When you read, sing, study, write, chat or daydream, language is at the heart of your experience. The study of linguistics is not just an investigation into words or sounds, but into the heart of humanity. Finally, linguistics is fun and will make you a more rounded person with interesting things to say. Have you ever wondered why sentences such as, "the friend I came to the party with" are incorrect according to your high school English teacher, at least?
Are you confused by the subjunctive of Spanish or French or by the use of the dative or accusative in German? Do you wonder why so many people learn English, but why so few English speakers learn other languages? All of these are questions that make linguists' hearts stir and, although we might not always have the answers, we definitely enjoy trying to find them.
Skip to main content. What is Linguistics? Linguistics looks at: The general phenomenon of human language. Earlier hominids could have had a sort of language that used a more restricted range of consonants and vowels, and the changes in the vocal tract may only have had the effect of making speech faster and more expressive.
Some researchers even propose that language began as sign language, then gradually or suddenly switched to the vocal modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue.
These issues and many others are undergoing lively investigation among linguists, psychologists, and biologists. One important question is the degree to which precursors of human language ability are found in animals.
For instance, how similar are apes' systems of thought to ours? Do they include things that hominids would find it useful to express to each other? There is indeed some consensus that apes' spatial abilities and their ability to negotiate their social world provide foundations on which the human system of concepts could be built.
A related question is what aspects of language are unique to language and what aspects just draw on other human abilities not shared with other primates. This issue is particularly controversial. Some researchers claim that everything in language is built out of other human abilities: the ability for vocal imitation, the ability to memorize vast amounts of information both needed for learning words , the desire to communicate, the understanding of others' intentions and beliefs, and the ability to cooperate.
Current research seems to show that these human abilities are absent or less highly developed in apes. Other researchers acknowledge the importance of these factors but argue that hominid brains required additional changes that adapted them specifically for language. How did these changes take place? Some researchers claim that they came in a single leap, creating through one mutation the complete system in the brain by which humans express complex meanings through combinations of sounds.
These people also tend to claim that there are few aspects of language that are not already present in animals. Other researchers suspect that the special properties of language evolved in stages, perhaps over some millions of years, through a succession of hominid lines. In an early stage, sounds would have been used to name a wide range of objects and actions in the environment, and individuals would be able to invent new vocabulary items to talk about new things.
In order to achieve a large vocabulary, an important advance would have been the ability to 'digitize' signals into sequences of discrete speech sounds - consonants and vowels - rather than unstructured calls. This would require changes in the way the brain controls the vocal tract and possibly in the way the brain interprets auditory signals although the latter is again subject to considerable dispute.
These two changes alone would yield a communication system of single signals - better than the chimpanzee system but far from modern language. A next plausible step would be the ability to string together several such 'words' to create a message built out of the meanings of its parts.
This is still not as complex as modern language. It could have a rudimentary 'me Tarzan, you Jane' character and still be a lot better than single-word utterances. In fact, we do find such 'protolanguage' in two-year-old children, in the beginning efforts of adults learning a foreign language, and in so-called 'pidgins', the systems cobbled together by adult speakers of disparate languages when they need to communicate with each other for trade or other sorts of cooperation.
This has led some researchers to propose that the system of 'protolanguage' is still present in modern human brains, hidden under the modern system except when the latter is impaired or not yet developed. A final change or series of changes would add to 'protolanguage' a richer structure, encompassing such grammatical devices as plural markers, tense markers, relative clauses, and complement clauses "Joe thinks that the earth is flat".
Again, some hypothesize that this could have been a purely cultural development, and some think it required genetic changes in the brains of speakers. The jury is still out. When did this all happen? Again, it's very hard to tell. We do know that something important happened in the human line between , and 50, years ago: This is when we start to find cultural artifacts such as art and ritual objects, evidence of what we would call civilization.
What changed in the species at that point? Did they just get smarter even if their brains didn't suddenly get larger? Did they develop language all of a sudden?
Did they become smarter because of the intellectual advantages that language affords such as the ability to maintain an oral history over generations?
Studying how people use language — what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine — can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do. Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time.
They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon. The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects. Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.
Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly. New Stanford research shows that sentences that frame one gender as the standard for the other can unintentionally perpetuate biases.
New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.
Census data. People speak roughly 7, languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it. Fifth-year PhD student Kate Lindsey recently returned to the United States after a year of documenting an obscure language indigenous to the South Pacific nation.
In a research project spanning eight countries, two Stanford students search for Esperanto, a constructed language, against the backdrop of European populism.
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