News tagged with linguist
Language diversity will make London a true global player
Understanding linguistic diversity among London's schoolchildren is key for the city's future as a 'global player', research shows. A study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) mapped the distribution ...
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
May 10, 2012 |
not rated yet |
3
Can automated deep natural-language analysis unlock the power of inference?
Much of the operationally-relevant information relied on in support of DoD missions may be implicit rather than explicitly expressed, and in many cases, information is deliberately obfuscated and important ...
Technology / Computer Sciences
May 08, 2012 |
not rated yet |
0
Endangered species, languages linked at high biodiversity regions
Biodiversity hot spots -- the world's biologically richest and most threatened locations on Earth -- and high biodiversity wilderness areas -- biologically rich but less threatened -- are some of the most linguistically diverse ...
May 07, 2012 |
4.9 / 5 (7) |
2
|
Subconsciously, we echo the speech of superiors
(Phys.org) -- Want to know who holds the power? Just listen carefully, preferably with a little help from a computer. Research at Cornell shows that people speaking to someone of perceived superior status often unconsciously ...
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Apr 24, 2012 |
2.7 / 5 (3) |
2
Literal Lucy to the rescue: A new way to distinguish between literal meaning and contextual meaning
A new linguistic study of how individuals interpret various types of utterances sheds more light on how literal and contextual meaning are distinguished. The study, "A novel empirical paradigm for distinguishing between What ...
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Mar 09, 2012 |
not rated yet |
0
You can't do the math without the words
Most people learn to count when they are children. Yet surprisingly, not all languages have words for numbers. A recent study published in the journal of Cognitive Science shows that a few tongues lack number words and as ...
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Feb 21, 2012 |
4.8 / 5 (11) |
37
|
How social media help save an endangered language
(PhysOrg.com) -- There was a time when everyone living in Michigan grew up speaking the native language of the area's indigenous people. Now less than 10 people born in the state are fluent, yet more than 2,700 people "like" ...
Feb 21, 2012 |
5 / 5 (2) |
0
'Talking dictionaries' document vanishing languages
Digital technology is coming to the rescue of some of the world's most endangered languages. Linguists from National Geographic's Enduring Voices project who are racing to document and revitalize struggling languages are ...
Feb 17, 2012 |
not rated yet |
0
Out of Africa? Data fail to support language origin in Africa
Last year, a report claiming to support the idea that the origin of language can be traced to West Africa appeared in Science. The article caused quite a stir. Now linguist Michael Cysouw from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in Mun ...
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Feb 15, 2012 |
4.1 / 5 (7) |
12
|
Comics are serious teaching tools for USC linguist
The study of linguistics is not a laughing matter -- unless you happen to have Stan Dubinsky as your professor. The University of South Carolina linguist has been sharing jokes and puns and cartoons with students ...
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Jan 10, 2012 |
4 / 5 (2) |
0
Was St. Edmund killed by the Vikings in Essex?
Keith Briggs, a visiting research fellow in linguistics at the University of the West of England, has proposed a new site for the battle in which King Edmund of East Anglia was killed in 869. If confirmed, the new proposal ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Dec 19, 2011 |
5 / 5 (5) |
0
Enticing words on bags of potato chips have a lot to say about social class, researchers find
(PhysOrg.com) -- Like politicians who adopt regional accents to appeal to local audiences, the manufacturers of potato chips vary the wording on their bags to convey their products' authenticity in different ...
Dec 01, 2011 |
3.7 / 5 (3) |
5
|
'Queen's English' not the best
Native English speakers should give up their claim to be the guardians of the purest form of the language and accept that the ways it is used and changed by millions around the world are equally valid.
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Nov 02, 2011 |
3.2 / 5 (5) |
3
Noted physicist teams with anthropologist to create ancient linguistic tree
(PhysOrg.com) -- With the thousands of languages in the world today, it’s hard to imagine just one of them being spoken by all of the existing humans on Earth. And while there is really no way to prove ...
Oct 12, 2011 |
4.8 / 5 (9) |
12
|
New mathematical model to enable web searches for meaning
(PhysOrg.com) -- A new theory of meaning has the potential to revolutionise many artificial intelligence technologies and enable web searches that interpret the meaning of queries, according to its developer, a computer scientist ...
Sep 26, 2011 |
4 / 5 (6) |
2
|
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context.
The first is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the system of rules followed by the speakers (or hearers) of a language. It encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound systems). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.
The study of language meaning is concerned with how languages employ logical structures and real-world references to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to manage and resolve ambiguity. This subfield encompasses semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).
Language in its broader context includes evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language; historical linguistics, which explores language change; sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at language processing in the brain; language acquisition, how children or adults acquire language; and discourse analysis, which involves the structure of texts and conversations.
Although linguistics is the scientific study of language, a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to language and intersect with it. Semiotics, for example, is the general study of signs and symbols both within language and without. Literary theorists study the use of language in literature. Linguistics additionally draws on and informs work from such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and acoustics.
For more information about Linguistics, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
