What is Language?

Language is defined as the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication. It involves the use of arbitrary symbols (like the word "tree" in English or "Baum" in German), has a hierarchical structure (from sounds to words to sentences), and allows for the production of an infinite number of utterances.

What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It encompasses various subareas, one of which is Psycholinguistics, which focuses on the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language. Examples of questions explored in psycholinguistics include how we generate meaningful sentences and how children learn language.

Areas of Theoretical Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics explores the fundamental components of language. Here's a brief overview:

• Phonology: The study of sounds as abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning. This includes:
  • Phonemics: Investigates the meaning behind sounds. A phoneme is the basic unit of a language's phonology that can change meaning (e.g., /r/ and /l/ in "royal" and "loyal"). Different letters can represent the same phoneme (e.g., /k/ in "cat", "kit", "school", "skill"). Phonemic charts are used in this study.
  • Phonetics: The study of the physical sounds of human speech, including their production, acoustic properties, transmission, and perception.
• Morphology: The study of word structure and patterns of word formation. It examines how morphemes, such as affixes (e.g., "-s" for plural, "-ed" for past tense, "un-"), are attached to word stems to create new words (e.g., "dog" becomes "dogs", "run" becomes "runs", "do" becomes "undo").
• Syntax: The system of rules specifying how words are combined in sentences. For example, in English, a common rule is Subject – Verb – Object (e.g., "The boy throws a stone").
• Semantics: The study of how meaning is expressed in languages. Meaning is influenced by both the words used and the syntax of a sentence. For instance, the sentence structure can subtly change the meaning, as in "Peter’s hair needs cutting badly" versus "Peter’s hair badly needs cutting".
• Pragmatics: The study of how context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics helps us understand how language users can overcome apparent ambiguity by considering the manner, place, time, etc., of an utterance. An example illustrates this: asking "Can you open the window?" is usually interpreted as a request to open the window, not just an inquiry about one's ability to do so. This involves inferring the intended meaning or "implicatures".