LINGUISTICS

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does linguistics mean? 

• LINGUISTICS (noun)
  The noun LINGUISTICS has 2 senses:

1. the scientific study of language

2. the humanistic study of language and literature

  Familiarity information: LINGUISTICS used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• LINGUISTICS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The scientific study of language

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Hypernyms ("linguistics" is a kind of...):

science; scientific discipline (a particular branch of scientific knowledge)

Domain member category:

New (in use after medieval times)

acceptable (judged to be in conformity with approved usage)

Modern; New (used of a living language; being the current stage in its development)

late (of a later stage in the development of a language or literature; used especially of dead languages)

middle (of a stage in the development of a language or literature between earlier and later stages)

Old (of a very early stage in development)

early (of an early stage in the development of a language or literature)

descriptive (of or relating to an approach to linguistic analysis that aims at the description of a language's forms, structures and usage)

uninflected (not inflected)

inflected (showing alteration in form (especially by the addition of affixes))

cacuminal; retroflex (pronounced with the tip of the tongue turned back toward the hard palate)

inanimate (belonging to the class of nouns denoting nonliving things)

animate (belonging to the class of nouns that denote living beings)

synthetic (systematic combining of root and modifying elements into single words)

analytic; uninflected (expressing a grammatical category by using two or more words rather than inflection)

geminate; reduplicate (form by reduplication)

topicalize (emphasize by putting heavy stress on or by moving to the front of the sentence)

cognate (having the same ancestral language)

received; standard (conforming to the established language usage of educated native speakers)

nonstandard (not conforming to the language usage of a prestige group within a community)

bad (nonstandard)

prepositional (of or relating to or formed with a preposition)

aspectual (of or belonging to an aspect (as an aspect of the verb))

ablative (relating to the ablative case)

vocative (relating to a case used in some languages)

homophonous (characteristic of the phenomenon of words of different origins that are pronounced the same way)

unacceptable; unaccepted (not conforming to standard usage)

suprasegmental (pertaining to a feature of speech that extends over more than a single speech sound)

segmental (divided or organized into speech segments or isolable speech sounds)

autosemantic (of a word or phrase meaningful in isolation, independent of context)

synsemantic (of a word or phrase meaningful only when it occurs in the company of other words)

radical (of or relating to or constituting a linguistic root)

polyphonic (having two or more phonetic values)

prescriptive grammar (a grammar that is produced by prescriptive linguistics)

descriptor; form; signifier; word form (the phonological or orthographic sound or appearance of a word that can be used to describe or identify something)

derivative ((linguistics) a word that is derived from another word)

prescriptivism ((linguistics) a doctrine supporting or promoting prescriptive linguistics)

descriptivism ((linguistics) a doctrine supporting or promoting descriptive linguistics)

phonemics; phonology (the study of the sound system of a given language and the analysis and classification of its phonemes)

generative grammar ((linguistics) a type of grammar that describes syntax in terms of a set of logical rules that can generate all and only the infinite number of grammatical sentences in a language and assigns them all the correct structural description)

syntax (studies of the rules for forming admissible sentences)

phrase structure; sentence structure; syntax (the grammatical arrangement of words in sentences)

base; radical; root; root word; stem; theme ((linguistics) the form of a word after all affixes are removed)

descriptive grammar (a grammar that is produced by descriptive linguistics)

grammar (the branch of linguistics that deals with syntax and morphology (and sometimes also deals with semantics))

feature; feature of speech ((linguistics) a distinctive characteristic of a linguistic unit that serves to distinguish it from other units of the same kind)

linguistic competence ((linguistics) a speaker's implicit, internalized knowledge of the rules of their language (contrasted with linguistic performance))

complementary distribution; complementation ((linguistics) a distribution of related speech sounds or forms in such a way that they only appear in different contexts)

tone ((linguistics) a pitch or change in pitch of the voice that serves to distinguish words in tonal languages)

linguistic performance ((linguistics) a speaker's actual use of language in real situations; what the speaker actually says, including grammatical errors and other non-linguistic features such as hesitations and other disfluencies (contrasted with linguistic competence))

linguistic rule; rule ((linguistics) a rule describing (or prescribing) a linguistic practice)

reduce (destress and thus weaken a sound when pronouncing it)

obscure (reduce a vowel to a neutral one, such as a schwa)

voice ((linguistics) the grammatical relation (active or passive) of the grammatical subject of a verb to the action that the verb denotes)

linguistic process (a process involved in human language)

aphaeresis; apheresis ((linguistics) omission at the beginning of a word as in 'coon' for 'raccoon' or 'till' for 'until')

phylum ((linguistics) a large group of languages that are historically related)

sign (a fundamental linguistic unit linking a signifier to that which is signified)

linguistic universal; universal ((linguistics) a grammatical rule (or other linguistic feature) that is found in all languages)

etymologise; etymologize (construct the history of words)

allophone ((linguistics) any of various acoustically different forms of the same phoneme)

phoneme ((linguistics) one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language)

morphophoneme ((linguistics) the phonemes (or strings of phonemes) that constitute the various allomorphs of a morpheme)

topicalization ((linguistics) emphasis placed on the topic or focus of a sentence by preposing it to the beginning of the sentence; placing the topic at the beginning of the sentence is typical for English)

preposition ((linguistics) the placing of one linguistic element before another (as placing a modifier before the word it modifies in a sentence or placing an affix before the base to which it is attached))

postposition ((linguistics) the placing of one linguistic element after another (as placing a modifier after the word that it modifies in a sentence or placing an affix after the base to which it is attached))

participant role; semantic role ((linguistics) the underlying relation that a constituent has with the main verb in a clause)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "linguistics"):

computational linguistics (the use of computers for linguistic research and applications)

dialect geography; linguistic geography (the study of the geographical distribution of linguistic features)

etymology (the study of the sources and development of words)

diachronic linguistics; diachrony; historical linguistics (the study of linguistic change)

neurolinguistics (the branch of linguistics that studies the relation between language and the structure and function of the nervous system)

pragmatics (the study of language use)

semantics (the study of language meaning)

sociolinguistics (the study of language in relation to its sociocultural context)

structural linguistics; structuralism (linguistics defined as the analysis of formal structures in a text or discourse)

synchronic linguistics (the study of a language without reference to its historical context)

descriptive linguistics (a description (at a given point in time) of a language with respect to its phonology and morphology and syntax and semantics without value judgments)

prescriptive linguistics (an account of how a language should be used instead of how it is actually used; a prescription for the 'correct' phonology and morphology and syntax and semantics)

Holonyms ("linguistics" is a part of...):

cognitive science (the field of science concerned with cognition; includes parts of cognitive psychology and linguistics and computer science and cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind)

Derivation:

linguist (a specialist in linguistics)

linguistic (of or relating to the scientific study of language)

Sense 2

Meaning:

The humanistic study of language and literature

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Synonyms:

linguistics; philology

Hypernyms ("linguistics" is a kind of...):

arts; humanistic discipline; humanities; liberal arts (studies intended to provide general knowledge and intellectual skills (rather than occupational or professional skills))

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "linguistics"):

dialectology (the branch of philology that is devoted to the study of dialects)

lexicology (the branch of linguistics that studies the lexical component of language)

Derivation:

linguist (a specialist in linguistics)

linguistic (consisting of or related to language)

 Context examples 

Bioinformatics is a rapidly developing branch of biology and is highly interdisciplinary, using techniques and concepts from informatics, statistics, mathematics, chemistry, biochemistry, physics, and linguistics.

(Bioinformatics, NCI Thesaurus)