what s linguistics?

The science, that is, the general and universal properties, of language. The middle of the twentieth century saw a shift in the principal direction of linguistic inquiry from one of data collection and classification to the formulation of a theory of generative grammar, which focuses on the biological basis for the acquisition and use of human language and the universal principles that constrain the class of all languages. Generative grammar distinguishes between the knowledge of language (linguistic competence), which is represented by mental grammar, and the production and comprehension of speech (linguistic performance).

If grammar is defined as the mental representation of linguistic knowledge, then a general theory of language is a theory of grammar. A grammar includes everything one knows about a language; its phonetics and phonology (the sounds and the sound system), its morphology (the structure of words), its lexicon (the words or vocabulary), its syntax (the structure of sentences and the constraints on well-formed sentences), and its semantics (the meaning of words and sentences). See also Psychoacoustics; Speech; Speech perception.

Linguistics is not limited to grammatical theory. Descriptive linguistics analyzes the grammars of individual languages; anthropological linguistics, or ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguistics focus on languages in relation to culture, social class, race, and gender; dialectologists investigate how these factors fragment one language into many. In addition, sociolinguists and applied linguists examine language planning, literacy, bilingualism, and second-language acquisition. Computational linguistics encompasses automatic parsing, machine processing, and computer simulation of grammatical models for the generation and parsing of sentences. If viewed as a branch of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics has as its goal the modeling of human language as a cognitive system. A branch of linguistics concerned with the biological basis of language development is neurolinguistics. The form of language representation in the mind, that is, linguistic competence and the structure and components of the mental grammar, is the concern of theoretical linguistics. The branch of linguistics concerned with linguistic performance, that is, the production and comprehension of speech (or of sign language by the deaf), is called psycholinguistics. Psycholinguists also investigate how children acquire the complex grammar that underlies language use.