Lexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of lexical cognates.

In linguistics, an areal feature is any feature ( including cognates, false cognates, and false friends ) shared by languages within the same geographical area as a consequence of linguistic ( and other cultural ) diffusion.

Even beginning students in linguistics are made familiar with an appreciable variety of consonant systems, both in their general outlines and in many specific details.

The joint investigations of linguistics and psychiatry have established, in point of fact, that no matter what the subject of conversation is or what words are involved, it is impossible for people to talk at all without telling over and over again what sort of people they are and how they relate to the rest of the world.

Newest to this high-powered battery are the experts in linguistics who have carried that minimum to a new level.

Astronomy, history, linguistics, and the natural sciences are among the myriad fields that have benefited from the activities of amateurs.

Whorf argued that paying attention to how other physical phenomena are described in the study of linguistics could make valuable contributions to science by pointing out the ways in which certain assumptions about reality are implicit in the structure of language itself, and how language guides the attention of speakers towards certain phenomena in the world which risk becoming overemphasized while leaving other phenomena at risk of being overlooked.

Ongoing research on computational linguistics has focused on formulating other classes of languages that are " mildly context-sensitive " whose decision problems are feasible, such as tree-adjoining grammars, combinatory categorial grammars, coupled context-free languages, and linear context-free rewriting systems.

Context-free grammars are important in linguistics for describing the structure of sentences and words in natural language, and in computer science for describing the structure of programming languages and other formal languages.

In linguistics, some authors use the term phrase structure grammar to refer to context-free grammars, whereby phrase structure grammars are distinct from dependency grammars.

In cognitive linguistics, abstract concepts are transformations of concrete concepts derived from embodied experience.

In linguistics, creaky voice ( sometimes called laryngealisation, pulse phonation, vocal fry, or glottal fry ), is a special kind of phonation in which the arytenoid cartilages in the larynx are drawn together ; as a result, the vocal folds are compressed rather tightly, becoming relatively slack and compact.

August Schleicher ( 1821 – 1868 ) and his Stammbaumtheorie are often quoted as the starting point of evolutionary linguistics.

To what extent language's features are determined by genes, a hotly debated dichotomy in linguistics, has had new light shed upon it by the discovery of the FoxP2-gene.

Within lexical semantics, especially as applied to computers, modeling word meaning is easier when a given word is understood in terms of related words ; semantic networks are therefore important in computational linguistics.

In many language descriptions, particularly those of traditional European linguistics, the term tense is erroneously used to refer to categories that do not have time reference as their prototypical use, but rather are grammaticalisations of mood / modality ( e. g. uncertainty, possibility, evidentiality ) or aspect ( e. g. frequency, completion, duration ).

Moreover, there are similarities between major groups, although how these similarities are to be interpreted is one of the major debatable issues in the historical linguistics of Indo-European.

In historical linguistics, language families are often considered to be descended from proto-languages.

Since 1999, the education laws have forbidden the public universities to instruct students in languages other than Latvian ( there are exclusions made for linguistics, some international projects and non-budget groups ).

In psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics, researchers have proposed various models of how the lexicon is organized and how words are retrieved.

There are outside ( although sometimes related to ) linguistics types of semantics like cultural semantics and computational semantics, as the latest is not related to computational lexicology but to mathematical logic.

A false etymology ( pseudoetymology, paraetymology or paretymology ), sometimes called folk etymology although this is also a technical term in linguistics, is a popularly held but false belief about the origins of specific words, often originating in " common-sense " assumptions.

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language.

In linguistics, the description of a language is split into two parts, the grammar consisting of rules describing correct sentence formation and the lexicon listing words and phrases that can be used in the sentences.

Some use " lexicology " as a synonym for theoretical lexicography ; others use it to mean a branch of linguistics pertaining to the inventory of words in a particular language.

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation / stress, or implied context ( words in a lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology ).

In linguistics, a numeral is a word class ( part of speech ) of number words, specifically of counting words such as English ' two ', ' eleven ', and ' seventy-seven '.

In other words, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics, and phonology to theoretical linguistics.

In formal linguistics, puns can often be found embedded within the etymological meaning or usage of words, which in turn may be buried over time and unknown to native speakers.

The linguistics of the time was overwhelmingly neogrammarian and insisted that the only scientific study of language was to study the history and development of words across time ( the diachronic approach, in Saussure's terms ).

* Stress ( linguistics ), the emphasis given to particular syllables or words in speaking

In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of discourse ( termed texts ).

* Tone ( linguistics ), the pitch and pitch changes in words of certain languages

A landmark in modern corpus linguistics was the publication by Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis of Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English in 1967, a work based on the analysis of the Brown Corpus, a carefully compiled selection of current American English, totalling about a million words drawn from a wide variety of sources.

* Logorrhoea ( linguistics ), an excessive flow of words more generally

* Contrast ( linguistics ), expressing distinctions between words

* Sentence ( linguistics ), words grouped meaningfully to express a statement, question, exclamation, request or command

As defined in linguistics, a sentence is an abstract entity — a string of words divorced from non-linguistic context — as opposed to an utterance, which is a concrete example of a speech act in a specific context.

By comparison Whorf's other work in linguistics, the development of such concepts as the allophone and the cryptotype, and the formulation of " Whorf's law " in Uto-Aztecan historical linguistics, have met with broad acceptance.

In the realm of linguistics, Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff have been influential ( both have also become notable as political commentators ).

These metrical inconsistencies ( along with a knowledge of comparative linguistics ) have led scholars to infer the presence of a lost digamma in the original Ionic text of the poem.

In biology and artificial intelligence research, state machines or hierarchies of state machines have been used to describe neurological systems and in linguistics — to describe the grammars of natural languages.

Graph-theoretic methods, in various forms, have proven particularly useful in linguistics, since natural language often lends itself well to discrete structure.

Various " grammar frameworks " have been developed in theoretical linguistics since the mid 20th century, in particular under the influence of the idea of a " universal grammar " in the United States.

Scholarly techniques such as the recording of oral history, historical linguistics, archaeology and genetics have been crucial.

Grimm's results have been greatly modified by the wider range of comparison and improved methods of investigation that now characterize linguistics, and many questions he raised will probably remain obscure, but his book's influence has been profound.

What basic concepts / terms do I have to know to talk about linguistics?

Although Chomsky's theory of a generative grammar has been popular with some linguists since the 1950s, many criticisms of the basic assumptions of generative theory have been put forth by cognitive-functional linguistics, who argue that language structure is created through language use.

In the past 60 years, MIT's educational disciplines have expanded beyond the physical sciences and engineering into fields such as biology, economics, linguistics, political science, and management.

In addition to all universities in Maharashtra, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda ( Gujarat ), Osmania University ( Andhra Pradesh ), Gulbarga university ( Karnataka ), Devi Ahilya University of Indore and Goa University ( Panaji ) all have special departments for higher studies in Marathi linguistics.

Two professors of linguistics have claimed that de Vere wrote not only the works of Shakespeare, but most of what is memorable in English literature during his lifetime, with such names as Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, John Lyly, George Peele, George Gascoigne, Raphael Holinshed, Robert Greene, Thomas Phaer, and Arthur Golding being among dozens of further pseudonyms of de Vere.

Peirce's definition of the term " semiotic " as the study of necessary features of signs also has the effect of distinguishing the discipline from linguistics as the study of contingent features that the world's languages happen to have acquired in the course of human evolution.

Some influences have been drawn from phenomenological analysis, cognitive psychology, and structuralist and cognitivist linguistics, and visual anthropology / sociology.

But the rise of Indo-European comparative linguistics absorbed so much attention and enthusiasm that Uralic linguistics was all but eclipsed in Europe ; in Hungary, the only European country that would have had a vested interest in the family ( Finland and Estonia being under Russian rule ), the political climate was too hostile for the development of Uralic comparative linguistics.