linguistics (n.)

The scientific study of LANGUAGE; also called linguistic science. As an academic discipline, the development of this subject has been relatively recent and rapid, having become particularly widely known and taught in the 1960s. This reflects partly an increased popular and specialist interest in the study of language and communication in relation to human beliefs and behavior (e.g. in theology, philosophy, information theory, literary criticism), and the realization of the need for a separate discipline to deal adequately with the range and complexity of linguistic phenomena; partly the impact of the subject’s own internal development at this time, arising largely out of the work of the American linguist Noam Chomsky and his associates, whose more sophisticated analytic techniques and more powerful theoretical claims gave linguistics an unprecedented scope and applicability.

Different branches may be distinguished according to the linguist’s focus and range of interest (and each is dealt with in separate entries in this book). A major distinction, introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, is between diachronic and synchronic linguistics, the former referring to the study of language change (also called historical linguistics), the latter to the study of the state of language at any given point in time. In so far as the subject attempts to establish general principles for the study of all languages, and to determine the characteristics of human language as a phenomenon, it may be called general linguistics or theoretical linguistics. When it concentrates on establishing the facts of a particular language system, it is called descriptive linguistics. When its purpose is to focus on the differences between languages, especially in a language-teaching context, it is called contrastive linguistics. When its purpose is primarily to identify the common characteristics of different languages or language families, the subject goes under the heading of comparative (or typological) linguistics.

When the emphasis in linguistics is wholly or largely historical, the subject is traditionally referred to as COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY (or simply PHILOLOGY), though in many parts of the world ‘philologists’ and ‘historical linguists’ are people with very different backgrounds and attitudes. The term structural linguistics is widely used, sometimes in an extremely specific sense, referring to the particular approaches to SYNTAX and PHONOLOGY current in the 1940s and 1950s, with their emphasis on providing DISCOVERY PROCEDURES for the analysis of a language’s SURFACE STRUCTURE; sometimes in a more general sense, referring to any SYSTEM of linguistic analysis that attempts to establish explicit systems of RELATIONS between linguistic UNITS in surface structure. When the emphasis in language study is on the classification of structures and units, without reference to such notions as DEEP STRUCTURE, some linguists, particularly within GENERATIVE grammar, talk pejoratively of taxonomic linguistics.

In the later twentieth century the term linguistic sciences came to be used by many as a single label for both linguistics and PHONETICS – the latter being considered here as a strictly pre-language study. Equally, there are many who do not see the divide between linguistics and phonetics being as great as this label suggests: they would be quite happy to characterize the subject as linguistic science. ‘Linguistics’ is still the preferred name.

The overlapping interest of linguistics and other disciplines has led to the setting up of new branches of the subject in both pure and applied contexts, such as anthropological linguistics, biolinguistics, clinical linguistics, computational linguistics, critical linguistics, developmental linguistics, ecolinguistics, educational linguistics, ethnolinguistics, forensic linguistics, geographical linguistics, institutional linguistics, mathematical linguistics, neurolinguistics, peace linguistics, philosophical linguistics, psycholinguistics, quantitative linguistics, sociolinguistics, statistical linguistics, theolinguistics. When the subject’s findings, methods, or theoretical principles are applied to the study of problems from other areas of experience, one talks of applied linguistics; but this term is often restricted to the study of the theory and methodology of foreign-language teaching.