5: Only got five minutes?

[]()All normal humans acquire at least one language in the early years of their life, and use it frequently. Linguistics is the systematic study of language, and aims to cover all its main branches.

[]() Descriptive linguistics

A key part of linguistics is describing the languages of the world, including previously unwritten languages, in a coherent and well-organized way. Such a description is known as a grammar.

A grammar covers sound patterns (phonology), within-word patterns (morphology), word patterns (syntax) and meaning patterns (semantics). Sometimes morphology and syntax are bracketed together as morphosyntax.

Grammars handle the parts of language that are most easily describable, in that the patterns are partly detachable from the external world. Yet, in recent years, perhaps the greatest attention has been paid to areas of linguistics which handle how speakers use language to interact with the world.

[]() Language–world interaction

Several different branches of linguistics explore how speakers interact with the world in their use of language. The best-known are pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and stylistics.

Pragmatics is a huge field, which looks especially at how human beings interact with one another. People typically cooperate in their dealings with each other, they organize their speech in the order of occurrence of events, they take it in turns to talk, and they try to be polite to one another.

[]()Sociolinguistics explores social factors which lead to speech variation within a community, especially differences in geographical location, social class and sex. Sociolinguistics also re-examines, and in some cases dismisses, old myths, such as the long-standing, but false belief that women talk more than men.

Psycholinguistics, the study of language and mind, examines speech in the mind of individuals. It explores how children acquire language, how humans comprehend one another and how they organize speech for production. It also looks at language and the brain, particularly at brain areas most relevant to language, and outlines what happens when things go wrong, such as when someone suffers a stroke.

Stylistics, the study of literary language, includes inquiry into the language of the media, especially newspapers and advertising.

[]() Language change

In the nineteenth century, the main interest of historical linguists was the reconstruction of a proto-language, such as Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor from which numerous well-known existing languages developed. This is still an interesting topic, but in the twenty-first century is no longer predominant. In the twentieth century, linguists became particularly concerned with studying language change as it happens. Variation within language was at one time thought to be random, but was later realized to be an indication that a change was in progress. Linguists realized that changes work their way gradually through a language, moving from one group to another, and also from one word to another.

Causes of language change also became clearer. Natural tendencies, such as a propensity to leave the endings off words, sometimes disrupt patterns. Then therapeutic changes smooth out the disruptions. Languages always remain patterned, otherwise human communication would break down.

[]() Chomsky and transformational grammar

Noam Chomsky is the linguist whose fame and []()influence have spread furthest outside linguistics. He still attracts considerable attention. It is important to understand why his work has been so influential, and what his main ideas were. Recently, linguists have started to move in new directions, away from the abstract ideas of Chomsky, and towards a more ‘down-to-earth’ approach to linguistics.

[]() Happy reading!

Language is a key component of human behaviour, so everybody (ideally) will enjoy finding out how it works.