Branches of Linguistics (with Definitions, Explanations and Examples)

Definitions of Language

“Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex
systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; and a language is any specific example of
such a system.

” Robinson’s definition of language says “Man’s ability to make noise with the open organ and marks in
papers or some other materials by means of which groups of people speaking the same language are able to
interact and cooperate as a whole.”

Wale Osisanwo sees language as “Human vocal noise or the arbitrary graphic representation of this noise used
systematically and conventionally by members if speech community for the purpose of communication.

A. C. Gimson submits that language is “A system of conventional signals used for communication by a whole
community.” He stresses that the pattern of convention covers a system of significant sound units otherwise
called phonemes; the inflection and arrangement of words called grammar and the association of meaning
with words, that is, semantics.

What can be gathered from all these definitions is that language is:

“A system of arbitrary symbols that are conventionally structured by members of a speech community where
a particular language is used. In other word, a language is a system of signs (e.g. gestures, vocal sounds or
written symbols) that encodes information.”

The Nature and Characteristics of Language

The characteristics of language discussed below are sometimes called the “design features” of Language.
These features include the following:

 Mode of acquisition – Language is acquired by learning

 It is conventional
 It is systematic; that is, it possesses structure.
 Language is systematic, structured, patterned – it has rules and principles.
 We use language in the process of interaction: it is a unique attribute of man (it is exclusively
human), it is human-specie specific.
 Language makes use of arbitrary symbols: language is a matter of personal opinion. It is arbitrary.
There is no connection or relationship between the signified (object) and the signifier (symbol)
 Semanticity – language is meaningful because words have meanings.

Design Features of Language – C. F. Hockett

 Vocal-auditory channel—signal modality involves vocalization and sound perception.

 Broadcast transmission—everyone in earshot can hear what is said.
 Rapid fading—signals fade quickly, and do not ‘clog the airwaves’.
 Interchangeability—any speaker can also be a listener and vice versa.
 Total feedback—speakers can hear everything that they say.
 Specialisation (speech as ‘trigger’)—linguistic signals accomplish their results not via raw energy
(as in pushing or biting) but by their fit to the receiver’s perceptual and cognitive systems.
 Semanticity—some linguistic units have specific meanings (words or morphemes).
 Arbitrariness—meanings are generally arbitrarily related to signals, rather than iconic.
 Discreteness—each utterance differs from all others discretely (by at least a distinctive feature).
 Displacement—meanings about past, future or distant referents can be encoded and understood.
 Productivity/openness—new utterances can be readily coined and understood.
 Duality of patterning—meaningless units (phonemes) are combined into meaningful ones
(morphemes), which can then be combined into larger meaningful units (sentences).
 traditional (cultural) transmission—languages are learned, not genetically encoded
 Prevarication—it is possible to lie.
 Reflexivity—it is possible to use language to talk about language.
 Learnability—it is possible for a speaker of one language to learn additional languages.

Distinction between Language and a Language

You may wonder if there is any distinction at all; but there is! Language is a general notion, an abstract
concept in the mind and a universal phenomenon. A language, on its own part, is a specific instance or
manifestation of the phenomenon known as language.

Levels of Language Study

Language, as a very complex phenomenon, has been broken down into more manageable components for
easy study. We can see these components from three (3) broad
categorisations: Phonology, Grammar and Semantics. Embedded in these 3 major categorisations of the
level of language study are the forms and functions of language. Under phonology, we study phonetics and
other speech-related disciplines; under grammar, we consider syntax, morphology and other related fields
while under semantics, we deal with meaning of utterances in their various shades. Lexical relations
(antonymy, synonymy, hyponymy, etc.) come under semantics. Other concepts such as intentional meaning,
conventional meaning, connotation, denotation, etc. all come under semantic. In addition, applied linguistics
falls into this category also. Let us see each of these branches of linguistics or levels of language study as
shown below:

Branches of Linguistics (with Definitions, Explanations and Examples)

Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics, one of the branches of linguistics, as a branch of cognitive science, investigates how we
acquire language, how we produce language and how we acquire language. In other words,
Psycholinguistics examines language acquisition, language production and language comprehension. It is
the study mental aspects of language and speech. It looks critically into how we represent and process
language in the brain.

Alan Garnham, in his book Psycholinguistics: Central Topics, defines Psycholinguistics as “the study of the
mental mechanisms that make it possible for people to use language. It is a scientific discipline whose goal
is a coherent theory of the way in which language is produced and understood.” Psycholinguistics is a
branch of both linguistics and psychology. The American psychologist, Jacob Robert Kantor introduced the
term ‘Psycholinguistics’ in his book, An Objective Psychology of Grammar, published in 1936.
 The two key questions that Psycholinguistics seeks to answer are:

 What knowledge of language do we need to use language?

 What are the cognitive processes (perception, memory, and thinking) involved in the ordinary use of
language? (See Psychology of Language by David Carroll)

Semantics

Semantics, one of the major branches of linguistics, is the study of meaning. This branch of linguistics has a
lot of definitions as many scholars have advanced; but basically, Semantics has to do with the functions of
signs in language. Semantics differentiates between two major concepts on which meaning rests. These
are Sense and Reference. According to linguists, sense has to do with the how a word relates to other words

in a language while reference deals with how a word relates to real word concepts. In other words, the sense
of a word has to do with its linguistic boundaries in a particular language and the reference of a word has to
do with which concepts it refers to in the real world. Sometimes, it is problematic to distinguish between
sense and reference because of the biases in languages and the varying linguistic boundaries between
conceptual features of language. One of the interests of Semantics is the study of meaning in terms of
words and sentence relationships. We refer to this as lexical relations. Some semantic relationship between
words include the following:

Synonym

Paronym

This is a type of synonym. It has to do with words associated with meanings which also have great
similarities in form. For example:

 Affect/effect
 Aural/oral
 Ingenuous/ingenious
 Access/assess
 Academic/academia
 Believe/belief
 Imminent/Immanent

Antonyms

Antonyms are words that have the opposite meaning. They are words that mean the opposite of another
word. When we talk of oppositeness, we are talking about logical category. Antonyms have 3 types:

Complementary pairs

These are antonyms in which when one quality is present, it means the other quality is absent. The two
qualities involved are mutually exclusive. There can be no middle ground or an intermediate state. For

example:

 male/female
 single/ married
 not pregnant/pregnant
 off/on

Gradable pairs

These are antonyms that give room for gradual transition between two poles. In this case, there is a
possibility of making a comparison such as:

 a little/a lo
 good/bad
 hot/ cold
 wet/dry

Relational opposites

For these antonyms, they share the same semantic features but the focus or direction are in reversion. For
example:

 tie/untie
 buy/sell
 give/receive
 teacher/pupil
 father/son
 mother/daughter
 dependent/independent

Homonyms

A homonym is a word that has the same spelling and the same pronunciation as another word but which has
a meaning different from it. In other words, a way to identify a homonym is to look out for words with the
same spellings and same pronunciation but which usually have different meanings. (Read more
on homonyms)

Homophones

A homophone is a word that has the same pronunciation with another word but which has a different
spelling and meaning. (See Homophones in English)

Homographs

A homograph is a word that has the same spelling as another word but which has a different meaning and a
different pronunciation. (See Homographs in English)

Other lexical relations include: polysemy, hyponymy, taxonyms, holonyms, meronyms, figures of speech or
tropes, etc. it is important to note that we can describe all semantic relationships in all languages based
on similarity or contiguity.

Pragmatics
 Pragmatics, which is one of the interesting branches of linguistics, has to deal meaning beyond the surface
level; that is, it engages meaning beyond the literal level. Pragmatics highlights the study of meaning in the
interactional context. As language is an instrument of interaction, Pragmatics focuses on what implied
meanings, that is what people mean when they make use of language. Semantics deals with what a word
means while Pragmatics deals with what is meant by a word. Pragmatics has more to do with what a speaker
means by a word rather than what the word means in itself.

This is why Pragmatics concerns the negotiation of meaning between the speaker and the listener. It takes
into consideration the context of utterance. In essence, Pragmatics is the study of the aspects of meaning and
language use that are dependent on the speaker, the addressee and other features of the context of utterance,
such as the following:

 principles of communication
 speaker’s goals
 presupposition
 deixis
 speech acts
 implicature

Without Pragmatics, it would be difficult to understand language and responses to it; without Pragmatics, we
would not have a holistic understanding of what people mean and their intentions. Let us consider this
popular sentence:

 ‘Can you pass the salt?’

If we consider this question on the surface, the speaker is asking the listener if they have the ability to pass
the salt through the use of the modal auxiliary, ‘can’ which deals with ability. But the pragmatic import of
this interrogative sentence is beyond the ability to pass the salt. It means:

 ‘Will you pass the salt?

So in asking the question, the speaker is simply directing the listener to pass the salt. This is what J. L.
Austin deals with in his seminal book, How to do Things with Words.

Semiotics

This brach of linguistics has to do with the study of signs and sign-using behaviour. One of its
founders, Ferdinand de Saussure, defines it as the study of ‘the life of signs within society’. Another major
proponent of Semiotics is Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce defines a sign as “something which stands to
somebody for something”. He believes that a sign can never have a fixed meaning because we have to
constantly qualify what meaning means. (See the Meaning of meaning).

Peirce’s Categorisation of Signs

Peirce categorises signs into 3 major types. These are:

Icon
 An icon is that which looks almost exactly (if not exactly) like what is refers to. It is a picture or symbol
which we recognise universally to be representative of something. It is a word or sign which stands for
something else. Examples includes pictures in different forms, a road sign for falling rocks, the Roman
numeral ‘II’ representing the number two (2), etc.

Index

An index is an indicator or sign of something. We associated an index with its referent. For instance, smoke
is a sign of fire, dark clouds are indexical of imminent rainfall, a signpost or signboard is pointer or an
index of a particular location.

Symbol

A symbol is something that stands for or represents something else, especially an object representing an
abstraction or a concept; it is a sign with a specific meaning: a written or printed sign or character that
represents something in a specific context. Note that a symbol relates to its referent only by convention (this
is why we say language is conventional because there is no relationship between the signified (the concept
or idea behind the sign) and the signifier (a set of speech sounds or marks on a page); it is a matter of
convention. Socio-cultural contexts also determine what is symbolic and what is not. Modern semioticians
who have applied Peirce and Saussure’s principles to a variety of fields, such as aesthetics, anthropology,
psychoanalysis, communications, semantics, etc. include these leading scholars: Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and others.

Grammar

The discussions on branches of linguistics will not be complete without grammar. Grammatical level deals
with the morphology and the syntax of a language. The traditional grammar is the earliest form developed
by Socrates, Aristotle and Plato. They invented the Parts of Speech and came up with definitions, they are
the Prescriptive School. They defined grammar as a body of prescribed rules which is aimed at guiding the
use of a language. A school later came up, the empiricist movement, which gave birth to the Structural
grammar who based their argument on what is observed and not what is defined. They were averse to
prescribing and favours describing descriptive grammar as against prescriptive grammar.

They define grammar as a body of descriptive statements about a language. For instance, the grammar of
English is a description of its word classes: the stringing of words together in acceptable sequence such as
phrases, clauses, sentences, etc. Their emphasis is on form and function of a word and not what a rule says
about the word. Consider this sentence, for example:

 The disbursements have started.

‘Disbursement’ is a noun but it is not a place, person, animal, or thing as prescriptive grammarians have
defined nouns. (See the post: What is a Noun?)

Grammar is also a body of instructions that can be studied in schools. (See What is Grammar?) Grammar
examines how words or morphemes combine to form meaningful sentences. It is a set of constraints on the
possible sequences of symbols expressed as rules or principles. Syntax is the basic ingredient of grammar.
Grammar tells us the difference between sets of sentences. We can identify five basic units of grammatical
structure. These are: morphemes, word, phrase, clause and sentence. There are posts dedicated to each of
these 5 aspects. See them here:

Morphology

Morphology is a branch of linguistics which deals with the study of words; precisely the study of the internal
structure of words. The term originates from the Greek and it deals with ‘morph’ which means ‘shape’ or
‘form’. Morphology is a branch of linguistics that came into existence in 1859. The German linguist, August
Schleicher, first made use of the term to describe the study of the form of words. Morphology deals with
word formation out of morphemes. It is the study and description of word formation (such
as inflection, derivation, and compounding) in language; it is the system of word-forming elements and
processes in a language. Morphemes are the building blocks of morphology and they are the smallest
meaning-bearing units of language (O’Grady, 1997). Read more in this post on Morphemes.

Syntax

Edward J. Vajda informs us that ‘Syntax’ is a derivative of the Greek word syntaxis, which
means arrangement. Syntax deals with phrase and sentence formation out of words. Syntax is the study of
the arrangement of words in sentences, clauses, and phrases; it is also the study of the formation
of sentences and the relationship between their component parts. A major concern of syntax is ‘word order’
which is a main device for showing the relationship among words. Usually, the subject comes first in a
sentence; the verbs follows and the object or complement follows the verb. (See Patterns of the English
Sentence) and (The Syntactic Elements of the Clause Structure). When the order changes, it may affect
the meaning of the utterance. Syntax is the grammar, structure, or order of the elements in a language
statement. In essence, syntax is the way in which we put linguistic elementstogether to form constituents
such as phrases or clauses. We also refer to the part of grammardealing with this as syntax. In a sentence,
syntax tells us which word comes before and after another word. Syntax deals with arrangement of words to
form meaningful sentences.

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is an interface between sociology and linguistics or language and the society. This accounts
for the definition of sociolinguistics as the study of patterns and variations in language within a society
orcommunity. Sociolinguistics, another branch of linguistics, focuses on the way people use language to
express social class, group status, gender, or ethnicity, and it looks at how they make choices about the form
of language they use. It also examines the way people use language to negotiate their roles in a society and
to achieve positions of power. Sociolinguistics also deals with the assignment of roles to various languages
that exist in a speech community such as First Language, Official Language, National Language, etc.

Discourse Analysis

This branch of linguistics is the study of language of sentences; the analysis of features of language that
extend beyond the limits of a sentence. A scholar suggests that the term discourse analysis is very
ambiguous. According to him, Discourse Analysis “refer mainly to the linguistic analysis of naturally
occurring connected speech or written discourse.” Explaining further, discourse analysis “refers to attempts
to study the organisation of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore to study larger
linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts.” Discourse Analysis takes linguistic
enquiry beyond the clause-bound ‘objects’ of grammar and semantics to the level of analysing ‘utterances’,
‘texts’ and ‘speech events’. It engages itself with meaning that cannot be located in the ‘linguistic system’.
 Discourse Analysis deals with language use in social contexts; and in particular with interaction or dialogue
between speakers.

Deborah Tannen, in explaining Discourse analysis, defines it as “the analysis of language ‘beyond the
sentence’. She submits that this analysis contrasts with the typical analysis by modern linguistics which
mainly deals with the study of grammar: the study of smaller bits of language, such as sounds (phonetics and
phonology), parts of words (morphology), meaning (semantics), and the order of words in sentences
(syntax). According to her, “Discourse analysts study larger chunks of language as they flow together.”
Discourse analysts examine larger discourse context so that they ca determine how it affects the meaning of
a sentence. For instance, let us look at the example of two signs/sentences at a swimming pool given
by Charles Fillmore:

 Please use the toilet, not the pool.

 Pool for members only.

If these two sentences are read separately, they might seem reasonable; but when we take them together as a
single discourse, we will have to check again the interpretation of the first sentence having read the second
sentence. This is what discourse analysts do. Rechecking the first sentence to properly determine its
meaning is known in Discourse Analysis as Reframing.

Stylistics

This is one of the most interesting branches of linguistics that explores the linguistic choices available to
users of language in a particular language. We cannot talk about stylistics without talking about style.
Stylistics is the study of textual meaning. It arose from the Russian formalist approach to literary meaning.
Stylistics deals with style and its consequent meaning. Stylistics is the study of linguistic styles in a language.
It is the use of linguistic tools to arrive at the meaning of an utterance or a text. Stylistics explores how
readers interact with the language of (mainly literary) texts in order to explain how we understand, and how
texts affect us when we read them. Stylistics is also the study of the devices in languages (such as rhetorical
figures and syntactical patterns) that are considered to produce expressive or literary style. Modern stylistics
makes use of the tools of formal linguistic analysis alongside methods of literary criticism and the goal is to
try to isolate characteristic uses and functions of language and rhetoric rather than advance normative or
prescriptive rules and patterns.

Phonology

Phonology, a major branch of linguistics, deals with sounds of a language. It is the study of the patterns of
sounds in a language. It deals with how speech sounds are organised and used in a language; especially how
the sounds are organised in the mind and how they are used to convey meaning. The phonological system of
a language has to do with two basic foci: the inventory of sounds and their features and the rules which
govern how sounds interact with one another. Phonology is related to other branches of linguistics like
phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Phonology is different from phonetics. Phonetics
analyses the production or articulation of speech sounds irrespective of the language, but phonology
analyses the sound patterns of a particular language. Phonetics is concerned with the physical properties of
sounds while phonology deals more with how the sounds function in a language. There are some other
aspects to Phonology which study specific things. These include: Generative Phonology, Auto-segmental
Phonology, Metrical Phonology, Lexical Phonology, etc. The person who specialises in Phonology is a
Phonologist.

Phonetics

Phonetics, closely related with phonology, is another important branch of linguistics that studies speech
sounds. It deals with how we produce speech sounds and how we perceive speech sounds. There are three
major aspects to the study of phonetics: articulatory phonetics (the exploration of how the human vocal
tract or apparatus produce speech sound, the way the articulators or speech organs interact together to
produce sounds); acoustic phonetics (studies the sound waves the human vocal apparatuses produce; it
deals with the physical or acoustic properties of speech sounds) and auditory phonetics (this studies or
determines how the human ear perceives speech sounds which the articulators produce). There are other
posts on this site that focus specifically on some of these branches of linguistics in a more detailed manner.
You can check them out.

Prepared by:

JENNIFER BAUTISTA ABELLANIDA

Instructor