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).
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus, its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference. The large collections of text allow linguistics to run quantitative analyses on linguistic concepts, otherwise harder to quantify.
Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, psychology, communication research, information science, natural language processing, anthropology, and sociology. Applied linguistics is a practical use of language.
Dr. Hermann Moisl is a retired senior lecturer and visiting fellow in Linguistics at Newcastle University. He was educated at various institutes, including Trinity College Dublin and the University of Oxford.
Larry M. Hyman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in phonology and has particular interest in African languages.
Linguistic categories include
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers may vary in pronunciation (accent), word choice (lexicon), or morphology and syntax. But while the diversity of variation is great, there seem to be boundaries on variation – speakers do not generally make drastic alterations in word order or use novel sounds that are completely foreign to the language being spoken. Linguistic variation does not equate to language ungrammaticality, but speakers are still sensitive to what is and is not possible in their native lect.
The British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) is a learned society, based in the UK, which provides a forum for people interested in language and applied linguistics.
Stefan Th. Gries is (full) professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, and since 1 April 2018 also Chair of English Linguistics at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen.
The history of linguistics in the United States began to discover a greater understanding of humans and language. By trying to find a greater ‘parent language’ through similarities in different languages, a number of connections were discovered. Many contributors and new ideas helped shape the study of linguistics in the United States into what we know it as today. In the 1920s, linguistics focused on grammatical analysis and grammatical structure, especially of languages indigenous to North America, such as Chippewa, Apache, and more. In addition to scholars who have paved the way for linguistics in the United States, the Linguistic Society of America is a group that has contributed to the research of linguistics in America. The United States has long been known for its diverse collection of linguistic features and dialects that are spread across the country. In recent years, the study of linguistics in the United States has broadened to include nonstandard varieties of English speaking, such as Chicano English and African American English, as well as the question if language perpetuates inequalities.
Shana Poplack, is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American vernacular English. She founded and directs the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory.
Contrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of 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.
In linguistics, critical language awareness (CLA) refers to an understanding of social, political, and ideological aspects of language, linguistic variation, and discourse. It functions as a pedagogical application of a critical discourse analysis (CDA), which is a research approach that regards language as a social practice. Critical language awareness as a part of language education teaches students how to analyze the language that they and others use. More specifically, critical language awareness is a consideration of how features of language such as words, grammar, and discourse choices reproduce, reinforce, or challenge certain ideologies and struggles for power and dominance.
Mark E. Davies is an American linguist. He specializes in corpus linguistics and language variation and change. He is the creator of most of the text corpora from English-Corpora.org as well as the Corpus del español and the Corpus do português. He has also created large datasets of word frequency, collocates, and n-grams data, which have been used by many large companies in the fields of technology and also language learning.
John A. Nerbonne is an American computational linguist. He was a professor of humanities computing at the University of Groningen until January 2017, when he gave his valedictory address at the celebration of the 30th anniversary of his department there.
Vladimir Plungian is a Russian linguist, specialist in linguistic typology and theory of grammar, morphology, corpus linguistics, African studies, poetics.
Proto-Karenic or Proto-Karen is the reconstructed ancestor of the Karenic languages.