Linguistics - Dialects, Geography, Variation

linguistics

Table of Contents

Introduction
History of linguistics
- Earlier history
  - Non-Western traditions
  - Greek and Roman antiquity
  - The European Middle Ages
  - The Renaissance
- The 19th century
  - Development of the comparative method
  - The role of analogy
  - Other 19th-century theories and development
    - Inner and outer form
    - Phonetics and dialectology
- The 20th century
  - Structuralism
    - Structural linguistics in Europe
    - Structural linguistics in America
  - Transformational-generative grammar
  - Tagmemic, stratificational, and other approaches
Methods of synchronic linguistic analysis
- Structural linguistics
  - Phonology
  - Morphology
  - Syntax
  - Semantics
- Transformational-generative grammar
  - Harris’s grammar
  - Chomsky’s grammar
  - Modifications in Chomsky’s grammar
- Tagmemics
  - Modes of language
  - Hierarchy of levels
- Stratificational grammar
  - Technical terminology
  - Interstratal relationships
- The Prague school
  - Combination of structuralism and functionalism
  - Phonological contributions
  - Theory of markedness
  - Later contributions
Historical (diachronic) linguistics
- Linguistic change
  - Sound change
  - Grammatical change
  - Semantic change
  - Borrowing
- The comparative method
  - Grimm’s law
  - Proto-Indo-European reconstruction
  - Steps in the comparative method
  - Criticisms of the comparative method
  - Internal reconstruction
- Language classification
Linguistics and other disciplines
- Psycholinguistics
  - Language acquisition by children
  - Speech perception
  - Other areas of research
- Sociolinguistics
  - Delineation of the field
  - Social dimensions
- Other relationships
  - Anthropological linguistics
  - Computational linguistics
  - Mathematical linguistics
  - Stylistics
  - Applied linguistics
Dialectology and linguistic geography
- Dialect geography
  - Early dialect studies
  - Dialect atlases
  - The value and applications of dialectology
- Social dialectology

References & Edit History Related Topics

Images

Figure 1: The constituent structure of a simple sentence (see text).

Figure 2: The constituent structure of a class of simple sentences with arbitrary letters used to represent the form class of each constituent (see text).

phrase structure of the sentence “The man will hit the ball”

derived phrase marker for a passive sentence

Figure 7: Diagrammatic representation of a transformational grammar (see text).

For Students

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Dialect study as a discipline—dialectology—dates from the first half of the 19th century, when local dialect dictionaries and dialect grammars first appeared in western Europe. Soon thereafter, dialect maps were developed; most often they depicted the division of a language’s territory into regional dialects. The 19th-century rise of nationalism, coupled with the Romantic view of dialects and folklore as manifestations of the ethnic soul, furnished a great impetus for dialectology. The first dialect dictionaries and grammars were most often written by scholars describing the dialect of their birthplace or by fieldworkers whose main method of investigation was free conversation with ...(100 of 29428 words)

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