Department of Foreign Languages, Salem State College: Jon Aske

Dr. Jon Aske

My Linguistics Page

CONTENTS
What is linguistics? My dissertation Papers and publications	Britannica : Language Linguistics links galore

RELATED PAGES
Linguistics at SSC Aske93 Basque Corpus Languages of the World Romance linguistics	Sociolinguistics Applied linguistics Translation

What is linguistics?

Field Linguist

The term linguistics -- and the term that refers to practitioners of linguistics, namely, linguist -- are not often well understood, if not misunderstood, both among lay people as well as in academia. It is not only that regular folks think that linguists are people who speak many languages -- an old sense of the term which has now for the most part been abandoned -- but also among academics there is great misunderstanding of what linguistics is or what it is that a linguist does.

This is not surprising, given the many different ways in which these terms are used and the number of areas of study that they refer to. Physicists also study many different aspects of matter, and engineers also build many different types of structures. Still, people don't have much trouble understanding what it is that physicists and engineers do. But what can you do with languages other than learn them and use them, right? People can understand learning about the literature of a language, but that is not what linguists do either.

An encyclopedia can give us a fairly simple and complete answer to the question of what a linguist is. For example:

"Linguistics, the scientific study of language. It encompasses the description of languages [descriptive linguistics], the study of their origin, and the analysis of how children acquire language and how people learn languages other than their own [psycholinguistics]. Linguistics is also concerned with relationships between languages [comparative linguistics] and with the ways languages change over time [diachronic or historical linguistics]. Linguists may study language as a thought process and seek a theory that accounts for the universal human capacity to produce and understand language [cognitive linguistics and neurolinguistics]. Some linguists examine language within a cultural context [sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics]. By observing talk, they try to determine what a person needs to know in order to speak appropriately in different settings, such as the workplace, among friends, or among family. Other linguists focus on what happens when speakers from different language and cultural backgrounds interact [sociolinguistics and sociology of language]. Linguists may also concentrate on how to help people learn another language, using what they know about the learner's first language and about the language being acquired [applied linguistics]."

: "Linguistics," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 99. © 1993-1998 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

That is not a bad definition, for starters. The most basic type of linguistics is descriptive linguistics, also often known as general linguistics, something that all linguists must be proficient in to go on to other realms of the study of language. Descriptive linguistics is all about observing how people speak and making inventories about the sounds, morphemes, words, and constructions of a language, as well as -- most importantly -- making generalizations about the linguistic system, that is, finding patterns in the data. The next step in description is looking for explanations of different sorts for why a language, or groups of languages, are the way they are. As explanations come to depend more and more on what we theorize the human linguistic capacity is like, the field is sometimes called theoretical linguistics.

(By the way, descriptive linguistics is divided into different subfields in which a linguist may specialize: phonetics and phonology, the study of the sounds of language(s), the former more closely associated with the physics of sound making and the latter with the sound inventories and the sound systems that languages have; morphology is the study of words and their parts, that is, how words are made of morphemes, the smallest units of form and meaning; syntax is the study of how words are combined with other words to form larger units, such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. Semantics is the study of meaning, both the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and the more or less predictable meaning of expressions built from words (combinatorial semantics). Pragmatics is the study of how language is put to use, such as the contexts in which different expressions are used in a particular language or culture, which is not predictable from the meaning of those expressions. Discourse pragmatics is the term that is sometimes used (rather idiosyncratically perhaps) to refer to the study of larger units of speech, beyond, or instead of, the sentence, since discourse analysts question the fact that people actually speak in sentences (this has nothing to do with the term discourse, as used in literary studies). Discourse analysts thus also tend to look at how people actually speak, and the patterns in speech delivery, rather than the grammatical patterns that we have supposedly internalized as speakers of a language.)

Applied linguistics is a very different ball-game. For the most part, and especially in Britain, this term is used primarily for the art of teaching languages and the study of the different possible methodologies involved. More generally, the term applied linguistics is also used for the systematic study of the 'art' of translation, and various types of forensic linguistics.

With respect to the question of where linguistics fits in academia, linguists like to think that some of its manifestations fall squarely within the (hard?) sciences, even though our high degree of ignorance about many issues would seem to make it fit better within philosophy (but still not a good fit, and philosophy of language is a well-established, and very different, branch of philosophy). Other aspects of the study of language belong more squarely in the social sciences. Still others would seem to belong in the humanities, together with the study of literature and other forms of artistic expression.

Well, I am basically interested in all of these areas of the study of language. I am primarily a general/theoretical linguist, of the functionalist school, specializing in syntax and pragmatics, but because of my background I am also very interested in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. (In a nutshell, the functionalist school(s) of linguistics believe that form and function (e.g. meaning and use) are closely interconnected and cannot be studied separately, particularly in the area of syntax, whereas the formalist school(s), think that form can be studied separately from function.)

For more information about languages and linguistics, you can read this thing I wrote for beginners:

Languages of the World (Introduction to Linguistics)

I also have a few other language relates pages at this site:

Romance linguistics (under construction)
Sociolinguistics (under construction)
Applied linguistics
Translation (under construction)

What is linguistics?

My dissertation

Papers and publications

Published Conference Papers

Unpublished Presentations

Book under pre-contract agreement

Linguistics links around the world

What is linguistics?

Languages of the world

Dictionaries

Mailing/discussion lists and the like

Linguistics Programs/Departments/Schools

Semantics, Metaphor

Linguistics Resources

Phonetics and phonology

Linguistics software

Corpora

Courses, syllabi, etc.

Linguistic schools, frameworks, theories, and projects

Professional organizations

Linguistics fun

Linguistics publishers

Journals

Other Links

Links to pages of interesting links

Some interesting books

Page URL: www.lrc.salemstate.edu/aske/linguistics.htm

Last updated: September 14, 2002

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