Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. 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).
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, 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).
Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.
Ideologically identifying with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.
According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.
Fry and Laurie were a successful English comedy double act, mostly active in the 1980s and 1990s. The duo consisted of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, who met in 1980 through mutual friend Emma Thompson whilst all attended the University of Cambridge. Fry and Laurie have since collaborated on numerous projects together, including Jeeves and Wooster, in which Laurie portrayed Bertie Wooster and Fry portrayed Wooster's valet Jeeves. They also gained prominence through their own sketch show, A Bit of Fry & Laurie.
Since the conclusion of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, both have gone on to have successful solo careers in television, acting and writing, amongst other things though they still remain friends. More recently, Fry and Laurie have expressed interest in a continued partnership and reunited for a retrospective show in 2010 entitled Fry and Laurie Reunited.
On May 14, 2012, Stephen Fry announced on Twitter that he and Hugh Laurie are working on a new project together.
Fry and Laurie have also appeared together in various television advertisements, interviews, audio books and other projects.
Edward Vajda is a historical linguist at Western Washington University. He has become known for his work on the proposed Dené–Yeniseian language family, seeking to establish that the Ket language of Siberia has a common linguistic ancestor with the Na-Dené languages of North America. He began to study the Ket language in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union; he interviewed Ket speakers in Germany and later traveled to Tomsk in southwestern Siberia to perform fieldwork. In August 2008 he became the first North American to visit the Ket homeland in north-central Siberia's Turukhansky District, where he conducted intensive fieldwork with some of the remaining Ket speakers. Vajda's 67-page article "A Siberian link with Na-Dene languages" has been published in 2010 in the Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska.
PUBLICATIONS Monographs
Ket (Languages of the World/Materials Volume 204.) Munich: Lincom Europa, 2004.
Yeniseian Peoples and Languages: a history of their study with an annotated bibliography and a source guide. Surrey, England: Curzon Press, 2001. (389 pages)