The concept of linguistics (from the French linguistique) refers to what belongs to or is related to language. The word also makes it possible to allude to science whose object of study is language.
In this way, linguistics, as a science, is dedicated to the analysis of nature and the laws that govern language. Unlike philology, which is interested in the historical development of languages in written texts and in the context of literature and associated culture , linguistics seeks to explain how languages work at a given time in order to understand their general functioning.
Modern linguistics developed from the 19th century onwards. With the posthumous publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics” (1916), linguistics became a science integrated with semiology. It began by raising some controversy regarding the distinction between language (the system) and speech (use) and the definition of linguistic sign (meaning and signifier).
In the 20th century, Noam Chomsky developed the current of generativism with transformational generative grammar, which focuses on language as a process of the speaker ‘s mind and on the innate (genetic) ability to acquire and use a language.
The study of language as a system is applied at several levels: phonetic-phonological (phonology and phonetics), morphological (morphology), syntactic ( syntactic ), lexical (lexicology and lexicography) and semantic (semantics).
From the point of view of speech, on the other hand, the text can be considered as the superior unit of communication and pragmatics, the one that studies the enunciation and the utterance.
List of Acronyms Related to Linguistics
