Lecture 1 Language and linguistics Keywords

LECTURE 2
Branches of Linguistics
Keywords: analyze, interpreter, linguist, linguistic, meta-language, bilingual, communication, define, transcribe, contrast, pronounce, predict, classify, stress, multilingual.
I would like to speak about the different branches of linguistics. These range from morphology and syntax to the study of areas such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. These areas may seem unfamiliar to you now, but if you use your knowledge of affixes, and combining forms, then you can work out the meanings of some of these branches. For example, psycholinguistics is concerned with psychology and how language affects learning. Sociolinguistics involves society and people's attitudes to standard and non-standard forms of language. The —“ology” in morphology brings us back to the concept of linguistics as a scientific study. In this case, morphology refers to the study of word structure, in other words how different elements, or morphemes, combine to form what we call words.
The “syn” in syntax means together. So, syntax means the way words are combined or arranged in sentences.
There are seven main branches: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. I will focus on three of these branches, which will be covered this term. Firstly, there is phonology, the study of sounds in speech and how they are used. Secondly, there is morphology, the branch which studies the structure or forms of words. Thirdly, there is syntax, which investigates the ordering of words. Collectively these three branches are often called micro linguistics.
Phonology studies how sounds are organized and used in language. The phoneme plays a key role here. The word phoneme was created in 1876 by the Polish academic Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, whose work is considered to be the foundation of what we now know as phonology. Phonemes are meaningless sound units which language users put together to form meanings. Listen to speakers of different languages and you will note quite quickly that different tongues use different ranges of sounds. The main aim of phonology is to understand the rules of how these meaningless phonemes are combined in order to represent meaning in a particular language. In practice, a phonologist examines the sound patterns of a particular language by identifying the phonetic sounds and trying to clarify the way in which speakers interpret these sounds.
Morphology studies the structure of words. In fact, the term was first used by the great German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe, to describe the study of the structure of animals and plants. In years to come, it was used to describe the area of grammar that investigates the structure of words. The German August Schleicher was the first linguist to describe languages in terms from biology. In living organisms, separate cells form tissues which form organs, which in turn form systems. In language, phonemes combine to form meaningful sounds; morphemes or bits of words combine to form whole meaningful words; syntactic units like nouns and verbs and adjectives combine in rule-governed ways to form sentences. It's easy to see why Schleicher started to see the similarity between languages and living organisms. I've just mentioned syntactic units.
The third branch of linguistics is syntax. This looks at the way words come together. It focuses on how different words are ordered into clauses, and how clauses join to make sentences. Syntax can have an important impact on communication. For example, the position of a verb in a sentence can mean the difference between a statement and a question. If you get that wrong, it could cause a lot of trouble and misunderstanding in some situations. Different languages have very different rules of syntax.