Theoretical linguistics

Theoretical linguistics, or general linguistics, is the branch of linguistics which inquires into the nature of language itself and seeks to answer fundamental questions as to what language is; how it works; how universal grammar (UG) as a domain-specific mental organ operates, if it exists at all; what are its unique properties; how does language relate to other cognitive processes, etc. Theoretical linguists are most concerned with constructing models of linguistic knowledge, and ultimately developing a linguistic theory.

Since the 1960s, the term "theoretical linguistics" has typically been used in more or less the same sense as "general linguistics", even though it also contrasts with applied linguistics, and even though it is often said that language description is inherently theoretical.^{[citation needed]} The usual terminology is thus not entirely clear and consistent.

In the first half of the 20th century, the term "general linguistics" was more common (cf. Ferdinand de Saussure's famous Course in General Linguistics), which could be contrasted with "language-particular linguistics" (which is more often called descriptive linguistics).^{[citation needed]}

The fields that are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Although phonetics often guides phonology, it is often excluded from the purview of theoretical linguistics. Theoretical linguistics also involves the search for Noam Chomsky's hypothesized linguistic universals, that is, properties that all, or many languages have in common.

Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. For example, in the sentences The dog runs and The dogs run, the word forms runs and dogs have an affix -s added, distinguishing them from the base forms dog and run. Adding this suffix to a nominal stem gives plural forms, and adding it to verbal stems restricts the subject to third-person singular. Some morphological theories operate with two distinct suffixes -s, called allomorphs of the morphemes plural and third-person singular, respectively. Languages differ with respect to their morphological structure. Along one axis, analytic languages, with few or no affixes or other morphological processes, may be distinguished from synthetic languages, with many affixes. Along another axis, agglutinative languages, whose affixes express only one grammatical property and are added neatly one after another, may be distinguished from fusional languages, with non-concatenative morphological processes (infixation, umlaut, ablaut, etc.) and/or with less clear-cut affix boundaries.

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds that concentrates on three main points:

According to this definition, phonetics can also be called linguistic analysis of human speech at the surface level. That is one obvious difference from phonology, which concerns the structure and organisation of speech sounds in natural languages has a theoretical and abstract nature. One example can be made to illustrate the distinction:

In English, the suffix -s can represent /s/, /z/, or it can be silent (written Ø), depending on context.