User:James Crippen/Linguistics

There seems to be in modern linguistic study a tripartite division between three major fields. One is the descriptive field which focuses on description of languages and language phenomena, but makes little or no attempt to provide explanation or justification for these phenomena beyond the description. This might be considered to be a legacy of the Bloomfieldian tradition but today most practitioners subscribe to ideas of universal grammar and theoretical structuralism although they have little interest in the theoretical debate.

A second field, perhaps initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure but which truly burgeoned after Chomsky's initial work, is the theoretical field. In this field linguists focus on the production and testing of theoretical models which explain and justify linguistic and other related mental phenomena. The growing study of cognitive linguistics can be closely connected with this field, particularly because of their interest in understanding the mental processes which give rise to language use and comprehension.

The third field, one less cohesive and more difficult to delineate, is the social field. In this field practitioners may or may not be trained exclusively in linguistic topics, and they tend to focus on questions of language use and greater issues of communication in society. Many are anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists who are concerned with pragmatics and discourse in human cultures.

Descriptive topics

 * Morphology (linguistics)
 * Noun
 * Grammatical number
 * Grammatical gender
 * Declension (case)
 * List of grammatical cases (cf. Template:Grammatical cases)
 * Morphosyntactic alignment
 * Grammatical person
 * Verb
 * Category:Verb types
 * Copula
 * Transitive verb
 * Intransitive verb
 * Grammatical aspect
 * Grammatical mood
 * Irrealis moods
 * Grammatical tense
 * Grammatical voice
 * Preverb

Theoretical topics

 * Conceptual metaphor
 * Optimality theory
 * Head-driven phrase structure grammar
 * Tagmemics
 * Construction grammar
 * Transformational grammar

Anthropological topics

 * Language families
 * Na-Dené languages
 * Athabaskan languages
 * Paleosiberian languages
 * Eskimo-Aleut languages
 * Austronesian languages
 * Malayo-Polynesian languages
 * Polynesian languages