Linguistics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 1

Linguistics - Essay Example Additionally, it is structural understanding of knowledge and languages in terms of their differences. This can well be explained by, when one is born; one cannot be able to communicate with adults who are surrounding us, using their language. However, by the time we reach the age of six or seven, we are able to produce sounds, sentences, make rhymes, and understand jokes, among other activities. Therefore, one becomes a good speaker, in which we all have experiences that learning a language has never been easy, especially during the first years of our lives, where we accumulated a broad range of knowledge about the language (Fromkin, 2002, Pg 13-15). According to Akmajian (56-58), language speakers seem to have a wide range of knowledge on their languages, either by knowing or without being aware. Some of us possess the language of sounds, for example, consonants. Linguistics therefore, seeks to investigate how this kind of knowledge is acquired, as well as how it interacts with oth er processes mentally. It also investigates how the knowledge varies from one region to another region, from one person to another, in addition to how specific programs in a computer model the knowledge. Additionally, Linguistics also study the language structure like phrases and sound, in terms of how they can be characterized, and how diverse language components interact with others, like meaning and intonation. They also work with people who converse different languages and designs carefully the experiments on how to answer all the questions on language. Clearly, linguistics is considered as a science. Linguists are people who specialize on specific or different languages, whose main goal is to understand the language nature in general. However, the main goal of linguistic study in academics is to increase understanding and knowledge of the world. Akmajian (56-58) claims that language is essential and universal to all human relations, and knowledge acquired has many applications that are practical. Linguists are prepared to find answers to questions like, how a specific language can be written and analyzed, teaching of foreign languages, speech synthesization, computer programming and how the problems of language can be rectified and analyzed. While studying linguistics, one gets to learn many aspects of the language, sounds structure and their physical properties (Fromkin, 2002, Pg 13-15). Question 2 Phonology and Morphology is one of branch of linguistics but can be explained in different ways. Fromkin (13-15) highlights that phonology is organized study of sounds in language. People who study this branch of linguistics are referred to as phonologists and are concerned with sounds that have contrast in a language but not others. For example, Spanish speakers have a problem of ch and sh and people who speak English have trouble pronouncing â€Å"u† in their French words like Wheel and steel they pronounce as roue. On the other hand, morphology is th e study of formation of words. People who study this particular branch studies questions like, extent to ways words are formed, if they are productive or not. For example, they seek to answer questions like why we say words like amusement and arrival, and what determines the words change, like adding er to adjectives when it comes to making comparisons, like pretty becomes prettier, or getting a computer recognize the roots of words to be separated from their affixes like, crawl, crawls, crawling and crawled. Sentence structure, which includes clauses and phrases enables a clear segmentation into sentences, phrases and clauses. The relationship of these structures with each other forms syntax of domain. Fromkin (13-15) claims that this is the same as morphology, where this syntax does not concern what the meaning of