Linguistics is a woefully underappreciated field

We use language every day, but the beauty and complexity of our language processing often goes under the radar because it’s become so automatic. For example, have you ever realized that adjectives in English can only occur in a specific order (1 2)?

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It’s interesting in sort of the same way as biology, in that it’s shaped over many generations by natural processes into something incredibly complex. And because language is so central to societal operations, linguistics is too: from understanding different accents to the subconscious biases associated with them.

There are many branches of linguistic study. Here are a few.

Phonetics deals with the sounds that people use for language. Surprisingly, there are a lot of them, all catalogued in the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. Some of the coolest sounds are the clicks, which appear e.g. in the Bantu languages of Africa, particularly Xhosa. (This video is of a native speaker demonstrating many of the unique sounds of Xhosa.)

Phonology deals with how sounds function and interact in language. Depending on your native language, you will probably perceive certain sounds as essentially the same: in English, the /p/ in “pot” and “spot”. These are called allophones of /p/. However, they are actually different sounds; the first is aspirated and the second is not. In Hindi, this distinction is so important that the two sounds are considered completely different consonants (फ and प).

Morphology deals with how individual bits of meaning combine to form words. You’re probably familiar with English grammatical suffixes such as “-s” for plurality and “-ed” for past tense, but systems of morphological markers can get really intense: in the Navajo language, verbs can contain up to 14 different markers at the same time. And many of these markers don’t even exist in English! For example:

Mirativity: how surprised the speaker is about something
Evidentiality: where the speaker got that information (whether they saw it directly, heard it secondhand, or inferred it).

Syntax deals with how words form sentences. This is closest to traditional grammar, but still surprisingly interesting, especially once you get out of the bubble of English. For example, the word order of English is subject-verb-object (abbreivated SVO):

He (S) told (V) her (O).
She (S) sleeps (V).

But SOV order (e.g. Japanese, Korean) is actually more common. Some languages don’t even fit into this category because they are ergative-absolutive:

He (E) her (A) told (V).
Her (A) sleeps (V).

Semantics deals with how meaning is conveyed. This is where we start getting adjacent to philosophy, psychology, and computer science: questions of how machines can understand meaning to the extent that humans do. Consider a sentence like:

He gave her flowers.

A computer would actually struggle to understand this sentence, because syntatically, the sentence could mean either of the following:

He gave flowers to her.
He gave the flowers that belong to her (to someone else).

Somehow, humans can tell which of these interpretations is more logical. How? Tough question.

Pragmatics deals with the influence of context on meaning. Now we’re talking about things like sarcasm. To a computer (at least naively), it wouldn’t make any sense that people say things they don’t mean, but it happens all the time in real life. I attended a talk once that attempted to explain sarcasm through the rational speech acts (RSA) model, so that’s something.