds of language therapy look promising? Do people who read languages written from left to right (like English or Spanish) have language in a different place from people who read languages written from right to left (like Hebrew and Arabic)? What about if you read a language that is written using some other kind of symbols instead of an alphabet, like Chinese or Japanese? If you're dyslexic, in what way is your brain different from the brain of someone who has no trouble reading? How about if you stutter?

As you can see, neurolinguistics is deeply entwined with psycholinguistics, which is the study of the language processing steps that are required for speaking and understanding words and sentences, learning first and later languages, and also of language processing in disorders of speech, language, and reading.