12 linguistics branches - Research Paper Example

ENGLISH Ordinarily, linguists are engaged in a diversity of studies, some of which bear little direct relationship to each other. Literary stylistics is a branch that involves the analysis of literary texts applying linguistic methods and theories of all the branches (phonetics, morphology, syntax, discourse analysis, pragmatics, etc.) with the aim of providing retrievable interpretations which allow comparisons of different texts, genres (fiction, drama and poetry).This branch is just like the grandfather since it involves all the branches whose texts must be analyzed.

(Crystal, 1997)Morphology is like the mother who teaches the baby how to talk. This branch often studies how the words are constructed out of smaller units which have a meaning or grammatical function, for example the word friendly is constructed from friend. This branch has a sister two sisters called syntax which studies how the words combine to form sentences and the rules which govern the formation of sentences, and phonetics that studies speech sounds; how they are produced in the vocal tract (articulatory phonetics), how they are transmitted through the air (acoustic phonetics), and how they are perceived by the listener (auditory phonetics).

Their mandate is to ensure words are correctly written and spoken. (Crystal, 1997)The screaming child, phonology studies the sound system of language; how the particular sounds used in each language form an integrated system for encoding information and how such systems differ from one language to another. On the other hand the curious father, psycholinguistics always studies the mental processes underlying the planning, production, perception and comprehension of speech, for example how memory limitations affect speech production and comprehension.

This is to ensure the child speaks correctly with good perceptions of things. The twin brother of the father, uncle sociolinguistics, is also keen to the social factors such as social class, educational level, and age, sex and ethnic origin so that the child may grow to understand them to link in the sentences. (Crystal, 1997)The elder brother of the child, semantics who studies the meaning and how words and sentences are related to the real or imaginary objects they refer to and the situations they describe.

This is to ensure that the child links together the words that are related. However the elder sister of the child, pragmatics is keen in on the context of the situation. He studies the use of language in communication, particularly the relationships between sentences and the contexts and situations in which they are used. The grandmother, stylist ensures that the child varies the language depending on the situation in which the language is used and also on the effect the speaker wishes to create on the hearer.

This is to ensure that the child grows to be good. (Crystal, 1997)It should be noted that linguistic can be applied and this forms applied linguistics. Normally, this consists of the application of the methods and results of linguistics to such areas as language teaching; national language policies; translation; language in politics, advertising, classrooms and courts (forensic linguistics). On the other hand, lexicography which is one of the branches of linguistics could be seen as son of applied linguistics.

This is because it involves the compilation of dictionaries.The advancement in technology has led to the presence of computer. Instead of computer languages, such as Fortran, or Java, the computational linguists studies natural languages, such as English and Japanese, The field of computational linguistics has two aims: the technological aim to enable computers to be used as aids in analyzing and processing natural language and the psychological aim to understand, by analogy with computers, more about how people process natural languages.

It also includes research on automatic translation, electronic production of artificial speech and the automatic recognition of human speech. (Crystal, 1997)Works CitedCrystal, D. (1997). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. Oxford: Blackwell.