Linguistics is a branch of social sciences which investigates the systematic structure, social and individual characteristics of the most fundamental and widely used means of communication, that is, human language from both theoretical and applied perspectives. As a result of continuing advances in science, modern linguistic investigations are now carried out within a variety sub-branches and language phenomena are studied also from broader perspectives of interdisciplinary attempts. Departments of Linguistics and Departments of Language and Literature at universities differ from each other in certain ways concerning their interests in the study of language: Generally speaking, Departments of Language and Literature deal with the historical changes a certain language has undergone with its period-specific characteristics and make an extensive use of the analyses of written documents and literary texts in this context. They place particular emphasis on works of literature. Whereas in Departments of Linguistics, human language is taken as a subject matter on its own with its both historical and contemporary characteristics. While investigations can be carried out on the basis of written and oral examples of language use, they can also be carried out on a comparative basis in regard to different languages or in regard to universal features of the human language. Issues such as what language is or how languages first appeared on earth have been a matter of curiosity since the early ages, thus a variety of mythological, religious or folk hypotheses have been put forward. To the exception of such considerations, the early examples that considered language as a matter of study date back to the times of early Greek, Indian, Chinese and Arab civilizations. During the Antiquity, for example, the early questions on language within the European tradition were raised by the Greeks in philosophical and rhetorical trends. This interest gradually developed into various studies pursued for the sake of language itself. However, the conception of modern linguistic science relates mostly to the ends of 18th century. Historical and comparative language studies, which were shaped by the effects of the 19th century positivist and romanticist movements, were further developed and introductions of structuralism and generativism later in the 20th century carried linguistics to its current autonomous position with the introduction of new paradigms, concepts, and theories. Thus, starting with studies based on grammar, etymology, lexicography that were developed by some cultures for their own languages and continuing as a process of more universal principles and interdisciplinary studies, linguistics has gained a broad research area with both theoretical and applied purposes. The study areas of linguistics can be generally divided into two: (1) micro studies, (2) macro studies. The first group studies consider the structural and functional properties of language within the context of phonology, phonetics, morphology, lexicology, syntax, and semantics. The second group studies, on the other hand, research the appearances that occur according to the individual and social properties of language. But in order to carry out macro researches, above all it is necessary to use the micro knowledge of that language. The properties of language use of individuals or societies cannot be analyzed completely independent from micro and macro structures. As an example to macro studies sociolinguistics which studies the relation language and society, psycholinguistics which studies the relation between language and mind, pragmatics which studies different meanings conveyed by language use and performance, neurolinguistics which studies language and the structure of brain can be given. In addition to these fields, cognitive linguistics studies the relation between perception and interpretation processes of the brain and language, neurocognitive linguistics which adds intercellular interaction types to this analysis and tries to explain language analysis and production, computational linguistics which tries to apply the language processes similar to that of humans to computers, stylistics which explains the properties of language use in literary texts in the light of linguistic theories can be named. The areas which developed extensively especially in the second half of the 20th century are text linguistics which analyzes the structure of texts and discourse analysis which studies the structure and the properties of discourse and the characteristics of it according to the context it is used. Another subfield that developed during the same period is corpus linguistics which collects examples of different natural language usages and tries to reach broad theories with qualification and quantificational analysis in the computer environment. In addition to all these, there are many fields of applied linguistics such as foreign language teaching, lexicography, speech therapy and translation etc. which are fed by linguistics...........
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 13:49:40 +0000
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