What is Linguistics?

What is Linguistics?

LINGUISTICS is the scientific study of human language. There are many approaches to the study of language, emphasizing different scientific traditions and aspects of the subject. Two broad divisions are the following:

1.    Theoretical Linguistics: the study of the structural properties of language, e.g., the rules or constraints that govern the formation and interpretation of words and sentences in the world's languages.

2.    Experimental and Applied Linguistics: the study of language in relation to a wide range of other fields of inquiry, from neuroscience and psychology, to language learning and teaching, to anthropology, geography and sociology.

The Department of Linguistics at McGill offers a wide range of courses in both of these areas, with an emphasis on the "core" areas of theoretical linguistics. The main subjects in theoretical linguistics are:

1.    Phonetics: the study of speech sounds.

2.    Phonology: the study of how speech sounds are organized in

3.    the sound systems of languages.

4.    Morphology: the study of word structure.

5.    Syntax: the study of sentence structure.

6.    Semantics: the study of the meaning of words and sentences.

7.    You can get an introduction to all of these areas by taking LING 201. This is the best course to start with, since it's a pre-requisite for most other courses in Linguistics and is required for all Linguistics programs.

In addition to the "theory" courses listed above, students can take courses in the following experimental and applied areas:

1.    Bilingualism: how people develop and use two grammars at once.

2.    Dialectology: regional differences in language.

3.    Field Methods: how to elicit linguistic data from a native speaker of a language you don't speak.

4.    Historical Linguistics: how languages change over time.

5.    Language Acquisition: how people learn first and second languages.

6.    Neurolinguistics: how language is represented and processed in the brain.

7.    Sociolinguistics: how language is affected by social factors like age,

8.    sex, and social class.

9.    Structure of a specific language: a detailed analysis of the grammar of one language.