Historical linguistics is a subfield of linguistics that studies language in its historical aspects. It investigates a language or languages at various points in time. The term “diachronic linguistics” is often used in place of historical linguistics and sets it apart from “synchronic linguistics,” which studies language at a single point in time. The investigation
Transformation grammar is a way of viewing syntax first proposed in 1957 by Noam Chomsky, the most influential linguist of the 20th century. It is hard to overestimate the impact this new theory had on all of the social sciences; within a few years, it had replaced the prevailing paradigm of structuralism in linguistics and
Descriptive linguistics is a subfield of linguistics that studies and describes language in structural terms. In its investigation of linguistic structure, descriptive linguistics emphasizes the primacy of speech, the adoption of a synchronic approach, and the description of language and dialect systems as they are found to be spoken. Descriptive Linguistics as a Scientific Pursuit
Linguistics is the study of language. Because linguists disagree on the scope of “language,” definitions of linguistics have varied. Descriptively, the study of language has gone from a search for relationships between specific languages to current interest in the biological bases for language and in language use. Methodologically, linguistics has changed from an empirical discipline