Types of Linguistics

Linguistics is a broad field of disciplines with ever-expanding branches. The job of a linguist can vary greatly from scientist to anthropologist to lawyer.

1.     Theoretical Linguistics

o    Theoretical linguistics deals with the scientific structure of language, including grammar, syntax, morphology and semantics. It attempts to explain language according to a set of rules or theories.

Descriptive Linguistics

o    Descriptive linguistics analyzes the use of language within society, tracking language changes over time and the use of languages around the world. For example, a descriptive linguist might pose the question "How has the English language evolved since the time of Shakespeare?"

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Applied Linguistics

o    Applied linguistics is the largest field of linguistics today, encompassing psychological, social and anthropological linguistics. Applied linguistics tends to be more science-based and generally practical, involving areas such as studying child development, drafting copyright laws or conducting an interrogation.

Computational Linguistics

o    Computational linguistics represents the convergence of technology and natural language. A computational linguist may develop online or digital translators and speech recognition devices.

Comparative Linguistics

o    Comparative linguistics is the study of the relationships between two or more languages and the investigation of whether the languages have a common ancestor.

Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language.

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Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned.

Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes language.

There are a number of subdisciplines; for example, as non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain become more and more widespread, neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right. Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc.

Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such as those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the development of children). Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics.

There are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on the components that make up human language.

For more information about the topic Psycholinguistics, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

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