Theoretical Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics is that branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. Part of this endeavor involves the search for and explanation of linguistic universals, that is, properties all languages have in common. The fields that are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics. Phonology is often informed by phonetics, which like psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics is often excluded from the purview of theoretical linguistics.

to be continued

Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds and the human voice. It is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones) as well as those of non-speech sounds, and their production, audition and perception, as opposed to phonology, which is the study of sound systems and abstract sound units (such as phonemes and distinctive features). Phonetics deals with the sounds themselves rather than the contexts in which they are used in languages. Discussions of meaning (semantics) do not enter at this level of linguistic analysis, therefore.

While writing systems and alphabets often attempt to represent the sounds of speech, phoneticians are more concerned with the sounds themselves than the symbols used to represent them. So close is the relationship between them, however, that many dictionaries list the study of the symbols (more accurately semiotics) as a part of phonetic studies [citation needed]. Logographic writing systems typically give much less phonetic information, although it is not necessarily non-existent. For instance, in Chinese characters, a phonetic is a portion of the character that hints at its pronunciation, while the radical gives semantic information. Characters featuring the same phonetic typically have similar pronunciations, but by no means are the pronunciations predictably determined by the phonetic; this is because pronunciations diverged over many centuries while the characters remained the same. Not all Chinese characters are radical-phonetic compounds, but a good majority of them are.

Phonetics has three main branches:

articulatory phonetics, concerned with the positions and movements of the lips, tongue, vocal tract and folds and other speech organs in producing speech;
acoustic phonetics, concerned with the properties of the sound waves and how they are received by the inner ear;
auditory phonetics, concerned with speech perception, principally how the brain forms perceptual representations of the input it receives.
There are over a hundred different phones recognized as distinctive by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and transcribed in their International Phonetic Alphabet.

Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in ancient India, with Pāṇini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BCE treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today, except Tamil script, order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification

Phonology is the branch of theoretical linguistics concerned with the production and comprehension of speech sounds in language. Phonology (Greek phonē = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages.
An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. In English, for example, /p/ and /b/ are distinctive units of sound, (i.e., they are phonemes / the difference is phonemic, or phonematic). This can be seen from minimal pairs such as "pin" and "bin", which mean different things, but differ only in one sound. On the other hand, /p/ is often pronounced differently depending on its position relative to other sounds, yet these different pronunciations are still considered by native speakers to be the same "sound". For example, the /p/ in "pin" is aspirated while the same phoneme in "spin" is not. In some other languages, eg Thai and Quechua, this same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate phonemes.

In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English described above, and topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation.
The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign languages, in which it is argued that the same or a similar phonological system underlies both signed and spoken languages. (Signs are distinguished from gestures in that the latter are non-linguistic or supply extra meaning alongside the linguistic message

Morphology is the study of word structure. For example in the sentences The dog runs and The dogs run, the wordforms runs and dogs have an affix -s added, distinguishing them from the bare forms dog and run. Adding this suffix to a nominal stem gives plural forms, adding it to verbal stems restricts the subject to third person singular. Some morphological theories operate with two distinct suffixes -s, called allomorphs of the morphemes Plural and Third person singular, respectively. Languages differ wrt. to their morphological structure. Along one axis, we may distinguish analytic languages, with few or no suffixes or other morphological processes from synthetic languages with many suffixes. Along another axis, we may distinguish agglutinative languages, where suffixes express one grammatical property each, and are added neatly one after another, from fusional languages, with non-concatenative morphological processes (infixation, Umlaut, Ablaut, etc.) and/or with less clear-cut suffix boundaries.
Morphology is a sub-discipline of linguistics that studies word structure. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations by virtue of the unconscious linguistic knowledge they have of the rules of word-formation processes in English. Therefore, these speakers intuit that dog is to dogs just as cat is to cats, or encyclopædia is to encyclopædias; similarly, dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules comprehended by the speaker in each case reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies such patterns of word-formation across and within languages, and attempts to explicate formal rules reflective of the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

In linguistics, Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning "co-" or "together") and τάξις (táxis, meaning "sequence, order, arrangement"), is the study of the rules, or "patterned relations" that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. It concerns how different words (which, going back to Dionysios Thrax, are categorized as nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.) are combined into clauses, which, in turn, are combined into sentences. Syntax attempts to systematize descriptive grammar, and is unconcerned with prescriptive grammar (see Prescription and description).
There are many theories of formal syntax — theories that have in time risen or fallen in influence. Most theories of syntax share at least two commonalities. First, they hierarchically group subunits into constituent units (phrases). Second, they provide some system of rules to explain patterns of acceptability/grammaticality and unacceptability/ungrammaticality. Most formal theories of syntax offer explanations of the systematic relationships between syntactic form and semantic meaning. Syntax is defined, within the study of signs, as the first of its three subfields (the study of the interrelation of the signs). The second subfield is semantics (the study of the relation between the signs and the objects to which they apply), and the third is pragmatics (the relationship between the sign system and the user).
In the framework of transformational-generative grammar (of which Government and Binding Theory and Minimalism are recent developments), the structure of a sentence is represented by phrase structure trees, otherwise known as phrase markers or tree diagrams. Such trees provide information about the sentences they represent by showinging the hierachical relations between their component parts.
There are various theories as to how best to make grammars such that by systematic application of the rules, one can arrive at every phrase marker in a language (and hence every sentence in the language). The most common are Phrase structure grammars and ID/LP grammars, the latter having a slight explanatory advantage over the former.[citation needed] Dependency grammar is a class of syntactic theories separate from generative grammar in which structure is determined by the relation between a word (a head) and its dependents. One difference from phrase structure grammar is that dependency grammar does not have phrasal categories. Algebraic syntax is a type of dependency grammar.


A modern approach to combining accurate descriptions of the grammatical patterns of language with their function in context is that of systemic functional grammar, an approach originally developed by Michael A.K. Halliday in the 1960s and now pursued actively on all continents. Systemic-functional grammar is related both to feature-based approaches such as Head-driven phrase structure grammar and to the older functional traditions of European schools of linguistics such as British Contextualism and the Prague School.
Tree adjoining grammar is a grammar formalism which has been used as the basis for a number of syntactic theories. However, in monotonic and monostratale frameworks, variants of unification grammar are often preferred formalisms.

Semantics (Greek semantikos, giving signs, significant, symptomatic, from sema, sign) refers to the aspects of meaning that are expressed in a language, code, or other form of representation. Semantics is contrasted with two other aspects of meaningful expression, namely, syntax, the construction of complex signs from simpler signs, and pragmatics, the practical use of signs by agents or communities of interpretation in particular circumstances and contexts. By the usual convention that calls a study or a theory by the name of its subject matter, semantics may also denote the theoretical study of meaning in systems of signs.
Though terminology varies, writers on the subject of meaning generally recognize two sorts of meaning that a significant expression may have: (1) the relation that a sign has to objects and objective situations, actual or possible, and (2) the relation that a sign has to other signs, most especially the sorts of mental signs that are conceived of as concepts.
Most theorists refer to the relation between a sign and its objects, as always including any manner of objective reference, as its denotation. Some theorists refer to the relation between a sign and the signs that serve in its practical interpretation as its connotation, but there are many more differences of opinion and distinctions of theory that are made in this case. Many theorists, especially in the formal semantic, pragmatic, and semiotic traditions, restrict the application of semantics to the deno

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شكرا جزيلا وننتظر المزيد من عطائك

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اصحاب هذا المنتدى وجميع المشاركين والزوار اللهم بارك فيهم اجمعين وأغفر لموتاهم وأشفي مرضاهم وأغني فقيرهم اللهم امين =-=-=-=-ahlawi

شكرا:small (372):

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جزاك الله خيرا

السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته
يعطيك العافية على التميز الدائم ؟

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