the scientific study of language. The word was first used in the middle of the 19th century to emphasize the difference between a newer approach to the study of language that was then developing and the more traditional approach of philology. The...

Linguistics can be defined as the science of language. Language, however, may be approached from a number of different perspectives, and it plays such a central role in human life that many disciplines are concerned with language in one way or another....

Scientific discipline with the goal of describing language and speech in all relevant theoretical and practical aspects and their relation to adjoining disciplines. Insofar as linguistics deals with human languages as a sign system, it can be...

As *Lévi-Strauss (1985:115–20) has pointed out, the emic level is the level of perception. People do not understand sounds as sounds, but through the phonological structure of their language. Likewise, people understand actions or words only...

Study of the nature and structure of language. It traditionally encompasses semantics, syntax, and phonology. Synchronic linguistic studies aim to describe a language as it exists at a given time; diachronic studies trace a language's historical...

/ / n. (LSG) Any generalization about the grammatical facts of a language which is, in the opinion of the linguist making the judgement, an important and independent fact about the language which needs to be separately expressed in the grammar....

General theoretical premise for the linguistic description of natural languages. Through abstracting from individual observances in individual languages, linguistic theory designs models for the description of general grammatical properties of all...

A collection of texts of written or spoken language that are stored in computers and can be evaluated by computer on the basis of word occurrences, word frequencies, word contexts, etc. Chisholm, D. 1985. Computer-assisted research in German language...

In American structuralism, such phonological features that can be broken down into further segments, that is, can be individually extracted from a linear series of sounds in the context of speech. Segmentability is a purely theoretical postulate, since...

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Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. Theoretical (or general) linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields, such as the study of language...