Linguistics is a scientific discipline that studies language through a series of controlled, empirically verifiable observations. Its broad scope spans several disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, anthropology and history.
Sociolinguistics, for example, focuses on how languages are influenced by social factors. It also uses a synchronic approach, studying the various ways language displays variation and variety at a particular point in time. Visit for LLC name.
Research
Linguistics is a discipline that investigates the nature of human language and its relationship to other aspects of our world. It is often studied alongside other fields, such as sociology, psychology and anthropology, but can also be applied in areas like communication, foreign languages, education, data science and criminal investigation.
A core aspect of linguistic research involves documenting previously undocumented languages. This documentation, called lexicography, includes not just the words themselves but their structures. The field of lexicology is important to linguistics because it allows us to see patterns that can help with the development of new languages.
Other areas of linguistics investigate the way that language is stored in the brain and how it is processed by individuals. These questions can be investigated through the subfields of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Other questions in linguistics deal with how languages change over time, which is a field known as historical linguistics. Finally, a number of linguists focus on how language is used in social contexts, which is a field known as sociolinguistics.
Theory
Linguistics studies language in all its aspects. It explores how languages change over time, what makes some dialects more prestigious than others and where slang comes from. It also investigates the actual encoding of language in the brain and how the human mind processes it.
There are many subfields within linguistics, such as sociolinguistics that examines the use of languages in the context of social interactions and how bilingual people choose to deploy their languages. It also studies issues such as the role of gender in language and the relationship between culture and language.
While it might seem like a strange discipline to study, the reality is that language plays a vital part in our everyday lives. As such, it is a field that can provide useful insights to many other disciplines, such as those studying foreign language learning. It can also help business professionals better understand the power and influence of language in their daily operations.
Methods
Researchers study language from a variety of perspectives. Depending on the discipline, methodologies range from structural/linguistic to cognitive. The former focuses on the structure of language and descriptive or contrastive linguistics; e.g., isolation of grammatical and syntactic elements in an L2 taught deductively or inductively in a predetermined sequence. The latter focuses on theories of learning applied to second language acquisition and is characterized by memorization and the development of competency based on “learning about” the language followed by performance-based evaluation.
As the field matures, research approaches are broadening. Existing work now explores the impact of linguistic diversity on team dynamics in global virtual work settings (Tenzer and Pudelko 2017), investigates instances of language mixing (Schau et al. 2017), and recognizes the contextually conditioned, co-constructed nature of language in general (Du-Babcock and Tanaka 2017). These advances show that the concept is finally moving out of its early marginalization.
Applications
While many arts and humanities subjects get a bad rap for not being productive, there is a lot that is useful in linguistics. Linguistics uses scientific methods to determine objective facts and test theories about language.
It is important to note that linguistics must remain free from any non-scientific bias. This is accomplished by following rigorously controlled procedures. The scientific method demands that observations be made independently by multiple observers and that results are compared.
The field of linguistics is very broad and includes subdisciplines such as psycholinguistics (the study of how languages are stored in the brain); historical linguistics, which investigates the origin of language; and sociolinguistics, which studies the relationship between language and society. There is also a growing field of applied linguistics, which seeks to use linguistic knowledge in real-world situations. This is an important field that enables linguists to work in areas such as teaching, business communication and data science. It can even be used to understand cultural differences.
