| | | ca | | | de | | | en | | | es | | | fr | | | it | | | nl | | | no | | | pl | | | pt | | | ru | | | ro | | | fi | | | sv | | | tr | | | vo | | |
| |  |
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and is largely divided into two major fields: theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.
Theoretical (or general) linguistics encompasses six major sub-fields: phonetics (the study of the isolated sounds of speech), phonology (the study of speech sound systems and their mental representations), morphology (the study of the grammatical rules for word formation), syntax (the study of word order), semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of meaning in context) which, together, allow for a description of the way a language works to convey meaning from one speaker to another. Applied linguistics encompasses diverse fields such as language education, second language acquisition, effect of society on language, or language's relationship to psychology, and so on.
Culture · Geography · Health · History · Mathematics · Natural sciences · Philosophy · Religion · Society · Technology
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have a distinct meaning. They are used to demonstrate that two phones constitute two separate phonemes in the language.
As an example for English vowels, the pair "let" + "lit" proves that the phones [ɛ] (in let) and [ɪ] (in lit) do in fact represent distinct phonemes /ɛ/ and /ɪ/. An example for English consonants is the minimal pair of "pat" + "bat". In phonetics, this pair, like any other, differs in number of ways. In this case, the contrast appears largely to be conveyed with a difference in the voice onset time of the initial consonant as the configuration of the mouth is same for [p] and [b]; however, there is also a possible difference in duration, which visual analysis using high quality video supports.
Lévi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology, in which the family, which was treated as a self-contained unit, consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children, was traditionally considered the fundamental object of analysis. Nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents, however, were all treated as secondary. But Lévi-Strauss argued that, akin to Saussure’s notion of linguistic value, families only acquire determinate identities through relations with one another. Thus he inverted the classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary family members first and insisting on analysing the relations between units instead of the units themselves.
...that pragmatics studies how saying "gosh, it's cold in here" can mean "please close the window"?
...that learning a second (or third or fourth) language as an adult is a different process from learning your first language(s)?
...that Damin is the only non-African language to have clicks as regular speech sounds?
...that an agent noun is a noun derived from another word that denotes an action, and means an entity that does that action?
 |
Here are some tasks you can do:
|
- Expand stubs, where possible.
- Attend where attention is needed.
- Nominate an article, a biography, a picture or a phone for a feature.
- Clean up Category:Linguistics where you are able.
WikiProjects concerned with linguistics:
- Language acquisition
- Psycholinguistics
- Sociolinguistics
- Linguistic anthropology
- Cognitive linguistics
- Computational linguistics
- Descriptive linguistics
- Stylistics
- Corpus linguistics
Of Interest
