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Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language), and pragmatics (how the context of use contributes to meaning). Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics (the study of the biological variables and evolution of language) and psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) bridge many of these divisions.

Linguistics encompasses many branches and subfields that span both theoretical and practical applications. Theoretical linguistics (including traditional descriptive linguistics) is concerned with understanding the universal and fundamental nature of language and developing a general theoretical framework for describing it. Applied linguistics seeks to utilize the scientific findings of the study of language for practical purposes, such as developing methods of improving language education and literacy.

Linguistic features may be studied through a variety of perspectives: synchronically (by describing the structure of a language at a specific point in time) or diachronically (through the historical development of a language over a period of time), in monolinguals or in multilinguals, among children or among adults, in terms of how it is being learnt or how it was acquired, as abstract objects or as cognitive structures, through written texts or through oral elicitation, and finally through mechanical data collection or through practical fieldwork.

Linguistics emerged from the field of philology, of which some branches are more qualitative and holistic in approach. Today, philology and linguistics are variably described as related fields, subdisciplines, or separate fields of language study but, by and large, linguistics can be seen as an umbrella term. Linguistics is also related to the philosophy of language, stylistics, rhetoric, semiotics, lexicography, and translation. (Full article...)

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General classifier gè, the most common Mandarin classifier

In Chinese, classifiers are words that must be used whenever a noun is modified by a number or a demonstrative such as "this" and "that". There are as many as 150 different classifiers, and many nouns are associated with certain ones—for example, flat objects such as tables use the classifier zhāng, whereas long objects such as lines use tiáo. How exactly these classifier–noun associations are formed has been a subject of debate, with some linguists proposing that they are based on innate semantic features (e.g., all nouns with "long" features use a certain classifier), and others suggesting that they are motivated by analogy to prototypical pairings (e.g., dictionaries and textbooks use whatever the more general noun "book" uses). There is also, however, a "general classifier", gè, which can be used in place of the specific classifiers; in informal speech, this one is used far more than any other. Furthermore, speakers often choose to use only a bare noun, dropping both the classifier and the number or demonstrative preceding it; therefore, some linguists believe that classifiers are used more for pragmatic reasons, such as foregrounding new information, rather than for strict grammatical reasons. (more...)

Did you know...

From Wikipedia's "Did You Know" archives:

The number 605 in Khmer Numerals

... that the world's largest mathematical experiment, designed by Brian Butterworth, found women to be faster than men at subitizing?
... that Khmer numerals were the first material evidence of the figure zero as a numerical figure?
... that in the English plural, the letter -s is pronounced differently in words like "cats", "cabs", and "buses", because of a phonological rule?
...that the 2005 movie The Interpreter by film director Sydney Pollack was based on real-life conference interpreters from the United Nations Interpretation Service?
... that Samuel Taylor Coleridge spelled William Shakespeare's last name as "Shakspere"?