Saturday, March 14, 2009

Diachronic linguistics

Studying languages at a particular point in time (usually the present) is "synchronic", while diachronic linguistics examines how language changes through time, sometimes over centuries. It enjoys both a rich history and a strong theoretical foundation for the study of language change.

In universities in the United States, the historic perspective is often out of fashion. The shift in focus to a non-historic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant with Noam Chomsky.

Explicitly historical perspectives include historical-comparative linguistics and etymology.

Names for the discipline

Before the twentieth century, the term "philology", first attested in 1716,[5] was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus.[6] Since Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted[7] and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition," especially in the United States,[8] where it was never as popular as elsewhere in the sense of "science of language".[5]

Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641,[9] the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847.[9] It is now the usual academic term in English for the scientific study of language.

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific[1][2] study of natural language.[3][4]Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure (grammar) and the study of meaning (semantics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into phrases and sentences) and phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract sound units). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived. Other sub-disciplines of linguistics include:evolutionary linguistics which considers the origins of language;historical linguistics which explores language change; sociolinguisticswhich looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics which explores the representation and functioning of language in the mind; neurolinguistics which looks at the representation of language in the brain; language acquisition which considers how children acquire their first language and how children and adults acquire and learn their second and subsequent languages; in addition, discourse analysis and pragmatics concern the structure of texts and conversations, and their context.

Linguistics is narrowly defined as the scientific approach to the study of language, but language can, of course, be approached from a variety of directions, and a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to it and influence its study. Semiotics, for example, is a related field concerned with the general study of signs and symbols both in language and outside of it. Literary theorists study the use of language in artisticliterature. Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse fields as psychologyspeech-language pathologyinformaticscomputer sciencephilosophybiologyhuman anatomyneurosciencesociology,anthropology, and acoustics.

Someone who engages in linguistics is called a linguist, although this term is also commonly used, outside linguistics, to refer to people who speak many languages.