The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and its speakers, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, including their society and Proto-Indo-European mythology. The studies cover where the language originated and how it spread. This article also lists Indo-European scholars, centres, journals and book series.
In linguistics, focus is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.
In linguistics, a zero or null is a segment which is not pronounced or written. It is a useful concept in analysis, indicating lack of an element where one might be expected. It is usually written with the symbol "∅", in Unicode U+2205∅EMPTY SET. A common ad hoc solution is to use the Scandinavian capital letter Ø instead.
The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, or Leibniz Prize, is awarded by the German Research Foundation to "exceptional scientists and academics for their outstanding achievements in the field of research". Since 1986, up to ten prizes have been awarded annually to individuals or research groups working at a research institution in Germany or at a German research institution abroad. It is considered the most important research award in Germany.
Theoretical Linguistics is an international peer-reviewed journal of theoretical linguistics published by Mouton de Gruyter. Since 2001, Manfred Krifka has been its editor.
In semantics, donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactic role in the sentence poses challenges to linguists. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.
Niina Ning Zhang is a theoretical linguist specializing in Mandarin Chinese syntax and semantics.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is a book on linguistics written by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1965. In Aspects, Chomsky presented a deeper, more extensive reformulation of transformational generative grammar (TGG), a new kind of syntactic theory that he had introduced in the 1950s with the publication of his first book, Syntactic Structures. Aspects is widely considered to be the foundational document and a proper book-length articulation of Chomskyan theoretical framework of linguistics. It presented Chomsky's epistemological assumptions with a view to establishing linguistic theory-making as a formal discipline comparable to physical sciences, i.e. a domain of inquiry well-defined in its nature and scope. From a philosophical perspective, it directed mainstream linguistic research away from behaviorism, constructivism, empiricism and structuralism and towards mentalism, nativism, rationalism and generativism, respectively, taking as its main object of study the abstract, inner workings of the human mind related to language acquisition and production.
Elisebeth Leinfellner was professor in linguistics at the University of Vienna, Department of Linguistics. She moved to the United States in 1967, and taught at Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, and at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is notable for her contributions to linguistics and philosophy. She received the Austrian Grand Decoration of Honour for services to the province of Lower Austria for Science and Art. She co-founded the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society and International Wittgenstein Symposium.
Ernst Frideryk Konrad Koerner was a German author, researcher, professor of linguistics, and historian of linguistics.
Barbara Kenyon Abbott is an American linguist. She earned her PhD in linguistics in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of George Lakoff. From 1976 to 2006, she was a professor in the department of linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African languages at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in philosophy. She is now a Professor Emerita.
Veneeta Dayal is an American linguist. She is currently the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale University.
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.
Artemis Alexiadou is a Greek linguist active in syntax research working in Germany. She is professor of English linguistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
András Kertész is a Hungarian linguist, professor, full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the philosophy of linguistics, theoretical linguistics and foundational problems of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. He works both in Hungary and around the world, and has published in English, German and Hungarian.
In linguistics, exhaustivity is the phenomenon where a proposition can be strengthened with the negation of certain alternatives. For example, in response to the question "Which students got an A?", the utterance "Ava got an A" has an exhaustive interpretation when it conveys that no other students got an A. It has a non-exhaustive interpretation when it merely conveys that Ava was among the students who got an A.
Susi Wurmbrand is an Austrian linguist specializing in syntax.
Horror aequi, or avoidance of identity, is a linguistic principle that language users have psychological or physiological motives or limits on cognitive planning to avoid repetition of identical linguistic structures.
Marga Reis is a linguist and emerita professor of German Linguistics at the University of Tübingen. Her research interests are the grammar of present-day and diachronic German linguistics, with a focus on syntax, word formation, and the relationship between grammar and pragmatics.
