Talk:Linguistics

research field

It can be applied too. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.126.132.139 (talk) 09:23, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Research is always an activity that is applied. But linguistics is not applied, in it that, can you use the word linguistics as a verb? You can't. You can say translation is theory and practice, because translation is the noun (for the theory) and translating, etc is the verb (for the activity). Lexicography too is an activity. So is also describing, and so on. But linguistics is just linguistics. Its knowledge is applied, but it's not an activity; it cannot be used as a verb. MrsCaptcha (talk) 13:28, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

What? Utter nonsense. "Activity" ≠ "verb"! See Applied linguistics:

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of linguistics that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, psychology, computer science, communication research, anthropology, and sociology.

--Thnidu, retired Research Administrator at the Linguistic Data Consortium (talk) 06:45, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Clean up of intro section

I undertook a clean up of the intro section, into which had crept various unsourced assertions about Indian grammarians, and which had moved away from the long-standing consensus version of the first sentence (discussed way back when and finally settled on; changed this summer with no discussion to a very much less pithy version). Overall, the intro had too much in it, and repeated info found in the body of the article. It was also less than professionally written. I tried to sort these things out. My computer's auto spell check also flagged the non-American spellings; if someone wants to change those back to the -ise forms etc., I really don't mind. But all the other, non-orthographical, changes are for the better, in terms of the content and writing, in my judgment. If someone would like to debate them point by point, I'm happy to do so here. But the version produced by User:Heartily was a major step backwards in my opinion, from the earlier consensus-built one. In their note on this talk page, it was clear that Heartily has some difficulties in felicitous expression in English, and these difficulties were reflected in part in the phrasings introduced into the intro section. So I'm going to revert to the version I spent some valuable time cleaning up, trying to make it something I could direct college students and others to without embarrassment.

The major changes I made (besides phrasing) are: 1. Cut sentence about the Prague school (it's a little too much detail for the second paragraph, and the source cited doesn't establish the point) and Bakhtin. Undue weight. 2. Moved and partly rewrote sentence about corpus linguistics out of third paragraph (corpus linguistics isn't coordinate to morphology, syntax, phonology: it's one method for studying such things). 3. Followed with paragraph on Saussure and Chomsky, moving mention of other subfields like socioling and discourse analysis lower. 4. Contrasted formal approaches with nonformal (not informal!) ones. 5. Cut superfluous and unsourced references to Indian grammarians I've never seen mentioned in any intro ling textbook. 6. Cut Derrida paragraph; the inappropriateness of a prominent mention of Derrida in the intro to the linguistics article (and even elsewhere, according to some) was well discussed in these talk pages in the past. 7. Left most of the rambling paragraph with Esperanto etc in, though it should really be condensed for this intro. 8. Reduced the muliti-sentence treatment of areas outside linguistics per se (translation, literary criticism, speech pathology, etc) to a single sentence.

(The other things I cut were the two irrelevant paragraphs under "Variation and Universality", which were poorly written and not germane.)

Perhaps I should've cleared these changes here first, but given how straightforward I thought they were, I thought they'd meet with the approval of the majority of editors here. I apologize for doing laying out this rationale post-facto. I do hope that before any more reverting to the previous version, any particular changes can be debated here first, if anyone wishes to. Mundart (talk) 19:22, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Those changes were not made by Heartily; they were made by me, and I have no language difficulties. Those changes were discussed over several months on the above talk page with consensus having arrived upon them. Please note that in its present condition the article was also nominated for recording (see discussion above on this page itself). As for the areas you don't see of importance in belonging to "ling textbooks", those are very much covered in the syllabi of universities here in the UK where I have taught for several years. Paucity of material published in the area of linguistics is no excuse to it not being covered in a main article such as this. Yet, all of the claims have sources cited, if you would take a deeper look. If you have a problem with the way the language is worded anywhere in the article, nobody would mind you improving upon that. But it shouldn't lead to mass deleting material from the article without any good reason. Whatever seems overstated to you may not seem so to a lot of university departments outside the United States of America (or even some others within, like User Beverley's for instance), for this is no article on American linguistics. MrsCaptcha (talk) 12:07, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

As an aside, it may benefit your students a lot more if you would allow them their own research space, instead of imposing upon them any particular encyclopedia, book, or other reading material. Wikipedia doesn't belong to anyone, and therefore anything that's written on it shouldn't even embarrass anyone. MrsCaptcha (talk) 12:26, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

So we seem to be an something of an impasse. Besides the spelling issues (about which I truly don't care) and some rephrasings, I made 8 substantive points, and explained their rationale above. Regardless of how or when the material which I changed was originally introduced into the article, I hope you could try to take up these points in turn and help us understand which ones you find objectionable, so we can work out compromises as needed. I find the current version, obviously, inferior in many respects, from the very first sentence, which moved away from the standard "linguistics is the scientific study of language" to something else. In reading over the talk pages you mention, I still conclude that few regular editors here would object to removing mentions of Bakhtin and Derrida in the intro.

My mention of linguistics textbooks was in regard to those obscure Indian grammatical terms: if you can supply a reference to them in an intro ling textbook used anywhere in the English-speaking world with a page number, I will gladly stand corrected. I made no claims about the importance or not of related areas such as literary theory, and no claims about their appearance or not in linguistics textbooks. But in fact let me point out that if no intro to ling textbook covers the area in question, it is indeed a very good reason for assigning it little to no prominence in a general encyclopedia article on linguistics: any other approach would constitute original research or undue weight. I was therefore surprised to read your assertion that "Paucity of material published in the area of linguistics is no excuse to it not being covered in a main article such as this": in fact, such paucity is precisely the reason it should not appear in the intro to this article. We do not make the field here; our aim is to reflect it.

(I also take objection, for the record, to the insinuation that I am somehow unaware of how linguistics is taught outside the US (where I happen not even to be at the moment). I have taught linguistics in the UK, and have studied and taught linguistics elsewhere in Europe and Asia, for extended periods of time (numbering in years). I have not "mass delet[ed]" material from the article: I cut a few sentences which in my professional judgment don't deserve the weight that they receive from being prominently placed in the intro to the overview article on my field. My professional judgment is formed from wide experience with many intro textbooks and more than two decades of teaching the subject. I am very much committed to the idea that Wikipedia should be a place for all to come to find reliable, accurate material reflecting the most widespread understandings in my field.) Mundart (talk) 12:56, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Bakhtin and Derrida are very much associated with linguistics, and so are the Indian grammarians who formulated several key concepts in linguistics that have been applied to modern theory. Only textbooks can't be sources to a Wikipedia article. This is not a school tuition class. It's meant to cover the research done in the subject area. If you look at several other topics, which are not even studied in schools, you will find the large amount of material comes from academic journals and so on. Linguistics is not studied in schools. It is an advanced topic. So you will not find "textbooks" on linguistics; you will find academic journals and research papers. And newspaper articles. MrsCaptcha (talk) 17:48, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

There are very many textbooks on linguistics, including introductory ones (and advanced ones on specific subfields, like sociolinguistics and syntax). I am aiming to make this intro section of the article reflect what such textbooks present, and how they present it, including the relative weight they give to various aspects and ideas. There is widespread consensus in the field, as established in the pages of introductory textbooks, about whether Bakhtin, Derrida, and Indian writers such as Katyayana and Patanjali and their putative roles and influences should be mentioned in introductory material: as far as I know, none of these four have appeared in the pages of an Intro to Linguistics textbook. Again, if you can find a citation to them in an intro textbook, I'd be happy to be corrected. But mere assertion isn't enough. (It should go without saying that the textbooks I'm referring to are those used at university level, not secondary schools. I'm unsure where you got the idea that there are no textbooks on linguistics.) Mundart (talk) 13:00, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Firstly, reflecting only textbook articles is dangerous and can make the field sound too nascent, and this article as if it belonged to the simple Wikipedia. Secondly, my hands are full right now and there's not much time I can devote to this right now. We'll have to just wait for a while. MrsCaptcha (talk) 22:04, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

@MrsCaptcha: Your part in the exchanges in the previous section (where also see my reply to you) led me to doubt your familiarity with the field of linguistics. After reading through the exchanges directly above and your user page ("Mrs. Captcha is a retired sub-editor and grammar teacher"), all my suspicions have been thoroughly confirmed. While of course a sub-editor and grammar teacher should have a fair bit of linguistic knowledge, that is very far indeed from being a linguist. My advice to you is "Cobbler, stick to thy last."

If you wish to discuss this with me, please {{Ping}} me. Thnidu (talk) 07:16, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Offered for mining: Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.

 It covers not only particular languages,
 like French and Nicaraguan Sign Language,
 but extends to the nature of language in general,
 to its production, understanding, and acquisition,
 to the changes languages undergo, to the ways language is used,
 and to the ways our language ability sometimes goes awry.
 Since language is pervasive in our lives, linguistics is a huge field.
 It is also multidimensional:
 it can be, and has been, divided into subfields
 in many different ways.
 The pervasiveness of language results in overlap
 between linguistics and other fields.
 Some specialties are defined by overlaps:
 psycholinguistics, for example,
 centers on issues of importance both to linguists and to psychologists.
 
 As a science, linguistics is concerned with data
 and with theories that organize and explain that data.
 To linguists,
 primary data are the things we say or sign in all our languages.
 By convention, such data are called utterances,
 whether spoken or signed.
 (One of the fruits of modern research in linguistics
 has been the determination that the languages used by the deaf
 are as expressive, as complex, and as resistant to satisfactory explanation
 as any other human language.
 [Cite notes 10 & 11 in the William Stokoe article.])
 Utterances provide direct evidence for a variety of theories.
 They also provide indirect evidence
 for theories concerned with structures and functions
 that are not directly observable in detail,
 because they are internal and unconscious.

Halfb1t (talk) 00:09, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

graphics

How about more graphics? The article's at a B level, and graphics might help. Saussure, for example: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ferdinand_de_Saussure.jpg Chomsky ... several Wikimedia Commons options: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Noam_Chomsky — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cecilemckee (talk • contribs) 22:13, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

How about more graphics? Saussure, for example: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ferdinand_de_Saussure.jpg Chomsky ... several Wikimedia Commons options: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Noam_ChomskyCecilemckee (talk) 22:17, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Clean up needed

I'm undertaking a quick spring cleaning to try to restore the best parts of the version from Oct 2014, while keeping the helpful improvements made in the meantime and cutting the superfluvia and other undue weight items that have crept in. Mundart (talk) 15:37, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

"Humanities" category/template need citations consistent with existing ones or need to be removed

All citations in Linguistics, Humanities, Social Science, and Cognitive Science indicate that the enterprise of linguistics is scientific in method and aim (not humanistic) and that if it ever could be considered to have had anything more than a tenuous relationship to the humanities historically, that has long since ceased to be a notable or relevant description of the field; the relationship of linguistics to the humanities field of philosophy (via logic, semantics, and philosophy of language) is no more compelling a reason to classify linguistics as a part of the humanities than any other discipline that also leans heavily on the same elements of philosophy for either their formal foundations (theoretical computer science and foundational mathematics) or their concern for the scientific modeling of language, belief, and communication -- artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and the cognitive sciences broadly also have contact with many of the same areas for the same or similar reasons (see e.g. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-linguistics and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognitive-science).

Appeals to library classification or occasional instances of university institutional structures are transparently facile, ignoring the substance of the matter and the history of linguistics; such appeals also leave unresolved the inconsistency between what is indicated by the weight of evidence of existing citations in the articles mentioned and the lingering presence of the humanities category tags/and template. Either the humanities tags/templates need justification (presumably citations) that doesn't conflict with the existing citations offered, or (the most straightforward resolution), the humanities template and/or category tags should be removed. 128.54.50.250 (talk) 19:57, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

I concur with 128.54.50.250's reasoning, and no one seems to provide reason to disagree, so I'll go ahead and remove the category and template tags. 24.16.211.19 (talk) 21:11, 25 August 2015 (UTC)