Tuesday, January 30, 2024

The Study of Language - Linguistics, Morphology, Orthography





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Philosophy of Language


In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought.

Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell were pivotal figures in analytic philosophy's "linguistic turn". These writers were followed by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), the Vienna Circle, logical positivists, and Willard Van Orman Quine.


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Linguistics


Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not exclusively employ scientific methods.

Traditional areas of linguistic analysis correspond to:

  • syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences),
  • phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language), and

Subdisciplines such as:

  • biolinguistics (the study of the biological variables and evolution of language) and
  • psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) bridge many of these divisions.

Linguistics encompasses many branches and subfields that span both theoretical and practical applications. Theoretical linguistics (including traditional descriptive linguistics) is concerned with understanding the universal and fundamental nature of language and developing a general theoretical framework for describing it. Applied linguistics seeks to utilise the scientific findings of the study of language for practical purposes, such as developing methods of improving language education and literacy.

Linguistic features may be studied through a variety of perspectives:

  • synchronically (by describing the shifts in a language at a certain specific point of time) or
  • diachronically (through the historical development of language over several periods of time), 
  • in monolinguals or in multilinguals, amongst children or amongst adults, in terms of how it is being learned or how it was acquired, as abstract objects or as cognitive structures, through written texts or through oral elicitation, and finally, through
  • mechanical data collection or through practical fieldwork.

Linguistics emerged from the field of philology, of which some branches are more qualitative and holistic in approach. Today, philology and linguistics are now variably described as related fields, subdisciplines, or separate fields of language study but, by and large, linguistics can be seen as an umbrella term. Linguistics is also related to the philosophy of language, stylistics, rhetoric, semiotics, lexicography, and translation.


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Morphology (Linguistics)


In linguistics, morphology (/mɔːrˈfɒlədʒi/ mor-FOL-ə-jee) is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary.

While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, in most languages, many words can be related to other words by rules that collectively describe the grammar for that language. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the noun-bound plurality morpheme "-s". By contrast, Classical Chinese has very little morphology, using almost exclusively unbound morphemes ("free" morphemes) and it relies on word order to convey meaning. (Most words in modern Standard Chinese ["Mandarin"], however, are compounds and most roots are bound.) These are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. The rules understood by a speaker reflect specific patterns or regularities in the way words are formed from smaller units in the language they are using, and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

Phonological and orthographic modifications between a base word and its origin may be partial to literacy skills. Studies have indicated that the presence of modification in phonology and orthography makes morphologically complex words harder to understand and that the absence of modification between a base word and its origin makes morphologically complex words easier to understand. Morphologically complex words are easier to comprehend when they include a base word.

Polysynthetic languages, such as Chukchi, have words composed of many morphemes. For example, the Chukchi word "təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən", meaning "I have a fierce headache", is composed of eight morphemes t-ə-meyŋ-ə-levt-pəγt-ə-rkən that may be glossed. The morphology of such languages allows for each consonant and vowel to be understood as morphemes, while the grammar of the language indicates the usage and understanding of each morpheme.

The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is morphophonology.


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Orthography


An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word boundaries, emphasis, and punctuation.

Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and most of these systems have undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language. These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g., "would" and "should"); they can also reflect deliberate efforts to introduce variability for the sake of national identity, as seen in Noah Webster's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences between American and British spelling (e.g., "honor" and "honour").

Some nations (e.g. France and Spain) have established language academies in an attempt to regulate orthography officially. For most languages (including English), no such authority exists, and a sense of "correct" orthography develops through encounters with print in schooling, workplace, and informal contexts. Some organizations, such as newspapers of record and academic journals, choose greater orthographic homogeneity by enforcing a particular style guide or spelling standard such as Oxford spelling.

Etymology and meaning

The English word orthography dates from the 15th century. It comes from the French: orthographie, from Latin: orthographia, which derives from Ancient Greek: ὀρθός (orthós, 'correct') and γράφειν (gráphein, 'to write').

Orthography is largely concerned with matters of spelling, and in particular the relationship between phonemes and graphemes in a language. Other elements that may be considered part of orthography include hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks/boundaries, emphasis, and punctuation. Orthography thus describes or defines the set of symbols used in writing a language and the conventions that broadly regulate their use.

Most natural languages developed as oral languages, and writing systems have usually been crafted or adapted as ways of representing the spoken language. The rules for doing this tend to become standardized for a given language, leading to the development of an orthography that is generally considered "correct".

In linguistics, the term orthography is often used to refer to any method of writing a language, without judgment as to right and wrong, with a scientific understanding that orthographic standardization exists on a spectrum of strength of convention. The original sense of the word, though, implies a dichotomy of correct and incorrect, and the word is still most often used to refer specifically to a thoroughly standardized, prescriptively correct, way of writing a language. A distinction may be made here between etic and emic viewpoints: the purely descriptive (etic) approach, which simply considers any system that is actually used—and the emic view, which takes account of language users' perceptions of correctness.


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Outline of Linguistics


Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. Linguistics can be theoretical or applied.

Branches of linguistics

Subfields of linguistics

Subfields, by linguistic structures studied

Sub-fields of structure-focused linguistics include:

  • Phonetics – study of the physical properties of speech (or signed) production and perception
  • Phonology – study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning
  • Morphology – study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified
  • Syntax – study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
  • Semantics – study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these compose to form the meanings of sentences
  • Pragmatics – study of how utterances are used in communicative acts – and the role played by context and nonlinguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning
  • Discourse analysis – analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)
  • Linguistic typology – comparative study of the similarities and differences between language structures in the world's languages.

Subfields, by nonlinguistic factors studied

  • Applied linguistics – study of language-related issues applied in everyday life, notably language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.)
  • Biolinguistics – the study of the biological and evolutionary components of human language.
  • Clinical linguistics – application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology.
  • Computational linguistics – study of linguistic issues in a way that is 'computationally responsible', i.e., taking careful note of computational consideration of algorithmic specification and computational complexity, so that the linguistic theories devised can be shown to exhibit certain desirable computational properties implementations.
  • Developmental linguistics – study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.
  • Historical linguistics – study of language change over time. Also called diachronic linguistics.
  • Language geography – study of the geographical distribution of languages and linguistic features.
  • Neurolinguistics – study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and communication.
  • Psycholinguistics – study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.
  • Sociolinguistics – study of variation in language and its relationship with social factors.
  • Stylistics – study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.

Other subfields of linguistics

Schools, movements, and approaches of linguistics

Related fields

  • Semiotics – investigates the relationship between signs and what they signify more broadly. From the perspective of semiotics, language can be seen as a sign or symbol, with the world as its representation.
  • Philosophy of language - takes a philosophical approach to language. Many formal semanticists are philosophers of language, differing from linguist semanticists only in their metaphysical assumptions (if at all).

History of linguistics

See also: History of linguistics

Timeline of discovery of basic linguistics concepts

When were the basic concepts first described and by whom?

Questions in linguistics

  1. What is language?
  2. How did it/does it evolve?
  3. How does language serve as a medium of communication?
  4. How does language serve as a medium of thinking?
  5. What is common to all languages?
  6. How do languages differ?

Basic concepts

What basic concepts / terms do I have to know to talk about linguistics?


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