Языкознание – это наука о языке, изучающая его и in the complex (as a system), and its individual properties and characteristics: the origin and historical past, the qualities and functional features, as well as the general laws of the construction and dynamic development of all languages on Earth.
Linguistics as a science of language
The main object of study of this science is the natural language of humanity, its nature and essence, and the subject is the laws of the structure, functioning, change of languages and methods of their study.
Despite the fact that now linguistics relieson a significant theoretical and empirical basis, it should be remembered that linguistics is a relatively young science (in Russia - from the 18th – early 19th centuries). Nevertheless, it has predecessors with interesting views — many philosophers and grammatists were fascinated with the study of language; therefore, there are interesting observations and reasonings in their works (for example, the philosophers of Ancient Greece, Voltaire, and Diderot).
Terminology Excursus
The word "linguistics" was not always indisputable.name for the domestic linguistic science. A synonymous number of terms “linguistics - linguistics - linguistics” has its own semantic and historical features.
Originally, before the 1917 revolution, the term linguistics was common in scientific circulation. In Soviet times, linguistics became dominant (for example, the university course and textbooks for it became known as “Introduction to Linguistics”), and its “non-canonical” variants acquired a new semantics. So, linguistics referred to the pre-revolutionary scientific tradition, and linguistics pointed to Western ideas and methods, such as structuralism. As noted by T.V. Shmelev in the article “Memory of the Term: Linguistics, Linguistics, Linguistics”, this semantic contradiction Russian linguistics has not yet resolved, as there is strict gradation, laws of compatibility and word formation (linguistics → linguistic → linguistic) and a tendency to expand the meaning of the term linguistics ( studying of foreign language). Thus, the researcher compares the names of linguistic disciplines in the current university standard, the names of structural divisions, publications: “distinguished” sections of linguistics in the curriculum “Introduction to Linguistics” and “General Linguistics”; Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Institute of Linguistics”, the journal “Issues of Linguistics”, the book “Essays on Linguistics”; Faculty of Linguistics and Intercultural Communication, "Computational Linguistics", the magazine "New in linguistics" ...
The main sections of linguistics: general characteristics
The science of language “breaks up” into many disciplines, the most important of which are such basic sections of linguistics as general and particular, theoretical and applied, descriptive and historical.
In addition, linguistic disciplines are grouped on the basis of the tasks assigned to them and based on the object of study. Thus, the following main sections of linguistics are traditionally distinguished:
- sections devoted to the study of the internal structure of the language system, the organization of its levels (for example, morphology and syntax);
- sections describing the dynamics of the historical development of the language as a whole and the formation of its individual levels (historical phonetics, historical grammar);
- sections dealing with the functional qualities of a language and its role in society (sociolinguistics, dialectology);
- sections studying the complex problems arising on the borderlands of various sciences and disciplines (psycholinguistics, mathematical linguistics);
- applied disciplines solve practical problems that the scientific community sets for linguistics (lexicography, paleography).
General and private linguistics
The division of the science of language into general and particular areas shows how global the goals of research interests of researchers are.
The most important scientific questions considered by general linguistics are:
- the essence of the language, the mystery of its origin and the laws of historical development;
- the basic laws of the structure and function of the language in the world as a community of people;
- the ratio of the categories of "language" and "thinking", "language", "objective reality";
- the origin and improvement of writing;
- typology of languages, the structure of their language levels, the functioning and historical development of grammatical classes and categories;
- classification of all languages existing in the world, and many others.
One of the important international problems thattrying to solve a common linguistics, is the creation and application of new means of communication between people (artificial international languages). The development of this direction is a priority for interlingualistics.
The jurisdiction of private linguistics isstudy of the structure, functioning and historical development of a specific language (Russian, Czech, Chinese), several separate languages or entire families of related languages at the same time (for example, only Romance - French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and many others). Private linguistics applies the techniques of synchronous (otherwise - descriptive) or diachronic (historical) research.
General linguistics in relation to the privateis a theoretical and methodological basis for the study of any scientific problems related to the study of the state, facts and processes in a given language. In turn, private linguistics is a discipline that provides general linguistics with empirical data, based on the analysis of which theoretical conclusions can be drawn.
External and internal linguistics
The device of modern science of language is a two-part structure - these are the main sections of linguistics, micro-linguistics (or internal linguistics) and extra-linguistics (external linguistics).
Micro-linguistics is focused on the inner side of the language system - sound, morphological, vocabulary and syntactic tiers.
Extralinguistics draws attention to the hugevariety of types of language interaction: with society, human thinking, communicative, emotional, aesthetic and other aspects of life. On its basis, methods of contrastive analysis and interdisciplinary research (psycho-, ethnolinguistics, paralinguistics, linguoculturology, etc.) are born.
Synchronic (descriptive) and diachronic (historical) linguistics
К сфере исследований описательного языкознания refers to the state of the language or its individual levels, facts, phenomena by their state at a given time interval, a certain stage of development. Most often, attention is paid to the current state, and more rarely to the state of development in the past (for example, the language of Russian chronicles of the 13th century).
Историческое языкознание занимается изучением various linguistic facts and phenomena from the standpoint of their dynamics and evolution. At the same time, researchers have a goal to record the changes that occur in the languages being studied (for example, a comparison of the dynamics of the literary norm of the Russian language in the XVII, XIX and XX centuries).
Linguistic description of language levels
Linguistics studies phenomena related todifferent tiers of a common language system. It is customary to distinguish the following language levels: phonemic, lexico-semantic, morphological, syntactic. In accordance with these levels, the following main sections of linguistics are distinguished.
The following sciences are associated with the phoneme level of language:
- phonetics (describes the variety of speech sounds in a language, their articulation and acoustic signs);
- phonology (studies the phoneme as the minimum unit of speech, its phonological characteristics and functioning);
- morphology (considers the phoneme structure of morphemes, qualitative and quantitative changes of phonemes in identical morphemes, their variability, establishes rules for compatibility at the boundaries of morphemes).
The lexical level of the language is explored in the following sections:
- лексикология (изучает слово как основную единицу language and in general words as linguistic wealth, explores the structural features of the vocabulary, its expansion and development, sources of replenishment of the vocabulary of the language);
- Semasiology (explores the lexical meaning of a word, the semantic correspondence of a word and the notion or subject named by it, the phenomenon of objective reality expressed by it);
- onomasiology (deals with issues related to the problem of nomination in the language, with the structuring of the objects of the world during the process of knowledge).
The morphological level of the language is studied by the following disciplines:
- morphology (describes the structural units of the word, the general morphemic composition of the word and forms of inflection, parts of speech, their characteristics, the essence and principles of the selection);
- word formation (studies the construction of the word, the ways of its reproduction, the patterns of the structure and formation of the word, and especially its functioning in language and speech).
The syntax level describes the syntax.(studies cognitive structures and processes of speech generation: the mechanisms of combining words into complex structures of phrases and sentences, types of structural connections of words and sentences, language processes due to which speech is formed)
Comparative and typological linguistics
Comparative linguistics deals withsystemic approach in comparing the device at least two or more languages, regardless of their genetic relationship. Here can be compared and certain milestones in the development of the same language - for example, the system of case endings of modern Russian and the language of the times of Ancient Russia.
Typological linguistics examinesstructure and functions of multi-structured languages in the "timeless" dimension (panchronic aspect). This allows you to identify common (universal) features inherent in human language in general.
Language universals
General linguistics in his studies fixeslanguage universals - language patterns peculiar to all languages in the world (absolute universals) or a significant part of languages (statistical universals).
As absolute universals, the following features are highlighted:
- For all the languages of the world is characterized by the presence of vowel sounds and occlusive consonants.
- The speech flow is divided into syllables, which are necessarily divided into complexes of sounds "vowel + consonant."
- Proper names and pronouns are available in any language.
- The grammatical system of all languages is characterized by names and verbs.
- Each language has a set of words that convey human feelings, emotions, or commands.
- If a language has a category of case or gender, then the category of a number is necessarily present in it.
- If nouns in a language are contrasted in gender, the same can be observed in the discharge of pronouns.
- All people in the world design their thoughts for the purpose of communication in sentences.
- Writing links and unions are present in all languages of the world.
- Any language of the world has comparative constructions, phraseological expressions, metaphors.
- Universal taboo and symbols of the sun and moon.
Statistical universals include the following observations:
- In the absolute majority of languages of the world there are at least two different vowel sounds (with the exception of the Australian language of arant).
- In most languages of the world, pronouns vary in numbers, of which there are at least two (except for the language of the inhabitants of Java).
- Almost all languages have nasal consonants (except for some languages of West Africa).
Applied Linguistics
This section of the science of language is directly involved in the development of solutions to problems related to language practice:
- improvement of methodological tools in teaching the language as a mother tongue and as a foreign language;
- the creation of self-help books, reference books, educational and thematic dictionaries used at different levels and stages of teaching;
- learning how to speak and write beautifully, accurately, clearly, convincingly (rhetoric);
- ability to navigate in language norms, mastering spelling (culture of speech, orthoepy, spelling and punctuation);
- improvement of spelling, alphabet, development of writing for unwritten languages (for example, for languages of certain peoples of the USSR in the 1930-1940s), the creation of letters and books for the blind;
- teaching shorthand and transliteration techniques;
- the creation of terminological standards (GOST);
- development of translation skills, the creation of bilingual and multilingual dictionaries of various types;
- development of automated machine translation practices;
- creation of computerized voice recognition systems, transforming the spoken word into printed text (engineering or computational linguistics);
- the formation of cases of texts, hypertexts, electronic databases and dictionaries and the development of methods for their analysis and processing (British National Corpus, BNC, National Corpus of the Russian language);
- development of methods, copywriting, advertising and public relations, etc.
