Linguistics and its Branches

·        LINGUISTICS

The systematic study of the nature, structure, and variation of language .

·        PHONETICS

a)     The branch of linguistics that deals with the sounds of speech and their production, combination, description, and representation by written symbols.

b)     Phonetics, the study of speech sounds and their physiological production and acoustic qualities. It deals with the configurations of the vocal tract used to produce speech sounds (articulatory phonetics), the acoustic properties of speech sounds (acoustic phonetics), and the manner of combining sounds so as to make syllables, words, and sentences (linguistic phonetics).

(A linguist who specializes in phonetics is known as a phonetician.)

·        PHONOLOGY

The branch of linguistics concerned with the study of speech sounds with reference to their distribution and patterning. 

Phonology,  study of the sound patterns that occur within languages. Some linguists include phonetics, the study of the production and description of speech sounds, within the study of phonology.

·        SYNTAX

          The arrangement of words in sentences, clauses, and phrases, and the study of the formation of sentences and the relationship of their component parts.

·        SEMANTICS

Semantics, also called semiotics, semology, or semasiology,  the philosophical

and scientific study of meaning in natural and artificial languages. 

·        PRAGMATICS

Pragmatics, In linguistics and philosophy, the study of the use of natural language in communication; more generally, the study of the relations between languages and their users.

·        PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

The study of the mental aspects of language and speech--a branch of both linguistics and psychology.

·        MORPHOLOGY

Morphology,  in linguistics, study of the internal construction of words. Languages vary widely in the degree to which words can be analyzed into word elements, or morphemes. In English there are numerous examples, such as “replacement,” which is composed of re-, “place,” and -ment, and “walked,” from the elements “walk” and -ed. Many American Indian languages have a highly complex morphology; other languages, such as Vietnamese or Chinese, have very little or none. Morphology includes the grammatical processes of inflection and derivation. Inflection marks categories such as person, tense, and case; e.g., “sings” contains a final -s, marker of the 3rd person singular, and the German Mannes consists of the stem Mann and the genitive singular inflection -es.Derivation is the formation of new words from existing words; e.g., “singer” from “sing” and “acceptable” from “accept.” Derived words can also be inflected: “singers” from “singer.”

·        STYLISTICS

Stylistics, study of the devices in languages (such as rhetorical figures and syntactical patterns) that are considered to produce expressive or literary style.

·        HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

Historical Linguistics, also called Diachronic Linguistics,  the branch of linguistics concerned with the study of phonological, grammatical, and semantic changes, the reconstruction of earlier stages of languages, and the discovery and application of the methods by which genetic relationships among languages can be demonstrated.

·        GRAMMAR

Rules of a language governing the sounds, words, sentences, and other elements, as well as their combination and interpretation. The word grammar also denotes the study of these abstract features or a book presenting these rules. In a restricted sense, the term refers only to the study of sentence and word structure (syntax and morphology), excluding vocabulary and pronunciation.

·        APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, linguistics, psychology, computer science,anthropology, and sociology.

·        GENERAL LINGUISTICS

A study of the phenomena, historical changes, and functions of language without restriction to a particular language or to a particular aspect (as phonetics, grammar, stylistics) of language.