Glossary

Linguistics: The study of the nature, structure, and variation of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.

Semantics: the study of linguistic development by classifying and examining changes in meaning and form.

Prescriptive linguistics: is the act of taking the official models of a language, and treating them as sacred perfect representations of the language, and enforcing them on people.

Descriptive linguistics: is the study of language as it is spoken (and written). Thus when the descriptivist hears a word or sentence that contradicts her model of the language, it is the model which must be corrected, not the speaker.

Ethnography: is the scientific study of human social phenomena and communities, through means such as fieldwork. It is considered a branch of cultural anthropology, the branch of anthropology which focuses on the study of human societies.

Ethno linguistics: that part of anthropological linguistics concerned with the study of the interrelation between a language and the cultural behavior of those who speak it.

Social linguistics: is a term including the aspects of linguistics applied toward the connections between language and society, and the way we use it in different social situations. Sociolinguistics often shows us the humorous realities of human speech and how a dialect of a given language can often describe the age, sex, and social class of the speaker; it codes the social function of a language.

Generative grammar: is a set of rules that provide a framework for all the grammatically possible sentences in a language, excluding those which would be considered ungrammatical.

Universal grammar: holds that there are certain fundamental grammatical ideas which all humans possess, without having to learn them. Universal grammar acts as a way to explain how language acquisition works in humans, by showing the most basic rules that all languages have to follow.

Neuroliguistics: Studies the brain mechanisms of the verbal activity and the changes that occur in the linguistics processes as a consequence of brain local injuries.