Introduction to Linguistics

• Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
• It involves analyzing language form, language meaning, and language in context, as well as exploring language origins and language acquisition.

Core Areas of Linguistics

• Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of speech sounds (phones).
• Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in a language.
• Morphology studies the structure of words and word formation.
• Syntax explores the structure of sentences and how words combine into phrases and sentences.
• Semantics examines the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences.
• Pragmatics investigates how context contributes to meaning.

Phonetics

• Articulatory phonetics focuses on how speech sounds are produced by the vocal organs.
• Acoustic phonetics examines the physical properties of speech sounds as sound waves.
• Auditory phonetics studies how speech sounds are perceived by the ear.
• Phones are speech sounds.
• The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a standardized system for transcribing phones.
• Vowels are classified by tongue height, tongue backness, and lip rounding.
• Consonants are classified by place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing.

Phonology

• Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that can distinguish meaning in a language.
• Allophones are variations of a phoneme that do not change meaning.
• Minimal pairs are words that differ by only one phoneme and have different meanings.
• Phonological rules describe how phonemes are realized as allophones in different contexts.
• Syllables are units of organization for a sequence of speech sounds.
• Stress refers to the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word or phrase.

Morphology

• Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language.
• Free morphemes can stand alone as words.
• Bound morphemes must be attached to other morphemes.
• Affixes are bound morphemes that attach to a root or stem and include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes.
• Inflectional morphology modifies a word to express grammatical categories such as tense, number, and gender.
• Derivational morphology creates new words from existing words, often changing the word's category or meaning.
• Compounding combines two or more free morphemes to create a new word.

Syntax

• Syntax is the study of the structure of sentences.
• Words combine to form phrases, and phrases combine to form sentences.
• Grammaticality refers to whether a sentence follows the rules of syntax of a given language.
• Syntactic categories (or parts of speech) include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.
• Phrase structure rules describe how phrases can be formed from words and other phrases.
• A parse tree is a diagram that represents the syntactic structure of a sentence.
• Transformational grammar proposes that sentences have both a deep structure (underlying meaning) and a surface structure (actual form).

Semantics

• Semantics is the study of meaning in language.
• Lexical semantics examines the meaning of words.
• Phrasal semantics examines the meaning of phrases and sentences.
• Semantic features are basic components of meaning that can be used to describe the meaning of words.
• Semantic roles (or thematic roles) describe the roles that participants play in an event, such as agent, patient, and instrument.
• Entailment occurs when the truth of one sentence necessarily implies the truth of another sentence.
• Presupposition is an underlying assumption that must be true in order for a sentence to be meaningful.

Pragmatics

• Pragmatics is the study of how context affects meaning.
• Speech acts are actions performed through language, such as making a statement, asking a question, or giving a command.
• Cooperative Principle: speakers and listeners are expected to cooperate with each other.
• Maxim of Quality: try to make your contribution one that is true.
• Maxim of Quantity: make your contribution as informative as is required.
• Maxim of Relevance: be relevant.
• Maxim of Manner: be clear, brief, and orderly.
• Implicature is an implied meaning that is not explicitly stated.
• Deixis refers to words or phrases whose meaning depends on the context, such as personal pronouns, demonstratives, and adverbs of time and place.

Sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguistics examines the relationship between language and society.
• Language variation refers to the different ways that people use language, depending on factors such as region, social class, ethnicity, age, and gender.
• Dialects are regional or social varieties of a language that differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.
• Accents refer to differences in pronunciation only.
• Sociolects are dialects associated with a particular social group.
• Code-switching is the practice of alternating between two or more languages or dialects in conversation.
• Language attitudes are the feelings and beliefs that people have about different languages and dialects.
• Language policy refers to the efforts of governments and other organizations to influence language use.

Psycholinguistics

• Psycholinguistics studies the psychological processes involved in language acquisition, comprehension, and production.
• Language acquisition is the process by which children learn their first language.
• Language comprehension is the process of understanding spoken or written language.
• Language production is the process of speaking or writing language.
• The mental lexicon is the mental dictionary that contains information about words, including their meanings, pronunciations, and syntactic properties.
• Sentence processing involves analyzing the syntactic structure and semantic meaning of sentences.
• Speech errors can provide insights into the cognitive processes involved in language production.

Historical Linguistics

• Historical linguistics studies how languages change over time.
• Language families are groups of languages that share a common ancestor.
• Proto-languages are reconstructed ancestral languages.
• Sound change refers to the ways in which the pronunciation of sounds can change over time.
• Semantic change refers to the ways in which the meaning of words can change over time.
• Grammaticalization is the process by which lexical items become grammatical markers.
• Comparative reconstruction is a method for reconstructing proto-languages by comparing related languages.

Applied Linguistics

• Applied linguistics is the use of linguistic theories, methods, and findings to address real-world problems involving language.
• Language teaching applies linguistic principles to the design and implementation of language courses.
• Lexicography is the practice of compiling dictionaries.
• Forensic linguistics applies linguistic analysis to legal issues, such as authorship attribution and the interpretation of legal documents.
• Clinical linguistics applies linguistic knowledge to the diagnosis and treatment of language disorders.
• Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science that deals with the interaction between computers and human language.