LINGUISTICS

1. BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS
By
Ashish Prasad & Apurv Verma
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2. WHAT IS LINGUISTICS?
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 Scientific study of human language.
 Aims of linguistic theory:
⚫ What is knowledge of language? (Competence)
⚫ How is knowledge of language acquired?
(Acquisition)
⚫ How is knowledge of language put to use?
(Performance/language processing)

3. LANGUAGE
“Language is a purely human and
non-instinctive method of
communicating ideas, emotions and
desires by means of voluntarily
produced symbols.”
--Edward Sapir (1884-1939):
Language: An Introduction to the
Study of Speech (1921)
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4. “From now on I will consider
language to be a set (finite or
infinite) of sentences, each
finite in length and constructed
out of a finite set of elements.”
--Noam Chomsky (1928- ):
Syntactic Structures (1957)
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5. IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE
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 The most important tool ever invented.
⚫ Distinguishes us from other creatures.
⚫ Provides a medium to think effectively, communicate
interpersonally and collaborate with other people in
work.
 Impossible to imagine a world without language.

6. LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD

7. MAIN BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS
 Phonetics
 Phonology
 Morphology
 Syntax
 Semantics
 Pragmatics
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8. PHONETICS
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 Phonetics studies speech sounds, including
⚫ Production of speech, that is how speech sounds are
actually made : Articulatory Phonetics
⚫ Transmission and receipt of speech : Acoustic
Phonetics and
⚫ Perception of the transmitted sound by human brain :
Auditory Phonetics.

9. PHONOLOGY
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 Studies the sound system of languages.
⚫ Distinctive sounds within a language,
⚫ Nature of sound systems across the languages.
 Phoneme (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a
sound uttered") is the smallest segmental unit of
sound employed to form meaningful contrasts
between utterances.

10. MORPHOLOGY
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 Studies the formation of words from smaller units
called morphemes.
 Morpheme: minimal meaningful language unit.
 Phoneme(s): smallest linguistically distinctive units
of sound) in spoken language.
 Grapheme(s): written symbol to represent speech.

11. SYNTAX
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 Rules that govern the formation of sentences from
words.
 Syntactic phrases include:
⚫ Noun Phrase : a tall man, the bus
⚫ Verb Phrase : roam around, hit the ball
⚫ Prepositional Phrase : in the class, at the club
⚫ Adjective Phrase : Very good, nice girl
 The Grammatical Rules:
⚫ SOV: eg. Hindi
⚫ SVO: eg . English

12. GRAMMAR
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 The syntax of a language deals
grammatical structure of a language.
with the
 Grammar is the structural foundation of our ability
to express ourselves.
⚫ Descriptive grammar : structure actually used by
speakers and writers.
⚫ Prescriptive grammar : structure that should be used.

13. HIERARCHY OF LANGUAGE: STRATIFICATION
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⚫Phonemes
⚫Syllables
⚫Morphemes
⚫Words
⚫Phrases
⚫Clauses
⚫Sentences/utterances
⚫Texts/discourses

14. SEMANTICS
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 Study of language meaning.
 Concerned with not only the meaning of words, but
also that of morphemes and of sentences.
 Lexical semantics study how and what the words of
a language denote.

15. SEMANTIC RELATIONS
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16. EXAMPLES
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 Pretty and attractive are synonyms.
 Good and bad are antonyms.
 Animal is a hypernym of mammal which is a
hypernym of dog.
 Dog is a hyponym of mammal which is a hyponym
of animal.
 Bark is a meronym of tree which is a meronym of
forest.
 Forest is a holonym of tree which is a holonym of
bark.

17. PRAGMATICS
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 Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context.
 How language is used to communicate rather than
how it is internally structured.
 Govern a number of conversational
interactions, such as sequential organization, repair
of errors, role and speech acts.

18. REFERENCES
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 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics
 en.citizendium.org/wiki/Linguistics
 Lecture Slides

19. THANK YOU
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