INTRODUCTION
The use of language is an integral part of being human. Children all over the world start putting words together at approximately the same age, and follow remarkably similar paths in their speech development. All languages are surprisingly similar in their basic structure, whether they are in South Africa, Australia or near the North Pole. Language and abstract thought are closely connected, and many people think that these two characteristics above all distinguish human beings from animals
WHAT IS LINGUISTICS?
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It encompasses the description of languages, the study of their origin, and the analysis of how children acquire language and how people learn languages other than their own. Linguistics is also concerned with relationships between languages and with the ways languages change over time. Linguists may study language as a thought process and seek a theory that accounts for the universal human capacity to produce and understand language. Some linguists examine language within a cultural context. By observing talk, they try to determine what a person needs to know in order to speak appropriately in different settings, such as the workplace, among friends, or among family. Other linguists focus on what happens when speakers from different language and cultural backgrounds interact. Linguists may also concentrate on how to help people learn another language, using what they know about the learner's first language and about the language being acquired.
SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS
Linguistics covers a wide range of topics and its boundaries are difficult to define. The famous Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, in his book The course in General Linguistics (Cours de Linguistique Generale) published in 1916, gave a rough impression of the range covered by Linguistics in the shape of a wheel. The description of the wheel is as below.
Phonetics
“The study speech sounds is called Phonetics”. Strictly speaking, phonetics is not the part of linguistics, though of course there are close connections between the two disciplines. Phoneticians investigate such topics as the anatomical, physiological and neurological basis of speech (physiological phonetics), the actions of the speech organs in producing speech sounds (articulatory phonetics), the acoustic nature of the sound waves which transmit speech (acoustics phonetics), and the manners in which the ears and brain interpret speech (auditory and perceptual phonetics). Linguists, on the other hand are more interested in the way in which language is patterned. They analyse the shape or form of these patterns rather than the physical substance out of which the units of language are made. Phonetics is not as central to general linguistics as the study of language patterning.
Phonology
According to Loreto Todd “Phonology is the study of sounds and sound combinations in a particular language”. Whereas phonetics is chiefly concerned with the physical nature of speech sounds, and hence is not strictly a part of linguistics, phonology deals with the ways in which sounds behave in language, and it is a central part of linguistics. The central concept in the phonological approach is the phoneme principle which allows linguists to understand the sounds of a language as constituting an orderly system, instead of being a mere collection of individual sounds.
Syntax
According to Loreto Todd “The form and arrangement of words into larger units such as phrases, clauses, sentences etc is called syntax”. R.L.Trask defines it as the sentence structure. It is that part of language which links together the sound patterns and the meanings Knowledge of syntactic system allows the speaker to generate an almost endless number of sentences and to recognize those that are not grammatically acceptable.
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