Branches of Linguistics

Language is concerned with human life, behavior, society, activity, and so on. So, linguistics looks at and explores language from varied perspectives, and studies a large number of ways to uncover its relation to human beings and their communication needs. The major branches of linguistics are given below:

Micro linguistics:

Micro linguistics covers the basic components of a language. It is referred to as theoretical linguistics.it covers the study of the structural aspects at the broad level of grammar.

Macro linguistics:

Macro linguistics includes the aspects of linguistic study that involve the application of findings of micro linguistics or theoretical linguistics to the analysis of language in use. It is called Applied linguistics because it involves the application of linguistics in relation to other disciplines. Sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, mathematical linguistics, ethnolinguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, clinical linguistics, and others are subfields of this macro linguistics.

Theoretical linguistics: Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. This theoretical linguistics includes phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, graphology, and lexicology. This linguistics examines a language at different levels of analysis, such as its phonological system, articulation and perception of sounds(phonetics), word formation(morphology) and phrases and sentences(syntax), the meaning of linguistic expressions (semantics), language use (pragmatics), and so on.

Comparative linguistics:

 Comparative linguistics is a part of historical linguistics that studies the similarities and differences between languages to determine their historical relationship.  For example, if we compare English, Dutch, and German, we can find several words that are similar in phonetic form and meaning, such as English Book, Dutch boek, and German buch. If we compare the equivalent words in French livre, Spanish libro, and Italian libro, it is clear that English, Dutch, and German are similar to each other. This fact implies that English, Dutch, and German belong to a language family distinct from that which French, Spanish, and Italian belong to.

The main goals of comparative linguistics are:

By comparing related languages, linguists try to reconstruct the features of the common ancestor language (called proto language), such as Proto-Indo-European.

Comparative linguistics helps to classify languages into families based on shared features and systematic sound changes, e.g. Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Sino- Tibetan).

Comparative linguistics sheds light on how languages evolve over time including phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic changes.

Contrastive linguistics:

Contrastive linguistics is part of applied linguistics and seeks to establish the similarities and differences between a language learner’s first language and the targeted language, where he/she will have difficulty and make mistakes. It is the study of two or more languages to improve language teaching and learning. Unlike comparative linguistics, which focuses on historical relationships, contrastive linguistics focuses on present-day structures of language. For example, languages like Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin do not have articles. We can then predict that speakers of these languages will have difficulty learning articles when they learn English.

Sociolinguistics:

Sociolinguistics is the study of how language interacts with society on society or the relationship of language to society. It investigates how factors like region, class, gender, age, level of education, ethnicity, and context influence the way people speak and how language varies and changes over time. For example, in a formal job interview, a speaker might use standard grammar and vocabulary, but the same person might use slang and informal expressions with friends-showing style shifting based on social context.

Psycholinguistics:

It is the study of how the human mind processes and produces language. It combines the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. It is concerned with the psychological mechanisms underlying speech production and reception. It also studies how children acquire their first language, speech perception, and the loss of the ability to use and understand language.

Major areas of psycholinguistics: 

1. Language acquisition:

·       How children learn their first language

·       How adults learn a second language

2. Language comprehension

·       How we understand spoken and written language involves perception, memory and interpretation of words and sentences

3. language production:

·       how we think about what we want to say and turn it into speech

·       includes planning, word retrieval, and articulation

4. Language and the brain (Neurolinguistics

·       Studies how language is represented in the brain

·       Includes research on brain regions

 Historical or Diachronic linguistics:

It is the branch of linguistics that studies the development and evolution of languages over time. It focuses on how languages change in their phonetics, grammar, semantics, and vocabulary across different historical periods. It was developed in the 19^th century. During this time, linguists were concerned with the historical development of languages. The aim of such investigations was to arrive at general hypotheses about how languages change over time and is therefore also known as diachronic linguistics as opposed to synchronic linguistics, which is non-historical linguistics.  Historical linguistics did not originally develop as a branch of linguistic study as it is today. It began as the core of linguistic research with its investigation into the historical development of English from Anglo-Saxon, which is currently referred to as the Romance languages- French, Spanish, and Italian, which in turn originated from Latin. Historical linguistics classifies languages into families based on relationships with other languages.  

Structural or Synchronic Linguistics:

Structural or synchronic linguistics, opposed to historical or diachronic linguistics, covers the study of languages at a specific point in time- typically the present -without considering its historical development. A synchronic study of language is a comparison of languages or dialects- various spoken differences of the same language used within some defined special region and during the same period of time. For most of the twentieth century, synchronic linguistics was considered to be prior to diachronic linguistics.

Mathematical Linguistics:

Mathematics is now linked to linguistics and is the study of linguistics using mathematical methods of analysis. It covers broad areas of linguistics, probability theory, speech synthesis, speech recognition, and computational linguistics. It focuses on the statistical and mathematical representation of information in texts.  Statistical and algebraic linguistics constitute two different areas of mathematical linguistics.

Ethnolinguistics:

Ethnolinguistics is the field of linguistic anthropology that studies the language of a particular ethnic group. It is often associated with regions where ethnicity plays a major role in language description and status. Ethnologists study the way perception and conceptualization influence language and show how this is linked to different cultures and societies. As ethnolinguistics studies on the relationship between language and culture, it is useful for language preservation and revitalization, cultural anthropology and sociolinguistics, cross-cultural communication, and education.

Computational Linguistics:

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. It is not related to any particular field of linguistics. Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer scientists who specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Recent research has shown that human language is much more complex than previously thought; so computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists, language experts, and computer scientists. That is, computational linguistics draws upon the knowledge of linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists, mathematicians, and logicians, amongst others.

Clinical Linguistics:

Clinical linguistics is a branch of linguistics and involves the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology. The central focus of Clinical linguistics is the application of the theories, methods and findings  of linguistics  to the assessment , diagnosis, and treatment of language disorders in individuals.

Clinical linguistics is applicable for analyzing a child’s grammar errors to diagnose developmental delays, assessing a stroke patient’s ability to produce and comprehend language, and helping autistic individuals improve pragmatic language skills.

Corpus Linguistics:

Corpus linguistics is the study of language through the systematic analysis of large collection of real-life language data, known as corpora (singular: corpus). corpus linguistics is use to analyze and research a number of linguistic questions and offers a unique insight into the dynamic of language which has made it one of the most widely used linguistic methodologies. Since corpus linguistics involves the use of large corpora that consist of millions or sometimes even billion words, it i

 Forensic Linguistics:

Forensic linguistics, referred to as forensic stylistics, is a branch of linguistics that focuses on taking the analytical techniques of the field and applying them to legal and criminal issues as far-ranging as trial, investigation, rehabilitation, and punishment. As a discipline, forensic linguistics reviews spoken and written materials and, using the scientific techniques of linguistics, analyzes them. This branch of linguistics is concerned with such things as determining who authored a written document and identifying speakers of oral material, such as taped conversations. Forensic linguistics also measures as well as determines both the content and meaning of both spoken and written material.

Cognitive Linguistics:

Cognitive linguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies the relationship between language and the human mind in its cognitive function. The term cognitive here refers to the crucial role of intermediate informational structures in our encounters with the world. This branch of linguistics assumes that our interaction with the world is mediated through informational structures in the mind. It is more specific than cognitive psychology, however, by focusing on natural language as a means of organizing, processing, and conveying that information

Contact Linguistics

The term ‘contact linguistics’ was introduced in 1979 at the First World Congress on Language Contact and Conflict in Brussels. Whenever people speaking different languages come into contact, they naturally tend to seek ways of bypassing the communicative barriers facing them by compromising their forms of speech. Such contact can have a wide variety of linguistic outcomes: internal, that is, linguistic, and external, that is, social and psychological.

Folk Linguistics

Folk linguistics is the study of non-expert beliefs and opinions about language and its use. It explores how ordinary people perceive, describe, and evaluate language. Folk linguistics helps linguists understand public attitudes toward language. It is useful in education, sociolinguistics, and language policymaking.

Stylistics

Stylistics, a branch of linguistics, is traditionally known as the study of literary texts or discourse by employing formal linguistics tools. It can also investigate literary texts or discourse through sophisticated computer-based applications. Some stylisticians, experts in stylistics, quantitatively analyze large amounts of data and texts, not possible otherwise, and thus can provide answers to queries, such as what Robert Frostt’s writing style is inhn his poetry or how one can state, solely on the basis of textual evidence, that Milton or Shakespeare’s works are historically arranged. Literature is the object of study in Stylistics. The traditional connection between stylistics and literature brings with it two important caveats. The first is that creativity and innovation in language use should not be considered as the exclusive preserve of literary writing. The second caveat  is the techniques of stylistic analysis are as much about deriving insights about linguistic structure and function as they are about understanding literary texts. Thus, stylistic analysis attempts to provide a commentary which is objective and scientific, based on concrete quantifiable date and applied in a systematic way.