Quantitative Linguistics


Quantitative Linguistics is a sub-discipline of general linguistics and, more specifically, of mathematical linguistics. Quantitative Linguistics (QL) deals with language learning, language change, and application as well as structure of natural languages. QL investigates languages using statistical methods; its most demanding objective is the formulation of language laws and, ultimately, of a general theory of language in the sense of a set of interrelated languages laws[1] Synergetic linguistics was from its very beginning specifically designed for this purpose.[2] QL is empirically based on the results of language statistics, a field which can be interpreted as statistics of languages or as statistics of any linguistic object. This field is not necessarily connected to substantial theoretical ambitions. Corpus linguistics and computational linguistics are other fields which contribute important empirical evidence.
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.[1][2][3][4] Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields: the study of language form, of language meaning, and of language in context.
The first 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, 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).
Language 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 influence its study. 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 work from such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and acoustics.

Terminology for the discipline
Before the 20th century, the term "philology", first attested in 1716 was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus.Since Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted 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,where it was never as popular as it was elsewhere (in the sense of the "science of language").
Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641, the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847. 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.


Fundamental concerns and divisions
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.
Fundamental questions
All humans achieve competence in whatever language is used around them when growing up, with apparently little need for explicit conscious instruction (setting aside extremely pathological cases). Linguists assume 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 )

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.

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
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:
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.
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
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
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 towards 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 preferably large 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.

Applied linguistics
Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all language. Applied linguistics takes the result of those findings and "applies" them to other areas. The term "applied linguistics" is often used to refer to the use of linguistic research in language teaching only[citation needed], but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas as well, such as 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.





References
1.      ^ Fromkin, Victoria; Bruce Hayes; Susan Curtiss, Anna Szabolcsi, Tim Stowell, Donca Steriade (2000). Linguistics: An Introduction to Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 3. ISBN 0631197117. 
2.      ^ Martinet, André (1960). Elements of General Linguistics. Tr. Elisabeth Palmer (Studies in General Linguistics, vol. i.). London: Faber. p. 15. 
3.      ^ Halliday, Michael A. K.; Jonathan Webster (2006). On Language and Linguistics. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. vii. ISBN 0826488242. 
4.      ^ Greenberg, Joseph (1948). "Linguistics and ethnology". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 4: 140–47. 
5.      ^ a b Online Etymological Dictionary: philology
6.      ^ McMahon, A. M. S. (1994). Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University Press. p. 19. ISBN 0-521-44665-1 
7.      ^ McMahon, A. M. S. (1994). Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University Press. p. 9. ISBN 0-521-44665-1 
8.      ^ A. Morpurgo Davies Hist. Linguistics (1998) 4 I. 22.
9.      ^ a b Online Etymological Dictionary: linguist
10.  ^ "Linguist". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2000. ISBN 978-0395825174. 
11.  ^ "Animal Language Article"
12.  ^ (Dediu, D. & Ladd, D.R. (2007). Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin, PNAS 104:10944-10949; summary available here)
13.  ^ Much is from Middle English muchel, which is from Proto-Germanic *mekilaz[1], while mucho is from Latin multus[2].
14.  ^ Chomsky, Noam. 1957. "Syntactic Structures". Mouton, The Hague
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