What Is Definition of Linguistics

Linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of asylum seekers who do not have the necessary documents to prove their claim. [82] This often takes the form of interviews by immigration officers. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted either in the asylum seeker`s mother tongue by an interpreter or in an international lingua franca such as English. [82] Australia uses the first method, while Germany uses the second; The Netherlands uses both methods, depending on the language. [82] The interview recordings are then subjected to speech analysis, which may be conducted either by private contractors or within a department. In this analysis, the language characteristics of the claimant are used by analysts to determine the nationality of the speaker. The reported results of linguistic analysis can play a crucial role in the government`s decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker. [82] As popularly constructed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, relativists believe that the structure of a particular language is capable of influencing the cognitive models by which a person shapes his or her worldview. Universalists believe that there are similarities between human perception and human ability to speak, while relativists believe that it varies from language to language and from person to person. While the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is an elaboration of this idea, expressed through the writings of American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, it was Sapir`s student, Harry Hoijer, who called it so. The 20th century German linguist Leo Weisgerber also wrote extensively on the theory of relativity. Relativists argue for the case of differentiation at the level of cognition and in semantic domains.

The advent of cognitive linguistics in the 1980s also revived interest in linguistic relativity. Thinkers such as George Lakoff argued that language reflects different cultural metaphors, while the writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, particularly on deconstruction,[20] were considered closely related to the relativist movement in linguistics, for which he was heavily criticized in the media at the time of his death. [21] Nevertheless, linguists agree that the study of written language can be useful and valuable. For research based on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large spoken language corpora are difficult to create and difficult to find, and are usually transcribed and written. In addition, linguists have turned to textual discourse, which occurs in various computer-assisted communication formats, as a viable venue for linguistic inquiry. Historical linguistics is the study of language change over time, especially in relation to a particular language or group of languages. Historical linguistics was among the first sub-disciplines to appear in linguistics and was the most widely used form of linguistics in the late 19th century. [ref. needed] In the early twentieth century, the emphasis was on the synchronic approach (the systemic study of the current stage of language), but historical research remained a field of linguistic investigation. The subfields are language change and grammaticalization studies.

Initially, historical linguistics served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics, primarily as a tool for linguistic reconstruction. [9] Researchers have mainly been interested in the establishment of language families and the reconstruction of prehistoric protolanguages using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. [9] The focus was initially on the well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had long histories; The researchers also studied the Uralic languages, another European language family for which there are less ancient written documents. Since then, there has been important comparative linguistic work that has also spread outside European languages, such as on Austronesian languages and various Native American language families, among others. Today, however, comparative linguistics is only one part of a broader discipline of historical linguistics. For Indo-European languages, comparative study is now a highly specialized field. Most research is done on the further development of these languages, especially on the development of modern standard varieties. Linguists are not just polyglots, grammarians and word lovers. They are researchers who are dedicated to the systematic study of language and apply the scientific method by making observations, testing hypotheses and developing theories. Language science encompasses more than sounds, grammar, and meaning. When you study linguistics, you are at the crossroads of all disciplines.

In the 18th century, the first application of the comparative method by William Jones triggered the rise of comparative linguistics. [77] Bloomfield attributes «the world`s first great scientific linguistic work» to Jacob Grimm, who wrote German grammar. [78] Other authors soon followed, writing similar comparative studies on other language groups in Europe. The study of language was extended from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt, of whom Bloomfield states:[78] Syntax and morphology are branches of linguistics concerned with the order and structure of significant linguistic units such as words and morphemes.