Types of Language Description
Language description, as a task within linguistics, may be divided into separate areas of specialization, including:
- Phonetics, the study of the sounds of human language
- Phonology, the study of the sound system of a language
- Morphology, the study of the internal structure of words
- Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
- Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
- Historical linguistics, the study of languages whose historical relations are recognizable through similarities in vocabulary, word formation, and syntax
- Pragmatics, the study of how language is used by its speakers
- Stylistics, the study of style in languages
- Paremiography, the collection of proverbs and sayings
Read more about this topic: Language Documentation
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“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
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—John Locke (1632–1704)