subject: Linguistics In The Course Of Modern Society Development [print this page] In the century of globalization contacts between different cultures, countries and societies are being established in all spheres nearly every day. And in the conditions of the continually developing society linguistics becomes an important discipline, as it comes into use in different spheres of human life now. Linguistics is a complicated study that focuses on natural human languages based on their speech acts and text material.
Linguistics is generally subdivided into three main branches:
1.Theoretical linguistics that comprises such areas as phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. It deals with the theoretical matters of the word-study and the rules and laws of the learned languages. It also dwells upon sociolinguistics and also psycholinguistics to analyze and clarify the so-called linguistic universals - the traits common for all the natural languages.
2.Applied linguistics - the study which includes both linguistic and extralinguistic disciplines and also aims to resolve the practical debatable points related to language. This branch of linguistics is associated with psychology and sociology and consists of such subfields as translation study, pragmatics, lexicography, language pedagogy, computer-mediated communication, contrastive linguistics, discourse analysis and many others.
3.Practical linguistics - the definition that represents the area of human activities which aims at verification of theoretical issues of language study and of the correct work of applied linguistics products such as, for example, machine translation programs.
Although language-study is underestimated today, you cannot imagine life without the advantages given by the study of linguistics. It has established links with various sciences and humanities forming some new branches of study such as cognitive linguistics, computer linguistics, neurolinguistics, toponymy, speech-language pathology and many more. Most of the branches of study are comparatively new. Some of them appeared at the beginning of the 20 century or at the end of the century.
