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).
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.
In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
- to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
- to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families
- to develop general theories about how and why language changes
- to describe the history of speech communities
- to study the history of words, i.e. etymology
- to explore the impact of cultural and social factors on language evolution.
A noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type.
In mathematics, and in other disciplines involving formal languages, including mathematical logic and computer science, a variable may be said to be either free or bound. The terms are opposites. A free variable is a notation (symbol) that specifies places in an expression where substitution may take place and is not a parameter of this or any container expression. Some older books use the terms real variable and apparent variable for free variable and bound variable, respectively. The idea is related to a placeholder, or a wildcard character that stands for an unspecified symbol.
That is an English language word used for several grammatical purposes. These include use as an adjective, conjunction, pronoun, adverb, and intensifier; it has distance from the speaker, as opposed to words like this. The word did not originally exist in Old English, and its concept was represented by þe. Once it came into being, it was spelt as þæt, taking the role of the modern that. It also took on the role of the modern word what, though this has since changed, and that has recently replaced some usage of the modern which. Pronunciation of the word varies according to its role within a sentence, with two main varieties, though there are also regional differences, such as where the sound is substituted instead by a in English spoken in Cameroon.
Theta roles are the names of the participant roles associated with a predicate: the predicate may be a verb, an adjective, a preposition, or a noun. If an object is in motion or in a steady state as the speakers perceives the state, or it is the topic of discussion, it is called a theme. The participant is usually said to be an argument of the predicate. In generative grammar, a theta role or θ-role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure—the number and type of noun phrases—required syntactically by a particular verb. For example, the verb put requires three arguments.
Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles and specific parameters that for particular languages are either turned on or off. For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter. Whether a language is head-initial or head-final is regarded as a parameter which is either on or off for particular languages. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Many linguists have worked within this framework, and for a period of time it was considered the dominant form of mainstream generative linguistics.
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is an approach to linguistics, among functional linguistics, that considers language as a social semiotic system.
In linguistics, grammatical relations are functional relationships between constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical functions from traditional grammar are subject, direct object, and indirect object. In recent times, the syntactic functions, typified by the traditional categories of subject and object, have assumed an important role in linguistic theorizing, within a variety of approaches ranging from generative grammar to functional and cognitive theories. Many modern theories of grammar are likely to acknowledge numerous further types of grammatical relations. The role of grammatical relations in theories of grammar is greatest in dependency grammars, which tend to posit dozens of distinct grammatical relations. Every head-dependent dependency bears a grammatical function.
In linguistics, the term lexis designates the complete set of all possible words in a language, or a particular subset of words that are grouped by some specific linguistic criteria. For example, the general term English lexis refers to all words of the English language, while more specific term English religious lexis refers to a particular subset within English lexis, encompassing only words that are semantically related to the religious sphere of life.
In historical linguistics, grammaticalization is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions become grammatical markers. Thus it creates new function words from content words, rather than deriving them from existing bound, inflectional constructions. For example, the Old English verb willan 'to want', 'to wish' has become the Modern English auxiliary verb will, which expresses intention or simply futurity. Some concepts are often grammaticalized, while others, such as evidentiality, are not so much.
Functional grammar (FG) and functional discourse grammar (FDG) are grammar models and theories motivated by functional theories of grammar. These theories explain how linguistic utterances are shaped, based on the goals and knowledge of natural language users. In doing so, it contrasts with Chomskyan transformational grammar. Functional discourse grammar has been developed as a successor to functional grammar, attempting to be more psychologically and pragmatically adequate than functional grammar.
Divergence in linguistics refers to one of the five principles by which grammaticalization can be detected while it is taking place. The other four are: layering, specialisation, persistence, and de-categorialisation.
In linguistics, the term specialization, refers to one of the five principles by which grammaticalization can be detected while it is taking place. The other four principles are: layering, divergence, persistence, and de-categorialization.
Persistence in linguistics refers to one of the five principles by which grammaticalisation can be detected while it is taking place. The other four are: layering, divergence, specialisation, and de-categorialisation.
De-categorialization in linguistics refers to one of the five principles by which grammaticalization can be detected while it is taking place. The other four are layering, divergence, specialization, and persistence.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.
In linguistics, Cartographic syntax, or simply Cartography, is a branch of Generative syntax. The basic assumption of Cartographic syntax is that syntactic structures are built according to the same patterns in all languages of the world. It is assumed that all languages exhibit a richly articulated structure of hierarchical projections with specific meanings. Cartography belongs to the tradition of generative grammar and is regarded as a theory belonging to the Principles and Parameters theory. The founders of Cartography are the Italian linguists Luigi Rizzi and Guglielmo Cinque.
