+-- {: .rightHandSide} +-- {: .toc .clickDown tabindex="0"} ### Context #### Linguistics +-- {: .hide} [[!include linguistics - contents]] =-- =-- =-- \tableofcontents ## Idea **Linguistics** is the (scientific) study of natural human language. See a reasonably good page at [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics). It aims to develop a toolbox for description of concrete languages (applied linguistics, descriptive grammar), their classification (language families, language typology) as well as to understand how language functions (e.g. relations to cognition and social constraints) and changes (historical and comparative linguistics). The description of a concrete language includes organizational principles called grammar and distinguished constants called lexic. The grammar is described at several hierarchical levels (phonetics, [[phonology]], [[morphology]], [[syntax]]). There is an opposition between * individual expressions (Franc. parole) and abstract system of the language (Franc. langage) * snapshot of a system in time (synchronic) and its development (diachronic) * knowledge of a language (ability to speak) and knowledge about a language (theoretical description) Linguistics sign has also a dichotomy between its meaning and its expression. Linguistic systems are often also at several levels from personal idiom/idiolect, through social sociolects, regional dialects to languages and language families. There is no fundamental agreement of entirely consistent boundary of what is a boundary level of a language as opposed to dialects or language groups. Also there is no universal criterium of what a boundary of a word is, that is what a word is. ## Phonology *[[phonology|Phonology]]* is the subfield of linguistics that studies the grammatical notion of sound. The smallest unit of phonology is the _phoneme_, which is what is traditionally called a sound. Phonology is interested in such areas like vowel harmony, contrast, stress, allophony, phonological rules, phonological constraints etc. To read more, see [the page on phonology](https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/phonology). ## Syntax Syntax is the subfield of linguistics that studies sentence constructions. Through this, syntax is interested in grammaticality (valid, well-formed sentences) and it studies what makes sentences grammatical and what makes them ungrammatical. Since Chomsky's seminal work _Remarks on nominalization_, linguists have mostly adapted a binary branching tree representation to model the syntactic structure of natural languages. It is of importance to note that the word "syntax" is used in many other fields as well, which differ from the syntax of linguistics (however, there are thematic similarities: the syntax used in logic also deals with well-formed expressions and validity). #### Grammar of formal languages Linguists may deploy formal methods to analyse the [[syntax (linguistics)]] of natural language (see also [[syntax]] in the sense of logics). [[formal grammar|Formal grammars]] characterize which [[string (computer science)|strings]] of [[words]] are considered grammatical, they come in many different flavours: * [[context-free grammar]] * [[pregroup grammar]] * [[categorial grammar]] * [[mildly context-sensitive grammar]] * [[context-sensitive grammar]] * [[formal grammar#unrestrictedgrammar|unrestricted grammar]] These different frameworks come in a hierarchy of expressive power, see [[Chomsky hierarchy]]. ## Semantics Semantics is the subfield of linguistics that studies meaning. Many formal theories of meaning are based on the principle of [[compositionality]]: the semantics of a sentence is a function of the meanings of its words, and of its grammatical structure (cf. *[[linguistic semantics]]*). * [[Montague grammar|Montague semantics]] * [[categorical compositional distributional semantics]] * [[dependent type theoretic methods in natural language semantics]] ## Pragmatics Pragmatics is concerned with the meaning of language in context. * [[monad (in linguistics)]] * [[language game]] ## Related Concepts * [[phonology]] * [[syntax]], [[semantics (linguistics)]] * [[semantics of a programming language]], [[semantics]] (in model theoretic sense) * [[semiotics]] * [[lambda calculus]], [[type theory]] * [[context-free grammar]] * [[monad (in computer science)]] * [[continuation-passing style]] * [[linear logic]], [[modal logic]] * [[mathematical linguistics]] * [[transcendental grammar]] * [[DisCoCat]], [[DisCoPy]] ## Literature ### Linguistics per se * diverse materials and corpora can be found at extensive web site [The Linguist List](http://www.linguistlist.org) * Wikipedia [linguistics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics), [philology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philology), [phonetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetics), [morphology (linguistics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_%28linguistics%29), [syntax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax), [semantics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics), [pragmatics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics), [semiotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics), [linguistic typology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology), [historical linguistics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics), [comparative linguistics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics) * [LaTeX for linguists](http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/clmt/latex4ling) * F. de Saussure, _Cours de linguistique générale_ * André Martinet, _Éléments de linguistique générale_, (Engl. transl.: Elements of General Linguistics) * Adrian Akmajian, Richard A. Demers, Ann K. Farmer, Robert M. Harnish, _Linguistics, an introduction to language and communication_ * John Lyons, _Semantics_; _Linguistics semantics_ * Bernard Comrie, Language universals and linguistic typology, syntax and morphology, 1981, 1989 * Peter Ladefoged, Keith Johnson, A course in phonetics * Steven Pinker, _The language instinct_, 1994 * Winfred P. Lehmann, _Historical linguistics: an introduction_ * George Lakoff, _Women, fire and dangerous things_, 1987 * Ronald Langacker, _Foundations of cognitive grammar_, vol. 1, 1987, vol. 2, 1991 * Pieter A. M. Seuren, The logic of language, vol. II of Language from within; (vol. I: Language in cognition) Oxford University Press 2010 * [[David Mumford]], _Grammar isn't merely part of language_, 2016 [blog](https://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2016/grammar.html) * M. Tallerman, _Understanding syntax_ (1st ed, 1998, 5th ed. 2020) * [[Umberto Eco]], _Semiotics and the philosophy of language_, Indiana University Press 1984 ### Category theory and linguistics On [[category theory|category theoretic]] methods in linguistics: * [[Joachim Lambek]], _Pregroups and natural language processing_, The Mathematical Intelligencer **28** (2006) 41–48 [[pdf](http://www.math.mcgill.ca/rags/JAC/124/Lambek-Pregroups-s.pdf)] * [[Bob Coecke]], [[Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh]], Stephen Clark, _Mathematical foundations for a compositional distributional model of meaning_, in the Lambek Festschrift, special issue of Linguistic Analysis (2010) [[arxiv/1003.4394](https://arxiv.org/abs/1003.4394)] On applications of [[modal logic]] to linguistics: * [[Lawrence S. Moss]], Hans-Jörg Tiede: _Applications of Modal Logic in Linguistics_, in: *Studies in Logic and Practical Reasoning **3** (2007) 1031-1076 [<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/S1570-2464(07)80022-X">doi:10.1016/S1570-2464(07)80022-X</a>, [pdf](https://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~frank/MLHandbook/19.pdf)] On using [[tensor networks]] in linguistics: * [[Vasily Pestun]], [[Yiannis Vlassopoulos]], *Tensor network language model*, [[arXiv:1710.10248](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10248)] category: philosophy [[!redirects natural language]] [[!redirects natural languages]] [[!redirects formal linguistics]]