Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.^[1][2][3][4] Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest known descriptive linguistics activities are said to have been Panini's Ashtadhyayi around 500 BCE with the analysis of Sanskrit.

The first subfield of linguistics is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the system of rules followed by the speakers (or hearers) of a language. It encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound systems). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.

The study of language meaning is concerned with how languages employ logical structures and real-world references to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to manage and resolve ambiguity. This subfield encompasses semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).

Linguistics in its broader context includes evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language; historical linguistics, which explores language change; sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at language processing in the brain; language acquisition, how children or adults acquire language; and discourse analysis, which involves the structure of texts and conversations.

Although linguistics is the scientific study of language, a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to language and intersect with it. Semiotics, for example, is the general study of signs and symbols both within language and without. Literary theorists study the use of language in literature. Linguistics additionally draws on and informs work from such diverse fields as acoustics, anthropology, biology, computer science, human anatomy, informatics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and speech-language pathology.

Terminology for the discipline[link]

Before the 20th century, the term philology, first attested in 1716,^[5] was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus.^[6] Since Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted^[7] and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history, and literary tradition", especially in the United States,^[8] where it was never as popular as it was elsewhere (in the sense of the "science of language").^[5]

Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641,^[9] the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847.^[9] It is now the usual academic term in English for the scientific study of language.

The term linguist, used for one who studies language, applies within the field to someone who either studies linguistics or uses linguistic methodologies to study groups of languages or particular languages. Outside the field, this term is commonly used to refer to people who speak many languages fluently.^[10]

Fundamental questions[link]

Linguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of human language. Fundamental questions include what is universal to language, how language can vary, and how human beings come to know languages. Linguistic fields can then be broadly divided into those that distinguish themselves by a focus on linguistic structure and grammar, and those that distinguish themselves by the nonlinguistic factors they consider.

The language faculty[link]

All humans achieve competence in whatever language is used around them when growing up, with little apparent need for explicit conscious instruction (setting aside extremely pathological cases). Linguists think that the ability to acquire and use language is an innate, biologically based potential of modern human beings, similar to the ability to walk, because nonhumans do not acquire human language in this way (although many nonhuman animals can learn to respond to language, or can even be trained to use it to a degree).^[11]

There is no consensus, however, as to the extent of humans' innate potential for language, or the degree to which such innate abilities are specific to language. Some theorists claim that there is a very large set of highly abstract and specific binary settings coded into the human brain; the combinations of these settings would give rise to every language on the planet. Other linguists claim that the ability to learn language is a product of general human cognition. It is, however, generally agreed that there are no strong genetic differences underlying the differences between languages: An individual will acquire whatever language(s) he or she is exposed to as a child, regardless of parentage or ethnic origin. Nevertheless, recent research suggests that even weak genetic biases in speakers may, over a number of generations, influence the evolution of particular languages, leading to a nonrandom distribution of certain linguistic features across the world.^[12]

Variation and Universality[link]

Schools of study[link]

Early grammarians[link]

Ancient Tamil inscription at Thanjavur

The formal study of language began in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. Pāṇini’s systematic classification of the sounds of Sanskrit into consonants and vowels, and word classes, such as nouns and verbs, was the first known instance of its kind. In the Middle East Sibawayh (سیبویه) made a detailed description of Arabic in 760 AD in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), the first known author to distinguish between sounds and phonemes (sounds as units of a linguistic system).

Western interest in the study of languages began as early as in the East,^[13] but the grammarians of the classical languages did not use the same methods or reach the same conclusions as their contemporaries in the Indic world. Early interest in language in the West was a part of philosophy, not of grammatical description. The first insights into semantic theory were made by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue, where he argues that words denote concepts that are eternal and exist in the world of ideas. This work is the first to use the word etymology to describe the history of a word's meaning. Around 280 BC one of Alexander the Great’s successors founded a university (see Musaeum) in Alexandria, where a school of philologists studied the ancient texts in and taught Greek to speakers of other languages. This school was the first to use the word "grammar" in its modern sense, Plato had used the word in its original meaning as "téchnē grammatikḗ" (Τέχνη Γραμματική), the "art of writing," which is also the title of one of the most important works of the Alexandrine school by Dionysius Thrax.^[14] Throughout the Middle Ages the study of language was subsumed under the topic of philology, the study of ancient languages and texts, practiced by such educators as Roger Ascham, Wolfgang Ratke and John Amos Comenius.^[15]

Historicism[link]

In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics.^[16] Bloomfield attributes "the first great scientific linguistic work of the world" to Jacob Grimm, who wrote Deutsche Grammatik.^[17] It was soon followed by other authors writing similar comparative studies on other language groups of Europe. The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt, of whom Bloomfield asserts:^[17]

"This study received its foundation at the hands of the Prussian statesman and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767—1835), especially in the first volume of his work on Kavi, the literary language of Java, entitled Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts (‘On the Variety of the Structure of Human Language and its Influence upon the Mental Development of the Human Race’)."

Structuralism[link]

Early in the 20th century, de Saussure introduced the idea of language as a static system of interconnected units, defined through the oppositions between them. By introducing a distinction between diachronic to synchronic analyses of language, he laid the foundation of the modern discipline of linguistics. Saussure also introduced several basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that are still foundational in many contemporary linguistic theories , such as the distinctions between syntagm and paradigm, and the Langue- parole distinction, distinguishing language as an abstract system (language), from language as a concrete manifestation of this system (parole). ^[18] Substantial additional contributions following Saussure's definition of a structural approach to language came from The Prague school Leonard Bloomfield, Charles F. Hockett, Louis Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson.^[19]

Generativism[link]

During the last half of the 20th century, following the work of Noam Chomsky, linguistics was dominated by the generativist school. While formulated by Chomsky in part as a way to explain how human beings acquire language and the biological constraints on this acquisition, in practice it has largely been concerned with giving formal accounts of specific phenomena in natural languages. Generative theory is modularist and formalist in character. Chomsky built on earlier work of Zellig Harris to formulate the generative theory of language. According to this theory the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules universal for all humans and underlying the grammars of all human languages. This set of rules is called Universal Grammar, and for Chomsky describing it is the primary objective of the discipline of linguistics. For this reason the grammars of individual languages are of importance to linguistics only in so far as they allow us to discern the universal underlying rules from which the observable linguistic variability is generated.

In the classic formalization of generative grammars first proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s,^[20][21] a grammar G consists of the following components:

• A finite set N of nonterminal symbols, none of which appear in strings formed from G.
• A finite set Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Sigma

of terminal symbols that is disjoint from N.

• A finite set P of production rules, that map from one string of symbols to another.

A formal description of language attempts to replicate a speaker's knowledge of the rules of their language, and the aim is to produce a set of rules that is minimally sufficient to successfully model valid linguistic forms.

Functionalism[link]

Functional theories of language propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, it is reasonable to assume that its structures are best analyzed and understood with reference to the functions they carry out. Functional theories of grammar differs from formal theories of grammar, in that the latter seeks to define the different elements of language and describe the way they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations, whereas the former defines the functions performed by language and then relates these functions to the linguistic elements that carry them out. This means that functional theories of grammar tend to pay attention to the way language is actually used, and not just to the formal relations between linguistic elements.^[22]

Functional theories then describe language in term of functions existing on all levels of language.

• Phonological function: the function of the phoneme is to distinguish between different lexical material.
• Semantic function: (Agent, Patient, Recipient, etc.), describing the role of participants in states of affairs or actions expressed.
• Syntactic functions: (e.g. subject and Object), defining different perspectives in the presentation of a linguistic expression
• Pragmatic functions: (Theme and Rheme, Topic and Focus, Predicate) , defining the informational status of constituents, determined by the pragmatic context of the verbal interaction. Functional descriptions of grammar strive to explain how linguistic functions are performed in communication through the use of linguistic forms.

Cognitive linguistics[link]

In the 1970s and 1980s, a new school of thought known as cognitive linguistics emerged as a reaction to generativist theory. Led by theorists such as Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff, linguists working within the realm of cognitive linguistics propose that language is an emergent property of basic, general-purpose cognitive processes, though cognitive linguistics has also been the subject of much criticism.^[23] In contrast to the generativist school of linguistics, cognitive linguistics is non-modularist and functionalist in character. Important developments in cognitive linguistics include cognitive grammar, frame semantics, and conceptual metaphor, all of which are based on the idea that form-function correspondences based on representations derived from embodied experience constitute the basic units of language.

Cognitive linguistics interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms. It is thus closely associated with semantics but is distinct from psycholinguistics, which draws upon empirical findings from cognitive psychology in order to explain the mental processes that underlie the acquisition, storage, production and understanding of speech and writing. Cognitive linguistics denies that there is an autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind; it understands grammar in terms of conceptualization; and it claims that knowledge of language arises out of language use.^[24] Because of its conviction that knowledge of language is learned through use, cognitive linguistics is sometimes considered to be a functional approach, but it differs from other functional approaches in that it is primarily concerned with how the mind creates meaning through language, and not with the use of language as a tool of communication.

Subdisciplines[link]

Divisions based on linguistic structures studied[link]

Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form. Any particular pairing of meaning and form is a Saussurean sign. For instance, the meaning "cat" is represented worldwide with a wide variety of different sound patterns (in spoken languages), movements of the hands and face (in signed languages), and written symbols (in written languages).

Linguists focusing on structure attempt to understand the rules regarding language use that native speakers know (not always consciously). All linguistic structures can be broken down into component parts that are combined according to (sub)conscious rules, over multiple levels of analysis. For instance, consider the structure of the word "tenth" on two different levels of analysis. On the level of internal word structure (known as morphology), the word "tenth" is made up of one linguistic form indicating a number and another form indicating ordinality. The rule governing the combination of these forms ensures that the ordinality marker "th" follows the number "ten." On the level of sound structure (known as phonology), structural analysis shows that the "n" sound in "tenth" is made differently from the "n" sound in "ten" spoken alone. Although most speakers of English are consciously aware of the rules governing internal structure of the word pieces of "tenth", they are less often aware of the rule governing its sound structure. Linguists focused on structure find and analyze rules such as these, which govern how native speakers use language.

Linguistics has many sub-fields concerned with particular aspects of linguistic structure. These sub-fields range from those focused primarily on form to those focused primarily on meaning. They also run the gamut of level of analysis of language, from individual sounds, to words, to phrases, up to discourse.

Sub-fields of structure-focused linguistics include:

• Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech (or signed) production and perception
• Phonology, the study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning
• Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified
• Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
• Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
• Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used in communicative acts, and the role played by context and nonlinguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning
• Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)

Many linguists would agree that these divisions overlap considerably, and the independent significance of each of these areas is not universally acknowledged. Regardless of any particular linguist's position, each area has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and research.

Divisions based on nonlinguistic factors studied[link]

Alongside the structurally motivated domains of study are other fields of linguistics. These fields are distinguished by the kinds of nonlinguistic factors that they consider:

• Applied linguistics, the study of language-related issues applied in everyday life, notably language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.)
• Biolinguistics, the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals, compared to human language.
• Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology.
• Computational linguistics, the study of linguistic issues in a way that is 'computationaly responsible', i.e., taking careful note of computational consideration of algorithmic specification and computational complexity, so that the linguistic theories devised can be shown to exhibit certain desirable computational properties implementations.
• Developmental linguistics, the study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.
• Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the origin and subsequent development of language by the human species.
• Historical linguistics or diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time.
• Language geography, the study of the geographical distribution of languages and linguistic features.
• Linguistic typology, the study of the common properties of diverse unrelated languages, properties that may, given sufficient attestation, be assumed to be innate to human language capacity.
• Neurolinguistics, the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and communication.
• Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.
• Sociolinguistics, the study of variation in language and its relationship with social factors.
• Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.

Semiotics is not a discipline within linguistics; rather, it investigates the relationship between signs and what they signify more broadly. From the perspective of semiotics, language can be seen as a sign or symbol, with the world as its representation.^{[citation needed]}

Selected sub-fields[link]

Historical linguistics[link]

Historical linguistics studies the history and evolution of languages through the comparative method. Often, the aim of historical linguistics is to classify languages in language families descending from a common ancestor. This involves comparison of elements in different languages to detect possible cognates in order to be able to reconstruct how different languages have changed over time. This also involves the study of etymology, the study of the history of single words. Historical linguistics is also called "diachronic linguistics" and is opposed to "synchronic linguistics" that study languages in a given moment in time without regarding its previous stages. In universities in the United States, the historic perspective is often out of fashion. Historical linguistics was among the first linguistic disciplines to emerge and was the most widely practiced form of linguistics in the late 19th century. The shift in focus to a synchronic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant in western linguistics with Noam Chomsky's emphasis on the study of the synchronic and universal aspects of language.

Semiotics[link]

Semiotics is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs, and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems, including the study of how meaning is constructed and understood. Semioticians often do not restrict themselves to linguistic communication when studying the use of signs but extend the meaning of "sign" to cover all kinds of cultural symbols. Nonetheless, semiotic disciplines closely related to linguistics are literary studies, discourse analysis, text linguistics, and philosophy of language.

Descriptive linguistics and language documentation[link]

Since the inception of the discipline of linguistics, linguists have been concerned with describing and documenting languages previously unknown to science. Starting with Franz Boas in the early 1900s, descriptive linguistics became the main strand within American linguistics until the rise of formal structural linguistics in the mid-20th century. The rise of American descriptive linguistics was caused by the concern with describing the languages of indigenous peoples that were (and are) rapidly moving toward extinction. The ethnographic focus of the original Boasian type of descriptive linguistics occasioned the development of disciplines such as Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, disciplines that investigate the relations between language, culture, and society.

The emphasis on linguistic description and documentation has since become more important outside of North America as well, as the documentation of rapidly dying indigenous languages has become a primary focus in many of the worlds' linguistics programs. Language description is a work intensive endeavour usually requiring years of field work for the linguist to learn a language sufficiently well to write a reference grammar of it. The further task of language documentation requires the linguist to collect a substantial corpus of texts and recordings of sound and video in the language, and to arrange for its storage in accessible formats in open repositories where it may be of the best use for further research by other researchers.^[25]

Applied linguistics[link]

Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all languages. Applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and "applies" them to other areas. Linguistic research is commonly applied to areas such as language education, lexicography, and translation. "Applied linguistics" has been argued to be something of a misnomer^[who?], since applied linguists focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply "applying" existing technical knowledge from linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g., conversation analysis) and anthropology.

Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics that have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints.

Linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim.^[26] This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted either in the asylum seeker's native language through an interpreter or in an international lingua franca like English.^[26] Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved.^[26] Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis, which can be done either by private contractors or within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.^[26]

Description and prescription[link]

Linguistics is descriptive; linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature is "right" or "wrong". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: A zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular animal is better or worse than another.

Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favouring a particular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aim of establishing a linguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures that they consider to be destructive to society.

Speech and writing[link]

Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken (or signed) language is more fundamental than written language. This is because:

• Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and hearing it, while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication
• Speech evolved before human beings invented writing
• People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than writing.

Nonetheless, linguists agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. In addition, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.

The study of writing systems themselves is, in any case, considered a branch of linguistics.

History[link]

The earliest known linguistic activities date to Iron Age India (around the 8th century BC) with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school.^{[citation needed]} Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Pāṇini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who looked back on what are presumably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to.^{[citation needed]}Pāṇini formulates close to 4,000 rules that together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure.

Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries^{[citation needed]}; Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Pāṇini. In the later centuries BC, Pāṇini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartṛhari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation), third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, and fourth, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.^{[citation needed]}

Dante Alighieri, detail from Luca Signorelli's fresco

In the West, linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as Plato's Cratylus. The first important milestone in Western linguistics was the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks, who modified the alphabet by adding vowels, giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology and criticism. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument, and his works on rhetoric and poetics developed the understating of tragedy, poetry, and public discussions as text genres.

One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.^[27] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.^[28] In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.^{[citation needed]}

In China, linguistics starts with the development of Xiaoxue (小學 "elementary studies"), which began as an aid to understanding classics in the Han dynasty (c. 3d c. BCE).^[29] Early Chinese philologists included Yang Xiong, who studied the linguistic geography of China, Xu Shen, a lexicographer, and the phonologist Chen Di, who pioneered the study of Old Chinese.^[29] Xiaoxue came to be divided into three branches: Xungu (訓詁 "exegesis"), Wenzi (文字 "script [analysis]") and Yinyun (音韻 "[study of] sounds")^[30] and reached its golden age in the 17th. c. AD (Qing Dynasty). The advent of character glossaries and vocabularies during the Han Dynasty, including Sima Xiangru's The General Primer, Shi You's The Instant Primer, and Li Chang's The Yuanshang Primer, greatly contributed to the development of Chinese philology.^[31] The Chinese study of phonology appeared later, and was heavily influenced by Indian philology.

In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book, he distinguished phonetics from phonology.^{[citation needed]}

Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with classical Latin and Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprang from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches.

In 19th-century Europe, the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who formulated Verner's Law; August Schleicher, who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" ("family tree"); and Johannes Schmidt, who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872.

Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e., nonhistorical) explanations for language form.

In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the Bible) and anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field of anthropology in the United States,^[32][33] linguistics is now considered a separate scientific discipline in the US, Australia, and much of Europe.

Edward Sapir, a writer in American structural linguistics, was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His methodology had some influence on all his successors. Noam Chomsky's formal model of language, transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly influenced by Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant model since the 1960s.

The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative grammar in the 1950s and 1960s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal and language specific rules. Noam Chomsky remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such frameworks as Transformational grammar, Generative Semantics, Relational Grammar, Generalized phrase structure grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Other linguists working in Optimality Theory state generalizations in terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon the traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in generativist linguistics.

Functionalist linguists working in functional grammar and Cognitive Linguistics tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus differing significantly from the formal approaches.

See also[link]

• Cognitive science
• Speech-Language Pathology
• History of linguistics
• International Linguistics Olympiad
• Linguistics Departments at Universities
• Summer schools for linguistics
• List of linguists

Branches and fields[link]

Anthropological linguistics, Articulatory phonology, Asemic writing, Biolinguistics, Biosemiotics, Articulatory synthesis, Cognitive linguistics, Cognitive science, Comparative linguistics, Computational linguistics, Concept Mining, Corpus linguistics, Critical discourse analysis, Cryptanalysis, Decipherment, Descriptive linguistics, Developmental linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Discourse, Ecolinguistics, Embodied cognition, Endangered languages, Evolutionary linguistics, Forensic linguistics, Global language system, Glottometrics, Grammar Writing, Historical linguistics, History of linguistics, Integrational linguistics, Intercultural competence, International Linguistic Olympiad, Language acquisition, Language attrition, Language engineering, Language geography, Lexicography/Lexicology, Linguistic typology, Machine translation, Metacommunicative competence, Microlinguistics, Natural language processing, Neurolinguistics, Orthography, Philology, Post-structuralism, Reading, Second language acquisition, Semiotics, Sociocultural linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Speaker recognition (authentication), Speech processing, Speech recognition, Speech synthesis, Stratificational linguistics, Structuralism, Text linguistics, Varieties, Writing systems.

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Akmajian, Adrian; Demers, Richard; Farmer, Ann; Harnish, Robert (2010). Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-51370-6. 

External links[link]

Find more about Linguistics on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
	Images and media from Commons
	Learning resources from Wikiversity
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	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
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• The Linguist List, a global online linguistics community with news and information updated daily
• Glossary of linguistic terms
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• Linguistic sub-fields – according to the Linguistic Society of America
• Linguistics and language-related wiki articles on Scholarpedia and Citizendium
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Steven Arthur Pinker
Steven Pinker in 2011
Born	(1954-09-18) September 18, 1954 (age 57) Montréal, Québec, Canada
Residence	United States of America
Citizenship	Canadian
Fields	Evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, visual cognition
Alma mater	Dawson College, McGill University, Harvard University
Known for	How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate
Influences	Noam Chomsky, Thomas Sowell, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Schelling[1]
Notable awards	Troland Award (2003, National Academy of Sciences), Henry Dale Prize (2004, Royal Institution), Walter P. Kistler Book Award (2005), Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the AHA), George Miller Prize (2010, Cognitive Neuroscience Society)
Website
http://www.stevenpinker.com/

Steven Pinker in Göttingen in 2010

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954, Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University,^[2] and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).

Biography[link]

Career[link]

Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family. He graduated from Dawson College in 1971. He received a BA degree in psychology at McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his PhD degree in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995-96. As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.^[3] In June 2011 it was announced he would give lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.^[4]

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world in 2004^[5] and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005^[6] and 2008;^[7] in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.^[8][9] His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003.

In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about a gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. Pinker noted that Summers's remarks, properly understood, could form the basis of a testable hypothesis. The remarks, Pinker said, claimed not that men are consistently smarter, but that there are "more idiots, [and] more geniuses" of the male gender.^[10]

On May 13, 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.^[11]

In 2009, Pinker wrote a highly critical review of Malcolm Gladwell's analytic methods in the New York Times.^[12] Gladwell published a rebuttal in the Times regarding Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Pinker then responded to Gladwell's rebuttal.^[13] The exchange prompted Advanced NFL Stats to step in and address the issue statistically, siding with Pinker in that draft order is indeed correlated with quarterback performance.^[14]

Pinker also serves on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to Executive Director Sean Faircloth and the entire coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life. ^[15]

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry lists Pinker as one of their fellows. ^[16]

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.^[17] Pinker appeared on the Colbert Report on 10/18/11.

Personal[link]

His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.^[18][19] Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced.^[20] His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.^[21] He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew."^[22] As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969.^[23] He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as "neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian".^[24] Pinker confesses to having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East.^[25]

Theories of language and mind[link]

Pinker is known within psychology for his theory of language acquisition, his research on the syntax, morphology, and meaning of verbs, and his criticism of connectionist (neural network) models of language. In The Language Instinct (1994) he popularized Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication, although both ideas remain controversial (see below). He also defends the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models.

Written work[link]

Pinker's books, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. The Language Instinct has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, The 'Language Instinct' Debate.^[26] The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling), which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker has criticized.

Bibliography[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker in 2005

Books[link]

• Language Learnability and Language Development (1984) ISBN 978-0-674-51055-5
• Visual Cognition (1985) ISBN 978-0-262-66178-2
• Connections and Symbols (1988) ISBN 978-0-262-66064-8
• Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989) ISBN 978-0-262-66073-0
• Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992) ISBN 978-1-55786-354-6
• The Language Instinct (1994) ISBN 978-0-06-097651-4
• How the Mind Works (1997) ISBN 978-0-393-31848-7
• Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999) ISBN 978-0-465-07269-9
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) ISBN 978-0-670-03151-1
• The Best American Science and Nature Writing (editor and introduction author, 2004) ISBN 978-0-618-24698-4
• Hotheads (an extract from How the Mind Works, 2005) ISBN 978-0-14-102238-3
• The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007) ISBN 978-0-670-06327-7
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) ISBN 978-0-670-02295-3

Articles and essays[link]

• Pinker, S. (1991). "Rules of Language". Science 253 (5019): 530–535. DOI:10.1126/science.1857983. 
• Ullman, M.; Corkin, S.; Coppola, M.; Hickok, G.; Growdon, J. H.; Koroshetz, W. J.; Pinker, S. (1997). "A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9: 289–299. 
• Pinker, S. (2003) "Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche" In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), Language evolution: States of the Art New York: Oxford University Press.
• Pinker, S. (2005). "So How Does the Mind Work?". Mind and Language 20 (1): 1–24. DOI:10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00274.x. 
• Jackendoff, R.; Pinker, S. (2005). "The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language" (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky)". Cognition 97 (2): 211–225. DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.04.006. 
• S. Pinker (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" Chicago Sun-Times, July 15, 2007
• A number of Pinker's articles at Harvard

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Steven Pinker

• Official website

Interviews

• In Depth interview with Pinker, November 2, 2008
• Steven Pinker discusses the "Games People Play: Indirect Speech as a Window into Social Relationships"
• Steven Pinker on The Hour
• Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files
• Biology vs. the Blank Slate Reason magazine interview with Pinker
• Live interview with Steven Pinker on The Blank Slate
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• Online video interview with Pinker

TED talks

• Chalking it up to the blank slate, 2003
• The stuff of thought, 2005
• A brief history of violence, 2007

Debates

• The Two Steves Debate with Steven Rose
• The Science of Gender and Science Debate with Elizabeth Spelke