Lecture II.

11.10.2012

Introduction to Linguistics with Elements of History of English

What is linguistic sign?

→ a scientific study of language (system of human communication), based on some evidence

SUBFIELDS OF LINGUISTICS:

• computational linguistics- a disciplinary field dealing with statistical and rule- based modeling of natural languages with the use of computers

• comparative linguistics- a branch of historical linguistics, which compares languages in order to establish their historical relationships

• contrastive linguistics- an approach which discovers and describes the differences and similarities between a pair of languages (that are being used now)

• corpus linguistics- “corpus” means a sample of real, natural language usually in a digital form, representative of language and designed for scientific or research purposes → corpus linguistics is an area of study which studies the language as expressed and samples (corpora)

• dialectology- a study concerned with regional variations of natural languages

• discourse analysis- “discourse” means text beyond the level of a sentence, it deals with properties of language on the base of the text

• etymology- the study of the origin of words, their history and the study, how their form and meaning have changed over time

• forensic linguistics- an area which deals with relationship between language and the law and crime (pl. juryslingwistyka)

• historical linguistics- deals witch how language changes through time → describes and explains observed changes in particular language, reconstructs the prehistory of language and determines their relatedness grouping them into language families, develops general theories about why and how language changes, describes the history of speech communities, studies of the history of words

• lexicology- a study of words, lexis (meaning, form, formation process, functions, etc.)

• linguistics typology- studies and classifies languages according to their structure of features

• morphology- studies the structure of words, how words are formed and also other units of meaning

• neurolinguistics- study of the neural mechanisms and the human brain which control the comprehension, production, acquisition of language

• phonetics- the study of humans' speech sounds

• phonology- the study of sound to encode the meaning in any spoken human language

• pragmatics- studies which deals witch the role of context in language, how context influences meaning

• psycholinguistics- deals with psychological factors which enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language

• semantics- deals with meaning

• sociolinguistics- studies the mutual influence between society and language ( how they influence on each other)

• text linguistics- studies texts as communication systems

SCHOOL OF LINGUISTICS:

• cognitive linguistics- refers to the interpretation on language in terms of concepts (person's individual image of a thing)

• generative linguistics- makes use of generative grammar (there is a finite set of rules which can be applied to generate all those and only those sentences which are grammatical in a given language → Chomsky

• functionalism- functional grammar (FG) and functional discourse grammar (FDG) → theories which explain how linguistics utterances are shaped based on the goals and knowledge of natural language users

• the Geneva School of Linguistics (structuralism)- Ferdinand de Saussere pioneered modern structural linguistics, an approach that analyses language in terms of structures

• the Neogrammarians ( Young Grammarians, German Junggrammatiker)- they proposed the theory of regularity of how language changes

• the Prague Linguistic Circle (Prague School)- a group of literary critics, linguistics, they developed methods of structuralist literary analysis

• prescriptive linguistics- tells how language should be used by people

• descriptive linguistics- tells how language is used by people

• systemic linguistics- considers language as a system

3

LINGUISTICS

THEORETICAL linguistics → branch of linguistics which deals with developing models of language, concerned with language as a system, establishes language universals which are characteristic features of each language system

APPLIED linguistics → interdisciplinary filed, which identifies, investigates and offers solutions to language- related problems (anthropology, sociology, psycholinguistics)

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