What is linguistics

Assalamualaikum wr.wb 

LET ME INTRODUCE MY SELF 

      My name is Kamelia, you can call me Amel or Lia. I was born on April 09, 1989. I am studying in Lancang Kuning University on English Department.  I live at Tirtonadi street, Rumbai.

     My hobbies are cooking, Drawing and  make some hand craft  from flannel like flower  and ect.

     My ideal is English teacher.
Okey my friends, i think that's all about my self. If you have questions about my self, you can comment and ask me.

      

    Hai teman-teman, saya ingin share sedikit tentang linguistics..saya juga belum terlalu paham dengan smua materi yang ada di pelajaran linguistics tapi mari kita sama2 mempelajarinya ya teman2..😊

                                                           What is linguistics?

        Linguistics is the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics. Specific branches of linguistics include sociolinguistics, dialectology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, historical-comparative linguistics, and applied linguistics.

What will I study as a linguistics major?

         Linguistics is a major that gives you insight into one of the most intriguing aspects of human knowledge and behavior. Majoring in linguistics means that you will learn about many aspects of human language, including sounds (phonetics, phonology), words (morphology), sentences (syntax), and meaning (semantics). It can involve looking at how languages change over time (historical linguistics); how language varies from situation to situation, group to group, and place to place (sociolinguistics, dialectology); how people use language in context (pragmatics, discourse analysis); how to model aspects of language (computational linguistics); how people acquire or learn language (language acquisition); and how people process language (psycholinguistics, experimental linguistics).

        Linguistics programs may be organized around different aspects of the field. For example, in addition to or instead of the above areas, a program might choose to focus on a particular language or group of languages; how language relates to historical, social, and cultural issues (anthropological linguistics); how language is taught in a classroom setting, or how students learn language (applied linguistics); or how linguistics is situated in the cognitive sciences.

Each human language is a complex of knowledge and abilities enabling speakers of the language to communicate with each other, to express ideas, hypotheses, emotions, desires, and all the other things that need expressing. Linguistics is the study of these knowledge systems in all their aspects: how is such a knowledge system structured, how is it acquired, how is it used in the production and comprehension of messages, how does it change over time? Linguists consequently are concerned with a number of particular questions about the nature of language. What properties do all human languages have in common? How do languages differ, and to what extent are the differences systematic, i.e. can we find patterns in the differences? How do children acquire such complete knowledge of a language in such a short time? What are the ways in which languages can change over time, and are there limitations to how languages change? What is the nature of the cognitive processes that come into play when we produce and understand language?

The part of linguistics that is concerned with the structure of language is divided into a number of subfields:

• Phonetics - the study of speech sounds in their physical aspects
• Phonology - the study of speech sounds in their cognitive aspects
• Morphology - the study of the formation of words
• Syntax - the study of the formation of sentences
• Semantics - the study of meaning
• Pragmatics - the study of language use

Aside from language structure, other perspectives on language are represented in specialized or interdisciplinary branches:

• Historical Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Ethnolinguistics (or Anthropological Linguistics)
• Dialectology
• Computational Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

 Because language is such a central feature of being a human, Linguistics has intellectual connections and overlaps with many other disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Some of the closest connections are with Philosophy, Literature, Language Pedagogy, Psychology, Sociology, Physics (acoustics), Biology (anatomy, neuroscience), Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Health Sciences (Aphasia, Speech Therapy).

 But now I will to explaint about one of  the part of linguistics it is Morphology

                                                         Morphology

        Morphology, in linguistics, study of the internal construction of words. Languages vary widely in the degree to which words can be analyzed into word elements, or morphemes. In English there are numerous examples, such as “replacement,” which is composed of re-, “place,” and -ment, and “walked,” from the elements “walk” and -ed. Many American Indian languages have a highly complex morphology; other languages, such as Vietnamese or Chinese, have very little or none. Morphology includes the grammatical processes of inflection and derivation. Inflection marks categories such as person, tense, and case; e.g., “sings” contains a final -s, marker of the 3rd person singular, and the German Mannes consists of the stem Mann and the genitive singular inflection -es. Derivation is the formation of new words from existing words; e.g., “singer” from “sing” and “acceptable” from “accept.” Derived words can also be inflected: “singers” from “singer.”

       Morpheme, in linguistics, the smallest grammatical unit of speech; it may be a word, like “place” or “an,” or an element of a word, like re- and -ed in “reappeared.” So-called isolating languages, such as Vietnamese, have a one-to-one correspondence of morphemes to words; i.e., no words contain more than one morpheme. Variants of a morpheme are called allomorphs; the ending -s, indicating plural in “cats,” “dogs,” the -es in “dishes,” and the -en of “oxen” are all allomorphs of the plural morpheme. The word “talked” is represented by two morphemes, “talk” and the past-tense morpheme, here indicated by -ed. The study of words and morphemes is included in morphology.

         Inflection, formerly flection or accidence, in linguistics, the change in the form of a word (in English, usually the addition of endings) to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case. English inflection indicates noun plural (cat, cats), noun case (girl, girl’s, girls’), third person singular present tense (I, you, we, they buy; he buys), past tense (we walk, we walked), aspect (I have called, I am calling), and comparatives (big, bigger, biggest). Remnants of the earlier inflectional system of Old English may also be found (e.g., he, him, his). Changes within the stem, or main word part, are another type of inflection, as in sing, sang, sung and goose, geese. The paradigm of the Old Icelandic u-stem noun skjǫldr (“shield”), for example, includes forms with both internal change and suffixation; the nominative singular form is skjǫldr, the genitive singular is skjaldar, and the nominative plural is skildir. Many languages, such as Latin, Spanish, French, and German, have a much more extensive system of inflection. For example, Spanish shows verb distinction for person and number, “I, you, he, they live,” vivo, vives, vive, viven (“I live,” “you live,” “he lives,” “they live”). A number of languages, especially non-Indo-European ones, inflect with prefixes and infixes, word parts added before a main part or within the main part. Inflection differs from derivation in that it does not change the part of speech. Derivation uses prefixes and suffixes (e.g., in-, -tion) to form new words (e.g., inform, deletion), which can then take inflections.

The terms inflecting and inflectional are sometimes used more narrowly in the typological classification of languages to refer to a subtype of synthetic language, such as Latin. All synthetic languages have inflection in the broader and more widespread sense of the term.

         Given the basic design of human spoken language, the levels of phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics are arguably unavoidable. They needn't look exactly the way that they do, perhaps, but there has to be something to do the work of each of these levels.

         But morphology is basically gratuitous, as well as complex and irregular: anything that a language does with morphology, it usually can also do more straightforwardly with syntax; and there is always some other language that does the same thing with syntax.

         For instance, English morphology inflects nouns to specify plurality: thus dogs means "more than one dog". This inflection lets us be specific, in a compact way, about the distinction between one and more-than-one. Of course, we could always say the same thing in a more elaborated way, using the resources of syntax rather than morphology: more than one dog. If we want to be vague, we have to be long winded: one or more dogs.

Types of morphemes:

Bound Morphemes: cannot occur on their own, e.g. de- in detoxify, -tion in creation, -s in dogs, cran- in cranberry.

Free Morphemes: can occur as separate words, e.g. car, yes.

In a morphologically complex word -- a word composed of more than one morpheme -- one constituent may be considered as the basic one, the core of the form, with the others treated as being added on. The basic or core morpheme in such cases is referred to as the stem, root, or base, while the add-ons are affixes. Affixes that precede the stem are of course prefixes, while those that follow the stem are suffixes. Thus in rearranged, re- is a prefix, arrange is a stem, and -d is a suffix. Morphemes can also be infixes, which are inserted within another form. English doesn't really have any infixes, except perhaps for certain expletives in expressions like un-effing-believable or Kalama-effing-zoo.

Prefixes and suffixes are almost always bound, but what about the stems? Are they always free? In English, some stems that occur with negative prefixes are not free, such as -kempt and -sheveled. Bad jokes about some of these missing bound morphemes have become so frequent that they may re-enter common usage.

Morphemes can also be divided into the two categories of content and function morphemes, a distinction that is conceptually distinct from the free-bound distinction but that partially overlaps with it in practice.

The idea behind this distinction is that some morphemes express some general sort of referential or informational content, in a way that is as independent as possible of the grammatical system of a particular language -- while other morphemes are heavily tied to a grammatical function, expressing syntactic relationships between units in a sentence, or obligatorily-marked categories such as number or tense.

Thus (the stems of) nouns, verbs, adjectives are typically content morphemes: "throw," "green," "Kim," and "sand" are all English content morphemes. Content morphemes are also often called open-class morphemes, because they belong to categories that are open to the invention of arbitrary new items. People are always making up or borrowing new morphemes in these categories.: "smurf," "nuke," "byte," "grok."

By contrast, prepositions ("to", "by"), articles ("the", "a"), pronouns ("she", "his"), and conjunctions are typically function morphemes, since they either serve to tie elements together grammatically ("hit by a truck," "Kim and Leslie," "Lee saw his dog"), or express obligatory (in a given language!) morphological features like definiteness ("she found a table" or "she found the table" but not "*she found table"). Function morphemes are also called "closed-class" morphemes, because they belong to categories that are essentially closed to invention or borrowing -- it is very difficult to add a new preposition, article or pronoun.

For years, some people have tried to introduce non-gendered pronouns into English, for instance "sie" (meaning either "he" or "she", but not "it"). This is much harder to do than to get people to adopt a new noun or verb.

Try making up a new article. For instance, we could try to borrow from the Manding languages an article (written "le") that means something like "I'm focusing on this phrase as opposed to anything else I could have mentioned." We'll just slip in this new article after the definite or indefinite "the" or "a" -- that's where it goes in Manding, though the rest of the order is completely different. Thus we would say "Kim bought an apple at the-le fruit stand," meaning "it's the fruit stand (as opposed to anyplace else) where Kim bought an apple;" or "Kim bought an-le apple at the fruit stand," meaning "it's an apple (as opposed to any other kind of fruit) that Kim bought at the fruit stand."

This is a perfectly sensible kind of morpheme to have. Millions of West Africans use it every day. However, the chances of persuading the rest of the English-speaking community to adopt it are negligible.

In some ways the open/closed terminology is clearer than content/function, since obviously function morphemes also always have some content!

The concept of the morpheme does not directly map onto the units of sound that represent morphemes in speech. To do this, linguists developed the concept of the allomorph. Here is the definition given in a well-known linguistic workbook:

Allomorphs: Nondistinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are phonetically similar. For example, the English plural morpheme can appear as [s] as in cats, [z] as in dogs, or ['z] as in churches. Each of these three pronunciations is said to be an allomorph of the same morpheme.

Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphology

Another common distinction is the one between derivational and inflectional affixes.

Derivational morphemes makes new words from old ones. Thus creation is formed from create by adding a morpheme that makes nouns out of (some) verbs.

Derivational morphemes generally

1.     change the part of speech or the basic meaning of a word. Thus -ment added to a verb forms a noun (judg-ment). re-activate means "activate again."

2.     are not required by syntactic relations outside the word. Thus un-kind combines un- and kind into a single new word, but has no particular syntactic connections outside the word -- we can say he is unkind or he is kind or they are unkind or they are kind, depending on what we mean.

3.     are often not productive or regular in form or meaning -- derivational morphemes can be selective about what they'll combine with, and may also have erratic effects on meaning. Thus the suffix -hood occurs with just a few nouns such as brother, neighbor, and knight, but not with most others. e.g., *friendhood, *daughterhood, or *candlehood. Furthermore "brotherhood" can mean "the state or relationship of being brothers," but "neighborhood" cannot mean "the state or relationship of being neighbors." Note however that some derivational affixes are quite regular in form and meaning, e.g. -ism.

4.     typically occur "inside" any inflectional affixes. Thus in governments, -ment, a derivational suffix, precedes -s, an inflectional suffix.

5.     in English, may appear either as prefixes or suffixes: pre-arrange, arrange-ment.

Inflectional morphemes vary (or "inflect") the form of words in order to express the grammatical features that a given language chooses, such as singular/plural or past/present tense. Thus Boy and boys, for example, are two different forms of the "same" word. In English, we must choose the singular form or the plural form; if we choose the basic form with no affix, we have chosen the singular.

Inflectional Morphemes generally:

1.     do not change basic syntactic category: thus big, bigg-er, bigg-est are all adjectives.

2.     express grammatically-required features or indicate relations between different words in the sentence. Thus in Lee love-s Kim, -s marks the 3rd person singular present form of the verb, and also relates it to the 3rd singular subject Lee.

3.     occur outside any derivational morphemes. Thus in ration-al-iz-ation-s the final -s is inflectional, and appears at the very end of the word, outside the derivational morphemes -al, -iz, -ation.

4.     In English, are suffixes only.

What is the meaning of an affix?

The meanings of derivational affixes are sometimes clear, but often are obscured by changes that occur over time. The following two sets of examples show that the prefix un- is easily interpreted as "not" when applied to adjectives, and as a reversing action when applied to verbs, but the prefix con- is more opaque.

un-	untie
	unshackle
	unharness
	unhappy
	untimely
	unthinkable
	unmentionable

con-	constitution
	confess
	connect
	contract
	contend
	conspire
	complete

Are derivational affixes sensitive to the historical source of the roots they attach to?

         Although English is a Germanic language, and most of its basic vocabulary derives from Old English, there is also a sizeable vocabulary that derives from Romance (Latin and French). Some English affixes, such as re-, attach freely to vocabulary from both sources. Other affixes, such as "-ation", are more limited.

ROOT	tie	consider
	free form	free form
	Germanic root	Latinate root
SOURCE	Old English tygan, "to tie"	Latin considerare, "to examine"
PREFIX	retie	reconsider
SUFFIX	reties	reconsiders
	retying	reconsideration
	retyings	reconsiderations

        The suffix -ize, which some prescriptivists object to in words like hospitalize, has a long and venerable history.

        According to Hans Marchand, in The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word Formation (University of Alabama Press, 1969), the suffix -ize comes originally from the Greek -izo. Many words ending with this suffix passed from Ecclesiastical Greek into Latin, where, by the fourth century, they had become established as verbs with the ending -izare, such as barbarizare, catechizare, christianizare. In Old French we find many such verbs, belonging primarily to the ecclesistical sphere: baptiser (11th c.), canoniser (13th c.), exorciser (14th c.).

The first -ize words to be found in English are loans with both a French and Latin pattern such as baptize (1297), catechize, and organize (both 15th c.) Towards the end of the 16th century, however, we come across many new formations in English, such as bastardize, equalize, popularize, and womanize. The formal and semantic patterns were the same as those from the borrowed French and Latin forms, but owing to the renewed study of Greek, the educated had become more familiar with its vocabulary and used the patterns of Old Greek word formation freely.

Between 1580 and 1700, the disciplines of literature, medicine, natural science and theology introduced a great deal of new terminology into the language. Some of the terms still in use today include criticize, fertilize, humanize, naturalize, satirize, sterilize, and symbolize. The growth of science contributed vast numbers of -ize formations through the 19th century and into the 20th.

The -ize words collected by students in in this class nine years ago show that -ize is almost entirely restricted to Romance vocabulary, the only exceptions we found being womanize and winterize. Even though most contemporary English speakers are not consciously aware of which words in their vocabulary are from which source, they have respected this distinction in coining new words.