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 are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)