Linguistics

Linguistics as an Academic Discipline

Linguistics is an academic discipline that studies language as a universal human faculty. Linguistics, in its various aspects, spans the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, engineering, and technology because all these groups of disciplines use language and depend on certain aspects of it, in one way or another.

Linguistics is also one of the most ancient areas of research. The first grammatical description of a language, namely, Sanskrit, an ancient language of India, was written in verse by Panini several millennia ago. Historically and individually, people become aware of linguistic facts when they encounter a foreign language for the first time. Panini wanted to describe Sanskrit, the language of the Hindu sacred texts, as it was giving way to colloquial dialects that later developed into Hindi, Urdu, and several other languages of modern India.

Language is viewed by contemporary linguists as a complex dynamic structure of interrelated elements governed by a large number of intricate rules that are internalized in the minds of the native speakers, who use these rules without necessarily being aware of them or being able to formulate them correctly. Since Noam Chomsky’s “revolution” in linguistics in the late 1950s to mid-1960s, linguistics has also been seen as a principal contributor to cognitive [Page 458]science, and its goal is to explicate these rules, some of which are universal (i.e., the same for all natural languages) and others language-specific. These rules also afford greater access to the study of the human mind than most other cognitive disciplines. Humor also offers a window to the mind, with or without language.

Language is essentially a mechanism for constructing a complexly organized set of pairings between sounds and meanings. Whatever we say normally has a sound (a sign, for the hearing impaired) and conveys a meaning. The sound is studied by the linguistic subdiscipline of phonology, a theoretical expression of the empirical findings by phonetics, assisted by acoustics. The meaning is studied by semantics, accompanied by pragmatics: the former studies meaning more generally while pragmatics customizes and contextualizes it.

Mediating the pairings is the complex edifice of syntax, the study of sentential structure, that is, how the words of a language are assembled by native speakers into sentences. Syntax depends on morphology, the study of the structure of words and, especially, their membership in parts of speech that defines their behavior in sentences, so that nouns are typically subjects and objects, verbs predicates, adjectives attributes, and so on.

Syntax also interfaces with semantics, the study of meaning at the other end of the pairings, because the words of a sentence contribute their meanings to that of the sentence in the order imposed by the syntactic structure. If semantics is in charge of the general and generic meaning of words and sentences, pragmatics customizes and contextualizes it, thus adding another level of complexity to language structure by reflecting individual, group, and situational differences of usage. The latter is particularly attuned to the social aspects of language use.

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