wat do u do when u study linguistics?

Question

i want to know what people do when they study linguistics.....
i totally have no idea...please answer seriously..

tnx

Answer 1

Linguistics is the scientific study of the structure of language. Many people think a linguist is someone who learns languages, which is wrong. A linguist is someone who applies scientific methods and studies the fields of syntax, phonology, phonetics, morphology, semantics, sociolinguistics, etc. in a language specific context.

If you enjoy learning languages, you may or may not enjoy linguistics, it depends. Like I said before many people think linguistics is just learning languages or a linguist is someone who speaks multiple languages, which is very wrong, so they take a linguistics course and then a week later run away screaming, I did too at first.

Answer 2

Well ,linguistics is the scientific study of language ,from different domains .For example, we study the grammar of the language "Syntax and Morphology" which includes the study of the structure of sentences &the possible sequences of words {that's Syntax}
and the structure of words" the main word -stem- and prefixes and suffixes" {that's Morphology}

We also study Phonology "the sound system in a pecific language"
Semantics "the study of meaning and pragmatics"
And an interesting domain also is Computational Linguistics "which aimes at computing the language " as in electronic dictionaries,and we do that through studying a programming language.

So a linguist is that person who interested in the study of the origin of the language and its internal structure .
And yea I would go with Comorebe's answer that a very wrong common idea is that a linguist is a person who speaks more than a language!! if you went on Answers.com you would find the same thing!! the ame mistak! I wonder how come ? but any ways for myself I choosed to be a Computational Linguist to be able to analyse a lot of languages' Phenomenon . and to be able to make robbot language some day .

Hope it helps.

Answer 3

As far as I know, people study linguistics to be linguists, or the linguistics professors to teach this field to students (bachelor's to doctoral degrees), or the scholars to do research on linguistics, or the academics to write/edit international linguistics journals/textbooks.

Answer 4

exactly what Komorebi said..

its not just the study of a language/s .. its also the the study of how they came to be.. how they are stuctured.. how they vary .. and some anthropology studies.. such as..
at what time were we able to speak the way we do today.. or i mean. how did our voice box devlope through out the past 70,000 year.. to be able to speak the way we do today ?

if you are further interested. there is a great little book that you could read in 3 days that teaches alot.
Its called Speak -The History of Languages by Tore Janson

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780199263417&itm=1

Answer 5

I've head the dissecate tongues and the vocal organs.