What is linguistics, anyway?
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Its sub-fields include:
- phonetics: the study of speech sounds
- phonology: the study of how sounds are organized in natural languages.
- morphology: the study of word structure
- syntax: the study of how words are arranged into phrases and sentences
- semantics: the study of meaning
- pragmatics: the study of how language is used in social contexts.
Other sub-fields result from the intersection of linguistics with other fields:
- Historical linguistics is the study of how language changes over time.
- Sociolinguistics is the study of language in society.
- Psycholinguistics studies how language is processed in the mind.
- Neurolinguistics studies how the brain encodes language.
- Computational linguistics studies how computers and computational models can be used to model and process natural language.
