{ling-gwis'-tiks} Linguistics is the science of \Tlanguage\t; its subject is the pursuit of knowledge about the phenomenon of human language for its own sake. A common assumption is that linguists study only the histories and origins of languages. Even though these pursuits do constitute an important part of linguistics--the part called \Thistorical linguistics\t--they by no means exhaust the subject. Most linguists also study foreign languages and frequently contribute to the development of materials and methods in language teaching. Neither of these activities, however, constitutes linguistics. The better understanding of foreign languages and the improved methods of teaching them come under the rubric of \Tapplied linguistics\t and are by-products of linguistic analysis and research. Implicit and Explicit Linguistic Knowledge The acquisition of competence in foreign languages constitutes a tool of linguistics--an extremely useful and important tool, but only a tool, not the end or goal. The crucial distinction to be drawn is between implicit and explicit knowledge. A competent speaker of a language has implicit knowledge of that language; a linguist seeks to acquire explicit knowledge about it. Implicit knowledge of a language is reflected in speaking, understanding, reading, and writing--in short, in the ability to use the language, whether its properties are consciously understood or not. Explicit linguistic knowledge, on the other hand, has as its object the conscious understanding of a language's properties, whether or not the understanding is accompanied by the sort of unselfconscious utilitarian control over the language that is called implicit knowledge. Traditional Grammar In the West, speculation about language began with the Greeks. Although early philosophers such as \TPlato\t went no further than to suggest hundreds of fanciful etymologies for Greek words, by the 1st century BC grammarians like \TDionysius Thrax\t had worked out an elaborate system--later called traditional grammar--that was by and large faithful to the structure and properties of Greek. When the Roman grammarians Aelius \TDonatus\t and Priscian (6th century AD) adopted this system for their own language, Latin, it worked well because Greek and Latin are both genetically related as \TIndo-European languages\t and are structurally quite similar. Difficulties with traditional grammar did not become evident until many centuries later when Latin had evolved into its descendant \TRomance languages\t such as Italian, French, and Spanish. The new languages were so different from Latin that the familiar analysis enshrined in the traditional grammars no longer had any contemporary relevance. Because of the high cultural esteem in which Latin was held, however, the false notion arose that the emerging Romance languages represented corrupt forms of classical Latin. Scholars urged that this presumed corruption should be countered by conscious adherence to the archaic language forms and patterns found in Latin, which were believed to be somehow better and purer. This fundamentally mistaken view--that language change is inherently pathological, and that hence a people's language should be kept immune from its normal course of development--is called linguistic prescriptivism. With the Renaissance and the 15th-century boom in trade and exploration, information began to arrive in Europe about languages unrelated to and almost wholly different from Greek and Latin. Not surprisingly, traditional grammar was unsuited to cope with the new, exotic languages. One positive consequence of this confrontation of old norms and new languages was the development of philosophical interest in properties common to all languages, particularly with reference to canons of universal logic. This movement culminated in the so-called general grammars of the 17th century. The Beginnings of Modern Linguistics The English colonization of India during the 18th century uncovered the existence of Sanskrit, an ancient language of religion, philosophy, and literature (see \TIndo-Iranian languages\t). Among the Hindus, Sanskrit occupied a place of importance and esteem analogous to that once held in Christian Europe by Latin. Linguists noticed almost immediately that Sanskrit bore a remarkable resemblance to Greek and Latin, not only in the shapes of individual words--for example, mata, "mother," and asti, "is," beside Greek Meter and esti, and Latin mater and est--but equally in the organization of morphology and syntax. Sanskrit had also been the object of native grammatical investigation dating back three millennia and preeminently represented by the work of \TPanini\t. The Hindu approach in many respects surpassed the traditional grammar of the West for philosophic consistency and analytic thoroughness. The soundness and rigor of Panini's Sanskrit grammar thereafter provided an intellectual model for European scholars, and Europeans sought an explanation of the unmistakable similarity of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin. In retrospect, modern linguists consider that the key insight is theorized by Sir William \TJones\t, the first great European Sanskrit scholar, who in 1786 surmised that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin may all "have sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists." Jones's statement, made at the threshold of the 19th century, ignited the modern science of linguistics. For the next 100 years the interest of linguists was predominantly historical and comparative; they investigated the evolution and mutual relations of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, \TGermanic\t, \TCeltic\t, and any additional Indo-European languages they could find. Other language families were also studied, most notably \TUral-Altaic\t; but it was not until the 20th century that the pale of historical linguistics was extended significantly beyond Europe. Synchronic Linguistics During the last years of the 19th century linguists began turning their attention to nonhistorical aspects of language organization and function. They developed ways of studying a language independently of its own past history, as an object functioning at any given time or stage of its existence. An explicit and detailed exposition of the nonhistorical approach did not appear until the posthumous publication in 1916 of Course in General Linguistics by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de \TSaussure\t. The new vantage on language came to be known as synchronic linguistics, in contradistinction to historical or diachronic linguistics. The recognition of these two analytic perspectives, which provide complementary rather than competing modes of linguistic investigation, has remained a cardinal feature of linguistics. In the two decades after World War I, linguistic science showed rapid consolidation and development on both sides of the Atlantic; the science paid prime but not exclusive attention to synchronic linguistics. In Europe the Geneva school of linguists continued Saussure's pioneering work; significant brands of linguistics also developed in Denmark, under the direction of Otto \TJespersen\t and Louis Hjelmslev, as well as in England in association with scholars like J. R. Firth. The most important European linguistic movement of the 1920s and '30s was Czechoslovakia's \TPrague school\t, led by Roman \TJakobson\t, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and others. Behaviorism During the 1920s synchronic linguistics underwent a profound development and wide expansion in the United States. American interest was fueled by the study and analysis of the rich variety of American \TIndian languages\t. Particularly in its formative period, American linguistics developed in close association with \Tsocial anthropology\t--Franz \TBoas\t, Edward \TSapir\t, and Alfred L. \TKroeber\t, for example, were all anthropologists as well as linguists. By the early 1930s, however, the descriptive work that had been dominating the field came more and more to be complemented by a search for theoretical foundations. Under the aegis of \Tbehaviorism\t, the sweeping, freshly formulated tenets of American linguistic thought were set down in 1933 by Leonard \TBloomfield\t in his book Language. During World War II and in the decade that followed, linguistics continued to develop in the United States, aided and abetted by a variety of applied linguistic work, notably preparation of foreign language teaching materials begun in support of the war effort. European linguistics, on the other hand, was disrupted by the war, although it too began to pick up again in the 1950s with the work of such scholars as M. A. K. Halliday on systemic linguistics in England and Andre Martinet on functional linguistics in France. New or renewed progress also occurred after the war in Holland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the \TUSSR\t, and elsewhere. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw much theoretical consolidation of American linguistics. The behavioristic program set forth by Bloomfield and others a generation earlier had been put to the empirical test of the world's languages, and the theoretical refinements of linguists like Bernard Bloch, Zellig Harris, Charles Hockett, Eugene Nida, and Kenneth Pike now converged on a coherent theory of language analysis known as neo-Bloomfieldian or structural linguistics--sometimes also called American structuralism to distinguish it from several coeval brands of linguistics that are also generally considered structural. Because of its behaviorist foundations, American structuralism developed a variety of limitations to determine which linguistic phenomena might fall within the province of scientific inquiry. The specific limitations differed from time to time and from school to school, but they all reflected the structuralist tenet that scientific inquiry must be implemented by totally explicit and automatically replicable analytic methods--the so-called discovery procedures--and that the objects discovered or postulated by these methods must be physically defined. In the case of language, this procedure was tantamount to requiring that the defining properties of sentences, verbs, vowels, and so on be manifested behaviorally--that is, in the external behavior of speakers. Transformational Grammar Perhaps the single most serious limitation that the structuralists imposed on themselves was derived from their belief that meaning could not be scientifically studied because it showed insufficient physical manifestation to pass the rigorous behaviorist requirements. In the early 1950s, however, one of the most influential structuralists, Zellig Harris of the University of Pennsylvania, began an important series of investigations that ultimately led not only to the development of techniques for the scientific study of meaning, but also led to a revolution in linguistics. Harris explored the possibility of extending structuralist analysis beyond the limits of the sentence and developed formulas to capture systematic linguistic relations between sentences of different types--formulas that he called transformations. For example, a sentence in the active voice like Harry drank the beer was analyzed as being transformationally related to its passive-voice counterpart, The beer was drunk by Harry. To the extent that the transformation could be structurally stated, this theory was a breakthrough into a new realm, the linguistic study of meaning. What hitherto had been viewed purely as a relation of meaning--most structuralists had considered corresponding active and passive sentences equivalent in meaning but distinct in structure--could now be correlated with a structural relation as well, that of the transformation. Though Harris continued developing his own brand of transformational linguistics, what is probably the most important single event in American linguistics since the appearance of Bloomfield's book in 1933 was the publication in 1957 of Syntactic Structures by Noam \TChomsky\t of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A former student of Harris's, Chomsky took over the concept of transformation and incorporated it into a new linguistic theory now commonly known as transformational-generative, or simply generative, linguistics. The theory differs from structuralism in that it synthesizes theoretical and methodological elements from mathematics and the philosophy of language and abandons the structuralists' behaviorism for a philosophical position of neorationalism, which has roots going back to the 17-century concept of general grammar. The descriptive-analytic power afforded by transformations, coupled with the much-widened analytic scope permitted by its nonbehaviorist philosophy, together account for the striking ascendancy of generative linguistics--and proportionate decline of structuralism--between 1960 and 1980. Although the battle between generativism and structuralism now appears to be waning, there are appearing brands of linguistics descended from generativism but no longer purely generative theoretically, such as relational theory. Currently linguistics is flourishing throughout the world, but theories are too much in flux to predict trends with any confidence. THE MAJOR BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS Lay people commonly believe that a language operates through the element called words, which are strung together into sentences, which then are used to express thoughts. Although this view is an oversimplification and is frequently accompanied by distortions, it does reflect various fundamental truths about language. According to the popular conception, words themselves have a dual role. First, they serve as building blocks for sentences; each individual word is viewed as having a meaning. Second, words have spellings, which are viewed as being more or less immutable and inviolable, but which in turn are coupled with pronunciations that are characterized by considerable instability and have a tendency to degenerate. The first of these views seems to be essentially correct, except that the popular conception of meaning is normally fuzzy and inaccurate in various ways. The second conception, however, is backwards, since both historically and functionally a word's pronunciation is primary, while its spelling not only is derivative but also is in fact dispensable. Even to this day many languages lack \Twriting systems\t; yet their words show no more variability or instability in pronunciation than do the words of English or any other language with an established orthography. A word is an element coupling a meaning and a pronunciation, but comparisons between unrelated languages show the fundamental independence of meanings and pronunciations. For example, the English word foot may be compared with its nearest Hebrew equivalent, regel. The words differ in more than pronunciation; their meanings are not identical either. Both regel and foot designate the pedal extremity, but regel also designates the whole limb of which the pedal extremity is the end, a portion of the anatomy for which English uses the word leg. Phonetics \Tphonetics\t is the branch of linguistics that studies the nature and mechanisms of human speech sounds independently of the meanings that those sounds are used to convey. The English word mopper ("one who mops"), for instance, is characterizable in terms of phonetics as beginning with and containing segments formed by certain significant lip movements (spelled m and pp in this case); as being pronounced more loudly on the first syllable (mop) than on the second (per); as differing only in the first segment from the word hopper; and so on. Semantics Semantics might be characterized as the branch of linguistics that studies the nature and organization of the meanings conveyed by human language independently of the speech sounds used to symbolize those meanings. Thus aspects of the word mopper of interest to semanticists include: delimitation of the real or imagined set of entities designable by the term mopper; the contribution of the constituents mopp- and -er to the word's overall meaning; the fact that mopper, "one who mops," bears a semantically relevant relation to hopper in the sense of "one who hops," but not also in the sense of "a container for transferring loose material"; the fact that a mopper is a kind of cleaner and that additional members of the same set include sweeper and duster; and so on. Syntax The relation between sentences and thoughts is not nearly so clear or foregone as was once assumed. The discipline of \Tpsycholinguistics\t has shown that the term thought should be eschewed, where possible, in favor of more serviceable concepts. One such concept is meaning: human languages encode meanings into sounds through symbols called words, which enter into combinations called sentences. The phonetic structure of a sentence is partially but not totally a sum of the phonetic structures of its component words. Likewise, the semantic structure of a sentence is partially but not completely determined by the meanings of its component words. If, however, the only organizational levels of language are the phonetic and the semantic, languages presumably can differ from one another solely in pronunciation or in meaning or in both simultaneously. For instance, English foot and German Fuss have the same meaning but differ in pronunciation, while English foot and Hebrew regel differ in both regards. A simple English sentence like I don't know may be considered. In its commonest sense it is a plea of ignorance with respect to some request for information. All languages have a sentence functionally equivalent to I don't know, and consequently all these sentences will be equivalent in meaning. If the only two levels of a language were the semantic and phonetic, then any two languages' versions of I don't know would differ only in pronunciation. This conclusion, however, is egregiously false, as a comparison of I don't know with, for example, the corresponding German version clearly shows. If German Ich weiss nicht differed only phonetically from the English version, then substituting English pronunciations for the German word by word--I for Ich, know for weiss, and not for nicht--should result in I don't know. It does not, of course, but rather results in I know not, which is not acceptable everyday English. As a result, when the phonetic variances are abstracted out of the English and German sentences, an unaccounted-for residue of differences remains: elements present in one language but absent in the other (do appears only in the English version); elements receiving multiple representation (compare French je ne sais pas, literally translated as "I not know not"); and discrepancies in order of word placement (the negative precedes the verb in English, follows it in German, flanks it in French). If these differences are neither phonetic nor semantic, what type of differences are they? Linguists tend to agree (although not unanimously) that the differences indicate the existence of a third level of language organization, the so-called syntactic level. Although the exact nature and properties of this level remain to be delimited, a largely uncontroversial sampling of syntactic facets of the word mopper would include: its derivational structure--that is, the \Tparts of speech\t of both the word and its constituents, mopp- and -er; its inflectional structure--for example, the fact that a plural form, moppers, exists; and its possible syntactic functions--for example, that of subject in the sentence, "The mopper swabbed the deck." Phonology Evidence also exists for a fourth organizational level of language, phonology, which embraces aspects of both syntax and phonetics. Fundamentally, a language's phonological system specifies the deployment of its phonetic resources within the frames provided by the syntax. For example, the syntactic fact that the English nouns mopper and mop have plural forms moppers and mops is complemented by the phonetic fact that -s is pronounced differently in each instance--voiced (vibration of the vocal cords) in the case of moppers, but voiceless (vocal cords at rest) in the case of mops. The phonological system provides the special relation between the voiced and voiceless sounds. This special relation is neither an exclusively phonetic fact--the final sounds of moos and moose, for instance, are phonetically identical with those of moppers and mops, yet lack the special relation found between the latter two sounds--nor an exclusively syntactic fact--the same special relation holds between the final sounds of the possessives mopper's and mop's and the verbs slobbers and pops, although these suffixes are quite distinct syntactically from the plural suffix. Morphology and Lexicology Most linguists recognize at least two additional organizational levels, morphology and lexicology (see \Tlexicology and lexicography\t). In traditional grammar, a language's morphology gives the patterns internal to a word; syntax examines the relations among words in a sentence. In what is perhaps the most prevalent contemporary usage, the functions of traditional morphology are distributed between syntax and phonology. Recently, however, some promising attempts have been made to grant morphology a more independent footing. Lexicology is the branch of theoretical linguistics that corresponds to the applied science of lexicography and is thus concerned with the question of a language's repertory of words and other lexical items. In contemporary usage, a language's lexicological inventory, or lexicon, is viewed as either complementary or parallel to its semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology. LANGUAGE IN TIME AND SPACE When a language is studied as an object of development and change through time, the study is called diachronic or historical linguistics. Alternatively, when a language is studied irrespective of its own past--as an object having specific properties at any given temporal point of its existence--the study belongs to the sphere of descriptive or synchronic linguistics. Despite the importance of the distinction, these two modes of linguistic inquiry--the synchronic and the historical--were not kept sharply apart by linguists until the early part of the 20th century. An example of the difference between the synchronic and historical perspectives is provided by the English word went. Originally, went was the past tense of the verb wend. In time, however, it came to replace the original past tense (yede, from Old English eode) of the verb go, and the verb wend itself developed a new regular past tense form, wended. Because of this development, in modern English went is synchronically the past tense of go, but it is historically the past tense of wend. Both statements are equally true, but true from different vantages. To claim that went is the real past tense of wend would be clearly false, although statements of this type are frequently heard. Just as language change through time constitutes the subject matter of historical linguistics, language variation in space provides the material for \Tgeographical linguistics\t, which includes both linguistic geography and dialectology. Linguistic geography studies differences of language usage in relation to differences of locality, with special attention to geographic and demographic conditions either favoring or hindering the diffusion of linguistic features. Dialectology is concerned with the development and mutual relations of regional and social varieties of a given language. LANGUAGE, CULTURE, SOCIETY, AND THE INDIVIDUAL Since language is an exclusive property of human beings, the object of the science of linguistics--unlike the object of sciences such as chemistry or biology--is exclusively human. This fact might be sufficient to put linguistics in a special relation to the other social sciences, except that language interpenetrates the various human faculties and institutions so thoroughly that specific branches of linguistics have had to be developed to study each aspect. \Tanthropological linguistics\t and ethnolinguistics are the studies of the relation of language to culture; \Tsociolinguistics\t deals with its relation to society; and psycholinguistics examines the interaction between language and mind. An especially close relation also obtains between language and literature and between language and philosophy; these include the well-established subdiscipline known as the philosophy of language. The study of writing cannot be separated from linguistics; various other disciplines study language as a special case of broader concerns. In semiotics, for example, language is a special but particularly important case of a symbolic system. \Tcommunications\t includes such paralinguistic fields as \Tanimal communication\t, \Tsign language\t, and gesturemics. Several branches of mathematics, notably \Tlogic\t, \Tcalculus\t, and automata theory (see \Tautomata, theory of\t), are also central to linguistics, as is \Tcryptology\t, the analysis and decipherment of codes. Applied linguistics is a term that includes a wide variety of practical uses of linguistic theory and methodology in fields as diverse as language teaching, speech therapy, and translating. Mathematical linguistics is dedicated to the study of the formal properties of language. Statistical linguistics refers to the application of probability theory to various analytical problems where quantitative significance must be reckoned with. Computational linguistics involves the computerization of linguistic data for practical or theoretical reasons. Neurolinguistics embraces the study of the anatomy and physiology of the brain as correlative to specific levels and patterns of language organization. Finally, onomastics is the linguistic study of names, particularly of persons and places. Joseph L. Malone Bibliography: Bloomfield, Leonard, Language, rev. ed. (1951); Bolinger, Dwight, Aspects of Language, 2d ed. (1975); Chafe, Wallace L., Meaning and the Structure of Language (1970); Chomsky, Noam, Language and Mind, rev. ed. (1972), and Syntactic Structures (1957); Dineen, F. P., An Introduction to General Linguistics (1967); Greenberg, Joseph H., Language, Culture, and Communication (1971); Hayakawa, S. I., Language in Thought and Action, 3d ed. (1972); Hockett, Charles F., Language in Culture and Society (1964); Langacker, Ronald W., Language and Its Structure, 2d ed. (1973); Lyons, John, ed., New Horizons in Linguistics (1970); Pedersen, Holger, Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century (1931); Pei, Mario, Invitation to Linguistics (1965); Pike, Kenneth L., Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior (1954); Quine, Willard V., Word and Object (1960).