Q.1 What is Linguistics? Define its Scope and levels of linguistics.

Linguistics is a growing and interesting area of study, having a direct hearing on

fields as diverse as education, anthropology, sociology, language teaching,
cognitive psychology and philosophy. Linguistics refers to the scientific study of
language. The word ‘linguistics’ is derived from the Latin words ‘lingua’ meaning
‘tongue’ and ‘istics’ meaning ‘knowledge’. According to the Cambridge
Dictionary, linguistics refers to ‘the scientific study of the structure and
development of language in general or of particular languages’. The study of
linguistics comes from the natural curiosity of man about the particulars of the
language he speaks, evaluated through different perspectives. According
to Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the most famous linguists, “A linguistic system is
a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of
ideas.” This article looks into different aspects of linguistics, a science that studies
the role of language in personal and social levels.

The Scope of Linguistics

Linguistics involves a vast, complex and systematic study, with different core areas
such as phonology or phonetics, morphology, syntax and semantics. It is also
intertwined with various other disciplines and contains fields like sociolinguistics,
psycholinguistics etc. Linguistics, unlike past ages, is being recognized as an
independent discipline of study, thus paving the way to a lot of developments
and research. Linguistics is a descriptive study and not a prescriptive one and
describes language in all aspects. It is a subject that keeps changing, as languages
change.
It is a very dynamic domain of study. Although some aspects of the subject are
based on historical notes and few sets of rules, it continues to evolve out of old
boundaries into new, with developments that occur in different languages.
Linguistics is applied to different fields of study, and this makes it a very important
discipline. The application of linguistics extends from anthropology to speech
therapy in modern medicine. Extensive researches and studies are conducted on the
linguistic perspectives of every language, aimed at tracing the characteristics of the
language as well as in employing the scope of linguistics into understanding the
specific characteristics of literature, including prose and poems in different
languages.

1. ―Linguistics observes language in action as a means for determining how language has
developed, how it functions today, and how it is currently evolving.‖ (G. Duffy)
2. ―Linguistics is concerned with the nature of human language, how it is learned and what part
it plays in the life of the individual and the community.‖ (S. Pit Corder)

Levels of Linguistic Analysis:

In studying language which is the subject-matter of linguistics, we mark or sub-divide the area in
order to study it in an analytical and systematic way. Language has a hierarchical structure. This
means that it is made up of units which are themselves made up of smaller units which are made
of still smaller units till we have the smallest indivisible unit, i.e. a single distinguishable sound,
called a phoneme. Or we can put it the other way round, and say that single sounds or phonemes
combine together to make larger units of sounds, these combine into a larger meaningful unit
called a morpheme; morphemes combine to form larger units of words, and words combine to
form a large unit or sentence and several sentences combine or interconnect to make a unified
piece of speech or writing, which we call a text or discourse. At each stage (or level), there are
certain rules that operate which permit the occurrence and combination of smaller units. So we
can say that rule of phonology determine the occurrence and combination of particular phoneme,
rules of word-formation cover the behaviour of particular morphemes; rules of sentence-
formation determine the combination and positioning of words in a sentence. Each level is a
system in its own right. It is important to remember that, because of the existence of rules at each
level, we can analyse each levelindependently of the other. This means that if we study one level,
e.g. phonology or the sound-system, we need not necessarily study another level, say that of
sentence-formation. We can study phonology on its own, and syntax on its own. Although these
levels are linked in that one is lower in the hierarchy and another is higher in the hierarchy, and
the higher level includes the lower, still each level is independent because it has its own rules of
operation that can be described, analysed and understood.
We can represent these levels in the following manner, with each level of analysis corresponding
to each level of the structure of the language:

Levels of Analysis Levels of Structure

Phonetics and Phonology SOUND

Letters (Graphology)

Morphology WORD FORMATION

Syntax SENTENCE-FORMATION

Semantics MEANINGS

Discourse CONNECTED SENTENCES

However, we can study these links only after we describe and analyse structure at each level
separately. Thus Phonetics studies language at the level of sounds: How sounds are articulated
by the human speech mechanism and received by the auditory mechanism, how sounds can be
distinguished and characterised by the manner in which they are produced. Phonology studies the
combination of sounds into organised units of speech, the formation of syllables and larger
units. It describes the sound system of a particular language and the combination and
distribution of sounds which occur in that language. Classification is made on the basis of the
concept of the phoneme, i.e. a distinctive, contrasted sound unit, e.g. /m/, //, /p/. These
distinct sounds enter into combination with others. The rules of combination are different for
different languages.
Though phonology is considered to be the surface or superficial level of language (as it is
concrete and not abstract like meaning), there are some aspects of it such as tone which
contribute to the meaning of an utterance.

Morphology studies the patterns of formation of words by the combination of sounds into
minimal distinctive units of meaning called morphemes. A morpheme cannot be broken up
because if it is, it will no longer make sense, e.g. a morpheme ‗bat‘ is made up of three
sounds: /b/ /æ/ and /t/. This combination makes up the single morpheme ‗bat‘ and if broken up,
it will no longer carry the meaning of ‗bat‘. Words can be made up of single morphemes such as
‗bat‘ or combinations of morphemes, e.g. ‗bats‘ is made up of two morphemes: ‗bat‘ + ‗s‘.
Morphology deals with the rules of combination of morphemes to form words, as suffixes or
prefixes are attached to single morphemes to form words. It studies the changes that take place in
the structure of words, e.g. the morpheme ‗take‘ changes to ‗took‘ and ‗taken‘––these changes
signify a change in tense.

The level of morphology is linked to phonology on the one hand and to semantics on the other.
It is clear in the above example of ‗take‘ that the change to ‗took‘ involves a change in one of
the sounds in this morpheme. It also involves a change in meaning: ‗take‘ means the action
‗take‘ + time present and ‗took‘ means the action ‗take‘ + time past. So morphological changes
often involve changes at the levels of both sound and meaning.

Syntax is the level at which we study how words combine to form phrases, phrases combine to
form clauses and clauses join to make sentences. The study of syntax also involves the
description of the rules of positioning of elements in the sentence such as the nouns/noun syntax
phrases, verbs/verb phrases, adverbial phrases, etc. A sentence must be composed of these
elements arranged in a particular order. Syntax also attempts to describe how these elements
function in the sentence, i.e. what is their role in the sentence. For example, the word ‗boy‘ is a
noun. However, in each of the following sentences, it functions in different roles:

(a) The boy likes cricket

(b) The old man loved the boy.

In sentence (a), it functions as the subject of the sentence

In sentence (b), it functions as the object.

A sentence should be both grammatical and meaningful. For example, a sentence like
‗Colourless green ideas sleep furiously‘ is grammatically correct but it is not meaningful. Thus,
rules of syntax should be comprehensive enough to explain how sentences are constructed which
are both grammatical and meaningful.

Semantics deals with the level of meaning in language. It attempts to analyse the structure of
meaning in a language, e.g. how words similar or different are related; it attempts to show these
inter-relationships through forming ‗categories‘. Semantics tries to give an account of both word
and sentence meaning, and attempts to analyse and define that which is considered to be abstract.
It may be easy to define the meanings of words such as ‗tree‘ but not so easy to define the
meanings of words such as ‗love‘ or similar abstract things. This is why semantics is one of the
less clearly definable areas of language study.

An extension of the study of meaning or semantics is pragmatics. Pragmatics deals with the
contextual aspects of meaning in particular situations. As distinct from the study of sentences,
pragmatics considers utterances, i.e. those sentences which are actually uttered by speakers of a
language.

Discourse is the study of chunks of language which are bigger than a single sentence. At this
level, we analyse inter-sentential links that form a connected or cohesive text. Cohesion is the
relation established in a sentence between it and the sentences preceding and following it, by the
use of connectives such as ‗and‘, ‗though‘, ‗also‘, ‗but‘ etc. and by the manner in which
reference is made to other parts of the text by devices such as repetition or by use of pronouns,
definite articles, etc. By studying the elements of cohesion we can understand how a piece of
connected language can have greater meaning that is more than the sum of the individual
sentences it contains.