Portal:Linguistics

Linguistics Portal

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and is largely divided into two major fields: theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.

Theoretical (or general) linguistics encompasses six major sub-fields: phonetics (the study of the isolated sounds of speech), phonology (the study of speech sound systems and their mental representations), morphology (the study of the grammatical rules for word formation), syntax (the study of word order), semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of meaning in context) which, together, allow for a description of the way a language works to convey meaning from one speaker to another. Applied linguistics encompasses diverse fields such as language education, second language acquisition, effect of society on language, or language's relationship to psychology, and so on.

More about Linguistics...

...that pragmatics studies how saying "gosh, it's cold in here" can mean "please close the window"?

...that learning a second (or third or fourth) language as an adult is a different process from learning your first language(s)?

...that Damin is the only non-African language to have clicks as regular speech sounds?

...that an agent noun is a noun derived from another word that denotes an action, and means an entity that does that action?

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WikiProjects concerned with linguistics:

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