Linguistics is the (scientific) study of natural human language. See a reasonably good page at Wikipedia. It aims to develop a toolbox for description of concrete languages (applied linguistics, descriptive grammar), their classification (language families, language typology) as well as to understand how language functions (e.g. relations to cognition and social constraints) and changes (historical and comparative linguistics). The description of a concrete language includes organizational principles called grammar and distinguished constants called lexic. The grammar is described at several hierarchical levels (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax).
There is an opposition between
Linguistics sign has also a dichotomy between its meaning and its expression.
Linguistic systems are often also at several levels from personal idiom/idiolect, through social sociolects, regional dialects to languages and language families. There is no fundamental agreement of entirely consistent boundary of what is a boundary level of a language as opposed to dialects or language groups. Also there is no universal criterium of what a boundary of a word is, that is what a word is.
Syntax is a description of how a received (valid) phrase or sentence is made out of its constituent parts and discipline studying syntax in that sense.
Linguists may deploy formal methods to analyse the syntax (linguistics) of natural language (see also syntax in the sense of logics).
Formal grammars characterize which strings of words are considered grammatical, they come in many different flavours:
These different frameworks come in a hierarchy of expressive power, see Chomsky hierarchy.
Formal theories of meaning are based on the principle of compositionality: the semantics of a sentence is a function of the meanings of its words, and of its grammatical structure (cf. linguistic semantics).
Pragmatics is concerned with the meaning of language in context.
semantics of a programming language, semantics (in model theoretic sense)
diverse materials and corpora can be found at extensive web site The Linguist List
Wikipedia linguistics, philology, phonetics, morphology (linguistics), syntax, semantics, pragmatics, semiotics, linguistic typology, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics
F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale
André Martinet, Éléments de linguistique générale, (Engl. transl.: Elements of General Linguistics)
Adrian Akmajian, Richard A. Demers, Ann K. Farmer, Robert M. Harnish, Linguistics, an introduction to language and communication
John Lyons, Semantics; Linguistics semantics
Bernard Comrie, Language universals and linguistic typology, syntax and morphology, 1981, 1989
Peter Ladefoged, Keith Johnson, A course in phonetics
Steven Pinker, The language instinct, 1994
Winfred P. Lehmann, Historical linguistics: an introduction
George Lakoff, Women, fire and dangerous things, 1987
Ronald Langacker, Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. 1, 1987, vol. 2, 1991
Pieter A. M. Seuren, The logic of language, vol. II of Language from within; (vol. I: Language in cognition) Oxford University Press 2010
David Mumford, Grammar isn’t merely part of language, 2016 blog
M. Tallerman, Understanding syntax (1st ed, 1998, 5th ed. 2020)
Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the philosophy of language, Indiana University Press 1984
Joachim Lambek, Pregroups and natural language processing, The Mathematical Intelligencer 28 (2006), 41–48 pdf
Bob Coecke, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Stephen Clark, Mathematical foundations for a compositional distributional model of meaning, in the Lambek Festschrift, special issue of Linguistic Analysis, 2010 arxiv/1003.4394
Vasily Pestun, Yiannis Vlassopoulos, Tensor network language model, [arXiv:1710.10248]
(via tensor networks)
Last revised on August 18, 2024 at 15:13:30. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.