Entities in languageLanguage is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time.
Topics in languageLanguage is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time.
MorphologyIn linguistics, morphology (mɔrˈfɒlədʒi ) is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary.
PhonologyPhonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either: Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages.
SemanticsSemantics () is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science. In English, the study of meaning in language has been known by many names that involve the Ancient Greek word σῆμα (sema, "sign, mark, token"). In 1690, a Greek rendering of the term semiotics, the interpretation of signs and symbols, finds an early allusion in John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: The third Branch may be called σημειωτική [simeiotikí, "semiotics"], or the Doctrine of Signs, the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also λογικὴ, Logick.
Geography of EuropeEurope is traditionally defined as one of seven continents. Physiographically, it is the northwestern peninsula of the larger landmass known as Eurasia (or the larger Afro-Eurasia); Asia occupies the centre and east of this continuous landmass. Europe's eastern frontier is usually delineated by the Ural Mountains in Russia, which is the largest country by land area in the continent. The southeast boundary with Asia is not universally defined, but the modern definition is generally the Ural River or, less commonly, the Emba River.
Functional linguisticsFunctional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916). Functionalism sees functionality of language and its elements to be the key to understanding linguistic processes and structures.
Historical linguisticsHistorical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics) to develop general theories about how and why language changes to describe the history of speech communities to study the history of words, i.
Topics in classical antiquityClassical antiquity, also known as the classical era, classical period, classical age, or simply antiquity, is the period of cultural history between the 8th century BC and the 8th century AD centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome known as the Greco-Roman world. It is the period in which both Greek and Roman societies flourished and wielded huge influence throughout much of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia.
Geography of AsiaGeography of Asia reviews geographical concepts of classifying Asia, the central and eastern part of Eurasia, comprising approximately fifty countries. Definition and boundaries of Asia The land mass of Asia is not the sum of the land masses of each of its regions, which have been defined independently of the whole. For example, the borders of Central Asia and the Middle East depend on who is defining them and for what purpose.
Topics in natural language processingNatural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics and computer science. It is primarily concerned with processing natural language datasets, such as text corpora or speech corpora, using either rule-based or probabilistic (i.e. statistical and, most recently, neural network-based) machine learning approaches. The goal is a computer capable of "understanding" the contents of documents, including the contextual nuances of the language within them.
PragmaticsIn linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance and conversation, as well as nonverbal communication.
PhoneticsPhonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech (articulatory phonetics), how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound (acoustic phonetics), or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information (auditory phonetics).
Generative grammarGenerative grammar, or generativism ˈdʒɛnərətɪvɪzəm, is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistics, deriving ultimately from glossematics. Generative grammar considers grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language.
Topics in Middle AgesIn the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period (also spelled mediæval or mediaeval) lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, aligning with the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD and ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD before transitioning into the Renaissance and then the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: antiquity, medieval, and modern.
Regional geographyRegional geography is a major branch of geography. It focuses on the interaction of different cultural and natural geofactors in a specific land or landscape, while its counterpart, systematic geography, concentrates on a specific geofactor at the global level. Attention is paid to unique characteristics of a particular region such as natural elements, human elements, and regionalization which covers the techniques of delineating space into regions.
Early modern periodThe early modern period of modern history spans the period after the Late Middle Ages of the post-classical era (1400–1500) to the beginning of the Age of Revolutions (1800). Although the chronological limits of this period are open to debate, the timeframe is variously demarcated by historians as beginning with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Renaissance period in Europe and Timurid Central Asia, the end of the Crusades, the Age of Discovery (especially the voyages of Christopher Columbus beginning in 1492 but also Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India in 1498), and ending around the French Revolution in 1789, or Napoleon's rise to power.
SociolinguisticsSociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on language and the ways it is used. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.
Global citiesA megalopolis (ˌmɛgəˈlɒpəlɪs) or a supercity, also called a megaregion, is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on. They are integrated enough that coordinating policy is valuable, although the constituent metropolises keep their individual identities. The megalopolis concept has become highly influential as it introduced a new, larger scale thinking about urban patterns and growth.
Speech actsIn the philosophy of language and linguistics, speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well. For example, the phrase "I would like the kimchi; could you please pass it to me?" is considered a speech act as it expresses the speaker's desire to acquire the kimchi, as well as presenting a request that someone pass the kimchi to them.
