A Crash Course in Linguistics
Simply defined, linguistics is the systematic study of language. Though various types of language studies (including grammar and rhetoric) can be traced back over 2,500 years, the era of modern linguistics is barely two centuries old.
Kicked off by the late-18th-century discovery that many European and Asian languages descended from a common tongue (Proto-Indo-European), modern linguistics was reshaped, first, by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and more recently by Noam Chomsky (born 1928).
Linguistics, like most academic disciplines, has been divvied up into numerous overlapping subfields--"a stew of alien and undigestible terms," as Randy Allen Harris characterized them in his 1993 book The Linguistics Wars. Using the sentence "Fideau chased the cat" as an example, Allen offered this "crash course" in the major branches of linguistics. (Follow the links to learn more about these subfields.)
Phonetics concerns the acoustic waveform itself, the systematic disruptions of air molecules that occur whenever someone utters the expression.
Phonology concerns the elements of that waveform which recognizably punctuate the sonic flow--consonants, vowels, and syllables, represented on this page by letters.
Morphology concerns the words and meaningful subwords constructed out of the phonological elements--that Fideau is a noun, naming some mongrel, that chase is a verb signifying a specific action which calls for both a chaser and a chasee, that -ed is a suffix indicating past action, and so on.
Syntax concerns the arrangement of those morphological elements into phrases and sentences--that chased the cat is a verb phrase, that the cat is its noun phrase (the chasee), that Fideau is another noun phrase (the chaser), that the whole thing is a sentence.
Semantics concerns the proposition expressed by that sentence--in particular, that it is true if and only if some mutt named Fideau has chased some definite cat.
Though handy, Harris's list of linguistic subfields is far from comprehensive. In fact, some of the most innovative work in contemporary language studies is being carried out in even more specialized branches, some of which hardly existed 30 or 40 years ago. Here, without the assistance of Fideau, is a sample: applied linguistics, cognitive linguistics, contact linguistics, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, graphology, historical linguistics, language acquisition, lexicology, linguistic anthropology, neurolinguistics, paralinguistics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and stylistics.
Image: The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris (Oxford University Press, 1993)