A Crash Course in
Linguistics
Simply defined, linguistics is the systematic
study of language. Though various types of
language studies (including grammar and
rhetoric) can be traced back over 2,500 years,
the era of modern linguistics is barely two
centuries old.
Kicked off by the late-18th-century discovery
that many European and Asian languages
descended from a common tongue (Proto-IndoEuropean), modern linguistics was reshaped, first, by Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857-1913) and more recently by Noam Chomsky (born
1928).
Linguistics, like most academic disciplines, has been divvied up into
numerous overlapping subfields--"a stew of alien and undigestible
terms," as Randy Allen Harris characterized them in his 1993 book
The Linguistics Wars. Using the sentence "Fideau chased the cat" as
an example, Allen offered this "crash course" in the major branches
of linguistics. (Follow the links to learn more about these subfields.)
Phonetics concerns the acoustic waveform itself, the systematic
disruptions of air molecules that occur whenever someone utters the
expression.
Phonology concerns the elements of that waveform which
recognizably punctuate the sonic flow--consonants, vowels, and
syllables, represented on this page by letters.
Morphology concerns the words and meaningful subwords
constructed out of the phonological elements--that Fideau is a noun,
naming some mongrel, that chase is a verb signifying a specific
action which calls for both a chaser and a chasee, that -ed is a suffix
indicating past action, and so on.
Syntax concerns the arrangement of those morphological elements
into phrases and sentences--that chased the cat is a verb phrase,
that the cat is its noun phrase (the chasee), that Fideau is another
noun phrase (the chaser), that the whole thing is a sentence.
Semantics concerns the proposition expressed by that sentence--in
particular, that it is true if and only if some mutt named Fideau has
chased some definite cat.
Though handy, Harris's list of linguistic subfields is far from
comprehensive. In fact, some of the most innovative work in
contemporary language studies is being carried out in even more
specialized branches, some of which hardly existed 30 or 40 years
ago. Here, without the assistance of Fideau, is a sample: applied
linguistics, cognitive linguistics, contact linguistics, corpus linguistics,
discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, graphology, historical
linguistics, language acquisition, lexicology, linguistic anthropology,
neurolinguistics, paralinguistics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics,
sociolinguistics, and stylistics.
Image: The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris (Oxford University
Press, 1993)