In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural rules on speakers' or writers' usage and creation of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
Anna Wierzbicka is a Polish linguist who is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra. Brought up in Poland, she graduated from Warsaw University and emigrated to Australia in 1972, where she has lived since. With over twenty published books, many of which have been translated into other languages, she is a prolific writer.
Natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory that reduces lexicons down to a set of semantic primitives. It is based on the conception of Polish professor Andrzej Bogusławski. The theory was formally developed by Anna Wierzbicka at Warsaw University and later at the Australian National University in the early 1970s, and Cliff Goddard at Australia's Griffith University.
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind. The field originates from discussions influenced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of a Universal Grammar, but was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who derived a set of forty-five basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax, from a study of some thirty languages.
Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz was a Polish philosopher and logician, a prominent figure in the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic. He originated many novel ideas in semantics. Among these was categorial grammar, a highly flexible framework for the analysis of natural language syntax and (indirectly) semantics that remains a major influence on work in formal linguistics. Ajdukiewicz's fields of research were model theory and the philosophy of science.
Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay, also Ivan Alexandrovich Baudouin de Courtenay was a Russian and Polish linguist and Slavist, best known for his theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations.
Stanisław Jaśkowski was a Polish logician who made important contributions to proof theory and formal semantics. He was a student of Jan Łukasiewicz and a member of the Lwów–Warsaw School of Logic. He is regarded as one of the founders of natural deduction, which he discovered independently of Gerhard Gentzen in the 1930s. He is also known for his research into paraconsistent logic. Upon his death, his name was added to the Genius Wall of Fame. He was the President (rector) of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
Andrzej Wojciech Trybulec was a Polish mathematician and computer scientist noted for work on the Mizar system.
Distributional semantics is a research area that develops and studies theories and methods for quantifying and categorizing semantic similarities between linguistic items based on their distributional properties in large samples of language data. The basic idea of distributional semantics can be summed up in the so-called distributional hypothesis: linguistic items with similar distributions have similar meanings.
Jerzy Jan Rubach is a Polish linguist who specializes in phonology. He is a professor of linguistics at the University of Iowa and the University of Warsaw (Poland).
Meaning–text theory (MTT) is a theoretical linguistic framework, first put forward in Moscow by Aleksandr Žolkovskij and Igor Mel’čuk, for the construction of models of natural language. The theory provides a large and elaborate basis for linguistic description and, due to its formal character, lends itself particularly well to computer applications, including machine translation, phraseology, and lexicography.
The Ethiopian language area is a hypothesized linguistic area that was first proposed by Charles A. Ferguson, who posited a number of phonological and morphosyntactic features that were found widely across Ethiopia and Eritrea, including the Ethio-Semitic, Cushitic and Omotic languages but not the Nilo-Saharan languages.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not exclusively employ scientific methods.
Andrzej Grzegorczyk was a Polish logician, mathematician, philosopher, and ethicist noted for his work in computability, mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics.
Wacław Cimochowski was a Polish philologist who specialized in Indo-European linguistics, especially in Albanology.
Andrzej Aleksander Włodarczyk, known as André Wlodarczyk, is a Polish-French linguist.
Janusz Andrzej Rieger is a Polish linguist and slavist specializing in the history of Polish language in Kresy, professor of the humanities, member of the Warsaw Scientific Society. He worked at the Institute of Slavic Studies and at the Institute of Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and lectured at the University of Warsaw.
Henryk Hiż was a Polish analytical philosopher specializing in linguistics, philosophy of language, logic, mathematics and ethics, active for most of his life in the United States, one of the youngest representatives of the Lwów–Warsaw school.
Jan Szczepan Otrębski was a Polish philologist, linguist, and author of 350 scientific papers in the field of Slavic and Baltic studies. He is particularly noted for his study of the Lithuanian language. He held the Chair of Baltic Philology in the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and was the founder of the Lingua Posnaniensis journal. His three-volume work Gramatyka języka litewskiego is considered his magnum opus.
