Discipline of Linguistics
History of Linguistics
Linguistics and Literature
Philosophy of Language
Text and Corpus Linguistics
|Anthropological Linguistics: Includes Ethnolinguistics.
Examples: The SIL Ethnologue, which collects data on the number of speakers of a language and the geographical region in which it is spoken.
|Applied Linguistics: Includes Bilingualism/Multilingualism, Contrastive Ling, ESL, Education, English Lang Studies, Literacy,
Methodology, Second Language Teaching, TESOL, Writing.
Examples: Teaching materials, guides for language teachers, and studies of adult language learning.
Examples: An experiment on language and vision or a book on the study of mind.
|Computational Linguistics: Includes Artificial Intelligence, Computers and Linguistics, Machine Translation, Mathematical Ling,
Natural Language Processing, Text-to-speech.
Examples: Books and papers dealing with Machine Translation, Text to Speech software, and algorithms to parse sentences.
|Discipline of Linguistics: Includes resources which are about linguists or the study of linguistics.
Examples: an E-MELD paper giving guidelines to the linguistics community about archiving.
|Discourse Analysis: Includes Conversation Analysis, Courtroom discourse, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Humor.
Examples: Transcripts of discourse, perhaps with turn taking and speaker overlap highlighted; papers on Discourse Representation Theory or on different talk types such as doctor/patient interaction; and audio and video tapes of interactive discourse which might serve as an object of study.
|Forensic Linguistics: Includes Language and the Law.
Examples: Papers on issues in dispute in court cases, e.g., authorship identification, assessment of ambiguity in texts, voice attribution. Analyses of courtroom language are best classified under 'Discourse Analysis.'
|General Linguistics: Includes linguistic encyclopaedias.
Examples: Broad, often introductory textbooks such as The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language (Crystal, 1987), and glossaries of linguistic terminology. Resources that cover many subfields in depth, perhaps a dissertation on an endangered language with a detailed syntactic and phonological analysis, should be classified under all the relevant subfields instead of 'General Linguistics'.
Examples: A study of genetic relationships within the Afroasiatic family.
|Historical Linguistics: Includes Etymology, Language Change, Language Prehistory.
Examples: A study of the diachronic development of vowels in Romance.
|History of Linguistics:
Examples: A biography of Ferdinand de Saussure, or an analysis of Plato's discussions on language.
Examples: First/Second Language Acquisition experiments; guides to experimental techniques in eliciting acquisition data. (Language teaching is 'Applied Linguistics').
|Language Description: Includes Grammars; publications that describe the syntax, phonology, use etc. of a language or
family without necessarily making any theoretical claims. Dictionaries go under lexicography.
|Lexicography: Includes dictionaries.
Examples: Books and papers about creating dictionaries. Swadesh word lists, a bilingual Avestan-Engliah dictionary, and a collection of legal terms in a particular language.
|Linguistics and Literature: Includes poetics and stylistics.
Examples: An analysis of lexical patterns characteristic of a particular author or syntactic constructions used to create specific literary effects.
|Linguistic Theories: Includes Functional and Systematic Ling, Generative Ling.
Examples: Papers arguing for or against Universal Grammar, Transformational Grammar, or Montague Grammar.
Examples: A paper on morphological theory, Word Grammar (Hudson).
Examples: A study of brain damage with respect to language impairment, a study of the neurological development of the brain during first language acquisition. The latter should also be classified as 'Language Acquisition.'
|Philosophy of Language:
Examples: A paper on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a comparative study of verbal and non-verbal thought.
|Phonetics: Includes Articulatory Phonetics, Acoustic Phonetics, Auditory Phonetics.
Examples: A sound inventory of a language, a study of the variation of articulation of a particular sound. Experimentation results should be classified under 'Phonetics' if they have particular relevance to the sounds of the language.
Examples: Phonological theories applied to a particular language; that is, a study of the syllable structure of a language, or the rules behind sound alternations.
|Pragmatics: Includes non-verbal communication, language use.
Examples: A study of politeness phenomena, honorifics, deixis or speech acts.
|Psycholinguistics: Includes Specific Language Impairment.
Examples: A cross-linguistic study of acquisition of a particular syntactic constraint, a study of aphasic children's language development.
|Semantics: Includes logic.
Examples: A paper on a semantic theory, such as Truth Conditional Semantics. A paper on color lexemes in a particular language.
|Sociolinguistics: Includes Cross-Cultural Communication, Dialectology, Folklore, Lang Contact, Lang & Culture, Lang Death, Lang & Gender,
Language Planning, Lang Variation, Pidgins & Creoles, Planned Languages, Politics & Lang.
Examples: A syntactic description of a language, using a particular syntactic theory. A paper using language data to criticize a syntactic theory.
|Text and Corpus Linguistics: Includes Genre Analysis, Semiotics.
Examples: A statistical analysis of the British National Corpus, on the use of modal verbs in spoken and written English.
Examples: A study of the relative merits of different levels of translation (that is, literal translation, word-for-word translation and so on).
|Typology: Includes Universals, Lang classification (regardless of genetic relation).
Examples: An analysis of a poorly documented language in terms of Greenberg's Universals.
|Writing Systems: Includes logographic, syllabic, alphabetic systems.
Example: A paper examining issues in a linguist's development of a writing system for a previously unwritten language. An examination of pictographic writing systems. A book on the decipherment of Linear B.