Linguistics is the study of . It involves the analysis of language , language , and language in . Linguists traditionally analyze human language by observing an interplay between and . Linguistics also deals with the social, cultural, historical, and political factors that influence language, through which linguistic and language-based context is often determined. Research on language through the sub-branches of and also focuses on how languages change and grow, particularly over an extended .Phonetics is a branch of that studies how humans make and perceive sounds, or in the case of , the equivalent aspects of sign. Phoneticians—linguists who specialize in phonetics—study the physical properties of speech.There are three types of the study of the sounds of language. Acoustic Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of sounds. Auditory Phonetics is the study of the way listeners perceive sounds. Articulatory Phonetics is the study of how the vocal tracts produce the sounds. This article will only describe articulatory phonetics.The discrepancy between spelling and sounds led to the formation of the International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA.) The symbols used in this alphabet can be used to represent all sounds of all human languages. The following is the American English Phonetic alphabetPhonetics deals with the production of speech sounds by humans, often without prior knowledge of the language being spoken. Phonology is about patterns of sounds, especially different patterns of sounds in different languages, or within each language, different patterns of sounds in different positions in words etc.2. Phonology as grammar of phonetic patternsThe consonant cluster /st/ is OK at the beginning, middle or end of words in English.At beginnings of words, /str/ is OK in English, but /ftr/ or /tr/ are not (they are ungrammatical)./tr/ is OK in the middle of words, however, e.g. in "ashtray"./tr/ is OK at the beginnings of words in German, though, and /ftr/ is OK word-initially in Russian, but not in English or German.3. A given sound have a different function or status in the sound patterns of different languagesFor example, the glottal stop occurs in both English and Arabic BUT ...In English, at the beginning of a word, is a just way of beginning vowels, and does not occur with consonants. In the middle or at the end of a word, is one possible pronunciation of /t/ in e.g. "pat".In Arabic, is a consonant sound like any other (/k/, /t/ or whatever): "write!", "minute (time)", "right".4. Phonemes and allophones, or sounds and their variantsThe vowels in the English words "cool", "whose" and "moon" are all similar but slightly different. They are three variants or allophones of the /u/ phoneme. The different variants are dependent on the different contexts in which they occur. Likewise, the consonant phoneme /k/ has different variant pronunciations in different contexts. Compare:What is Morphology?Morphology is the study of words or morphemes, the smallest units in a language. Every language has its own system of sound combinations and theses sounds together form a word. Morpheme is known as the smallest unit in a particular language. While sounds join to make words, words connect to form . Words play an important role in any language and linguists have defined words in many ways.According to the famous linguist, Leonard Bloomfield word in the minimal free unit. In morphology, we study all these theories and concepts and try to analyze the word and functions of a word. Morphology does not limit itself to the words only. It also studies the affixes (), parts of speech, intonation, stress, and sometimes goes into the semantic level as well. When we look at languages, we can identify both free and bound words. Bound words are formed by adding one or more affixes together to a single word. Morphology studies about these words formation patterns and also it gives a scientific analysis to the word formation in languages.SYNTAXSyntax refers to word order and depends on lexical categories (parts of speech.) You probably learned that there are eight main parts of speech in grammar school. Linguistics takes a different approach to these categories and separates words into morphological and syntactic groups. Linguistics analyzes words according to their affixes and the words that follow or precede them. Hopefully, the following definitions of the parts of speech will make more sense and be more useful than the old definitions of grammar school books.Definition of SemanticsPhilosophers and linguists alike have long debated the intricacies of language, how we construct meaning, and how stationary those meanings really are. You've probably heard the line, 'That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.' Shakespeare asserts here then that a name doesn't matter - it's what that thing or concept really is. Even if we ceased to call a rose a rose, we could still smell its fragrance, feel its velvety petals, and be pricked by its thorns.PragmaticsPragmatics is a branch of linguistics, which is the study of language. Pragmatics focuses on conversational implicature, which is a process in which the speaker implies and a listener infers. Simply put, pragmatics studies language that is not directly spoken. Instead, the speaker hints at or suggests a meaning, and the listener assumes the correct intention.In a sense, pragmatics is seen as an understanding between people to obey certain rules of interaction. In everyday language, the meanings of words and phrases are constantly implied and not explicitly stated. In certain situations, words can have a certain meaning. You might think that words always have a specifically defined meaning, but that is not always the case. Pragmatics studies how words can be interpreted in different ways based on the situation.Branches of linguisticsThe last three chapters have dealt with the core areas of linguistics. Between them, phonetics/phonology, syntax and semantics/pragmatics constitute the principal levels of linguistics. Whatever branch of the subject we look at we shall inevitably find ourselves talking about them. We use the metaphor of a tree here because this seems the best way to capture the relationship between these core areas, collectively the 'trunk', and the individual disciplines, or 'branches', which sprout from them. Changing the metaphor, we could think of the core as the hub of a wheel with the various branches as the individual spokes radiating out.°°°Branches of Linguistics°°°Linguistics is the scientific analysis of language. Language is concerned with human life, behavior,society, and so forth. Hence, we have had a number of sub-fields of linguistics called branches oflinguistics. Let us have crucial ideas of the major departments of linguistics as noted below.•Micro-linguistics:--Micro-linguistics is a sector of in linguistics that interest itself with the analysis of language systems inthe abstract, without concern to the meaning or notional quantity of linguistic expressions. Micro-linguistics covers the crucial elements of a language. This is also cited as theoretical linguistics.Theoretical linguistics coats the study of the structural aspects of language under the broad level ofgrammar. Grammar is divided into few structures.Additional name is levels of linguistics.•Phonetics:--classification of speech sounds.•Phonology:--Phonemes and how soundclassificationed and used in natural languages.•Morphology:--Word formation and particularly form, shape, or structure.•Syntax:--Sentence structure and the configuration of words and phrases to build well-formedsentences in a language.•Semantics:--Textual meaning and the meaning of a word, phrase, or text.•Pragmatics:--Contextual meaning and used in dialogue, text organization, presupposition, andimplicature.2.Macro-linguistics:--Macro-linguistics concerned with the way languages are developed, stocked in the brain, and used forvarious purposes; interdependence of language and culture; physiological and psychologicalmechanisms affected in language behavior. Actually, macro-linguistics is not only a field concerned withlanguage but also disciplines such as psychology, sociology, neurology, computational, and applied arealso deflected with language. Below branches of macro-linguistics:--•Psycho-linguistics--mind and connections between linguistic behavior and psychological procedures,encompassing the method of language acquisition.•Socio-linguistics:--society and relation to social aspects, including distinctions of provincial, class, andoccupational dialect, gender distinctions, and bilingualism.•Anthropological-linguistics:--Human history.•Computational-linguistics:--Computer and language inspection that gives rise to the use of electronicdigital computers.•Applied-linguistics:---Education such as language teachingg, translation, and speech therapy.•Neuro-linguistics:--Brain and functioning of the brain.•Cognitive-linguistics:--Cognition and methods included in reading (late 16th century: from medievalLatin cognitivus, from cognit- 'known', from the verb cognoscere ).•Discourse-linguistics:--howa sentence is spoken and written.
