Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist,semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics,or semiology,as Saussure called it.
Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side,and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or,for sign languages,their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time,the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages,but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach,primarily in the social sciences,that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do,think,perceive,and feel.
In linguistics and related fields,pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions,as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).
In linguistics,transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar,especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones.
Stylistics,a branch of applied linguistics,is the study and interpretation of texts of all types and/or spoken language in regard to their linguistic and tonal style,where style is the particular variety of language used by different individuals and/or in different situations or settings. For example,the vernacular,or everyday language may be used among casual friends,whereas more formal language,with respect to grammar,pronunciation or accent,and lexicon or choice of words,is often used in a cover letter and résuméand while speaking during a job interview.
The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists,philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation from 1928 to 1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the CaféDerby in Prague,which is also where meetings took place during its first years.
Robert Malcolm Ward "Bob" Dixon is a Professor of Linguistics in the College of Arts,Society,and Education and The Cairns Institute,James Cook University,Queensland. He is also Deputy Director of The Language and Culture Research Centre at JCU. Doctor of Letters,he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa by JCU in 2018. Fellow of British Academy;Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities,and Honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America,he is one of three living linguists to be specifically mentioned in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics by Peter Matthews (2014).
Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay was a Polish linguist and Slavist,best known for his theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations.
In linguistics and social sciences,markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation,one term of an opposition is the broader,dominant one. The dominant default or minimum-effort form is known as unmarked;the other,secondary one is marked. In other words,markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms.
Bernard Sterling Comrie,is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology,linguistic universals and on Caucasian languages.
Clinical linguistics is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics involved in the description,analysis,and treatment of language disabilities,especially the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology. The study of the linguistic aspect of communication disorders is of relevance to a broader understanding of language and linguistic theory.
Michael Silverstein was an American linguist. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology,linguistics,and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication,the sociology of interaction,Russian formalist literary theory,linguistic pragmatics,sociolinguistics,early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory,together with his own theoretical contributions,yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture. He presented the developing results of this project annually from 1970 until his death in a course entitled "Language in Culture." Among other achievements,he was instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce,including especially the notion of indexicality,into the linguistic and anthropological literature;with coining the terms metapragmatics and metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life;and with introducing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.
Nina Hyams is a distinguished research professor emeritus in linguistics at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Structural linguistics, or structuralism,in linguistics,denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained,self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics,published posthumously in 1916,stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis,which define units syntactically and lexically,respectively,according to their contrast with the other units in the system.
Alpheus Sherwin Cody was an American writer and entrepreneur who developed a long-running home-study course in speaking and writing and a signature series of advertisements asking “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?”A critic of traditional English education,Cody advocated colloquial style and grammar. His course,presented in a patented workbook format which he described as self-correcting,was purchased by over 150,000 students from its inception in 1918. He published essays,books and articles virtually nonstop from 1893 through 1950. In a book published in 1895,he gave the advice,"Write what you know—so go out and know something."
Language and Linguistics Compass is an online peer-reviewed linguistics journal established by Blackwell Publishers in 2006. One of eight Compass journals,Language and Linguistics Compass publishes state-of-the-art review articles aimed at an international readership. The target audience includes academic researchers,postgraduates students and advanced undergraduates. The editors-in-chief are Edwin Battistella and Natalie Schilling.
Norma Catalina Mendoza-Denton is a professor of anthropology at the University of California,Los Angeles. She specializes in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology,including work in sociophonetics,language and identity,ethnography and visual anthropology.
