anyone here studying linguistics? i feel like its a really underrated

Arrival really made me think to, but not THAT much.

>>8696925
hollywood doesn't decide my interests. i really liked arrival but only because i was already interested in the study of language, plus i had read the short story arrival was based on before the movie was released and it was a lot more in depth.

>>8696912
It is crucial for communication. People can think all the shit they want, but if they can't communicate it plainly, it's more useless than shit.
I studied grammar so I can communicate to intelligent people who can understand by having basic skills and common standards.
I learned words and languages to see roots of words--their true meaning.
Most people have seriously impaired reading comprehension and have difficulty focusing on more than a hundred or so letters at a time. They babble and tweet but cannot speak or listen. ADHD is epedimic.

>>8698817
>ADHD is epedimic.
Subtle jew.

>>8696912
Who /conlanger/ here?

>>8696912
Yes. Most people have absolutely no idea what it is, so yeah, I'd agree that it's pretty underrated. The unfortunate thing is that not only do most people not have the slightest clue what it is, but a lot of those people THINK they know what it is. There are so many people who think linguistics about learning different languages, or translating and interpreting, or language pedagogy, communication skills, etc.
What area are you interested in?

>>8698879
Someone new to linguistics here. Tell me what it is, pls. Any cool linguistic facts?

>>8698817
you studied grammar? normie detected.

>>8696912
I personally don't know much about the subject but I study AI. Had a friend in undergrad who said that the first general AI would probably be invented by a linguist and I think he may have been on to something.

go to lit fagget

>>8696912
I took a few courses in syntax in undergrad.

Fun stuff, but as >>8699223 pointed out it's more appropriate with lit and not really a science in the same vein that CS isn't.

>>8699231
http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/mM4MDc2N/keenan.stabler.pdf
>not really a science

>>8699479
>no experimentation

Start with Chomsky. Finish with Hermes Trismegistus.

>>8696912
undergrad here. it soothes my autism, it can get really fun
>>8699223
what does linguistics have to do with lit?

I actually study linguistics. I think it's true what OP says, and it should be treated like a more serious science. The fact that people ITT think it belongs on /lit/ just shows how underrated the field is.

I like this idea >>8699218
I think more linguists need to learn statistics and programming. My university offers "language technology" courses that include those, but is seems like the end goal there is developing software and tools for linguistically impaired people etc.

>>8696912
I don't think that it will ever lead anywhere but that doesn't mean it's not interesting since thought is based in language.

>>8698994
A big part of the reason people think they know what it is when they don't is that some important words used in lingusitics have different meanings outside linguistics. For example, "language" (not "a language" but just "language") used outside linguistics has all kinds of meanings. It can mean "communication," or "prose," or "symbolic formalism," etc. In lingusitics, it refers to the human ability to learn and use langauges. Unfortunately, "a language" or "langauges" is another one of those words that can have multiple different meanings outside linguistics. In linguistics, "a langauge" refers to an individual's mental state which licenses a potentially unbounded set of expressions.

So linguistics is the study of the human ability to learn and use languages. In other words, a human can produce and interpret a potentially unbounded set of expressions licensed by their language, but animals can't, so the idea is there must be something unique about humans, presumably part of our brains, that gives us that ability. We can use data from different people's languages to answer this question. It just so happens that an individual will always have a language that's shared with a larger group, and these groups can get pretty big, which allows us to talk, kind of informally, about data from "English" or "Chinese." What that really means is we're considering data collected from a group of individuals with mental states which we consider so similar as to be practically indistinguishable.

fact to follow

>>8698994
>>8699832
I think there are a lot of cool facts. For one, when children start acquiring a language, they make a lot of mistakes, as everyone who's been around a child of that age knows. What you might not know is that there are certain mistakes that children DON'T make. For instance, in English, when we want to form a question, we take the auxiliary and move it to the front.
John is learning algebra.
-> Is John __ learning algebra?
But what about when there's more than one auxiliary in the sentence, like in
>The man who Bill is talking to is learning algebra.
Sentences like these, where there's an auxiliary in a relative clause in the subject, are extremely rare in child-directed speech. Children almost never encounter these kinds of sentences, so any time they produce a sentence like this, it's a novel utterance, not a copy of something they've heard before. In all the other examples they encounter, the FIRST auxiliary is moved to the front.
John is saying Bill is smart
-> Is John __ saying Bill is smart?
Even though the very simple rule "put the first auxiliary at the beginning of the sentence" accounts for potentially all of the sentences they've encountered, children don't make the following mistake,
The man who Bill is talking to is learning algebra.
-> Is the man who Bill __ talking to is learning algebra?
Children somehow know that the simple rule which could actually account for all the relevant sentences they've been exposed to is fundamentally incorrect. The real rule relies on structure. The structurally highest auxiliary is fronted, not the first one in the linear order.
[The man [who Bill is talking to]] is learning algebra.
-> Is [The man [who Bill is talking to]] __ learning algebra?
We'd like to have an explanation for why certain mistakes are prevalent in language acquisition, while other mistakes never happen. Many have hypothesized that it's a property of language.

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>>8696912
reminder that george lakoff is a tremendous faggot
steven pinker is the god of linguistics

>>8699855
what is also interesting is how the mistakes the children DO make follow rules also.
for example, in turkish we have this /-ı/ suffix, but when a word ends with a consonant /-sı/ allomorph takes its place.
ağ ends with a velar approximant, which is sometimes (by some speakers) are merely used to lengthen the vowel before it in turkish. so the "correct" version of the word with the suffix is "ağı", but children who mistake the consonant with a lenghtening of the vowel produce this word (and other such words) with the allomorph: "ağsı".

similarly, english children produce words like "runned", "thinked" etc., which is another case of children applying the grammar to the new lexical material (correctly, from their point of view)

Where do I start with linguistics?

>>8699972
learn IPA

How is linguistics closer to /sci/ than to /lit/? Honest question.

>>8700051

because linguistics is a science?

>>8700051
Because it has nothing to do with literature. It's not about literary theory, it's not about learning languages, it's not about teaching languages, it has nothing to do with traditional grammar, the stuff you learn in high school English class. It's not about rhetoric, or writing styles, or using precise vocabulary, or how to structure an essay.
Linguistics is typically defined as "the scientific study of language." The problem with that definition is the meaning of "language" in it isn't the most common colloquial meaning. This post explains it more >>8699832.

>>8699908
Thanks for the facts. Those were pretty interesting.

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>>8696912
Tbh it would be nice to study linguistics as a second major once I finish my MBA years later, but I think it could be one of the most rigorous majors in universities, really.

Also got me curious about the "lingua ignota" that was made by a female saint that also did "Scivias" as well.
Would study about her later on.

>>8696912
Hey Vsause, Micheal here detected.
go back to wikipedia

>>8700555
>>8699832
but isn't the thing you two anons are talking about just the neurolinguistics part of linguistics?

Anyone have recommendations for introductory texts in linguistics? No pop-sci garbage, something at the undergrad or beginning grad student level

>>8699908
shit, i fucked up. when a word ends with a *vowel* /-sı/ allomorph takes place

Linguistics is a weird subject in that it seems to be done mostly by other subjcets: psycholinguistics for language in the brain, philosophy for the fundamental aspects, anthropology for the applied and social aspects, biology/anthropology for language development, history/philology for the empirical studies, computer science + AI + mathematics for the theory. A lot of people are doing linguistics, but there doesn't really seem to be any unified body of linguists that tie all that shit together.

Maybe because childs don't learn based on a simple rule, but learn to understand the meaning first? - I have no idea, just guessing.

I think linguistics is pretty close to some aspects of computer science. Anyone working with both?

>>8701678
that makes a lot more sense. so it surfaces as [a:] but it's underlyingly /aɣ/?

Dude aliens lmao

>>8701614
No, this is formal linguistics. Neurolinguistics is more interested in how language in the sense of >>8699832 is implemented in the brain. If you ask me, neurolinguistics a premature endeavor, since we don't have enough understanding of the medium for implementing language (the brain).

>>8698817
linguistics is not the study of communication you moron, it's the study of the brain with respect to producing digital computation which is what language is.

holy shit, this pleb tier understanding of the topic is why most scientific fields are absolutely stagnant, they let these sub 150 iq retards into higher learning and it's just busy work for 60 years with no progress.

>>8701679
That probably means that in the near future there'll be a linguistics undergrad course.

>>8696912
Good enough to Tolkien!.

>>8696912
I love studying language more than anything in the world. When I looked into the potential for careers in linguistics, I was heart broken with the results. The articles I found pretty much said that it is an anachronistic field and there was no future in it besides teaching. Perhaps I'm too easily dismayed, but I accepted that there was no future in it for me.
I've been lost ever since then, drifting from career to career with no passion.
I envy you. Never give up.

>>8696912
James Pustejovsky-The Generative Lexicon

>>8703690
I have an IQ of 114, but I came into this thread knowing what the study of Linguistics entailed- because I find it interesting enough, and it bleeds into other avenues of study I legitimately enjoy.

I don't necessarily think IQ is the sole problem.

>>8696912
if it wasn't for the communication we wouldn't be able to do all the shit we do nowadays.

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>>8698994
queen and cunnus(cunt in latin as in cunnilingues) have the same root

>>8696912
I am a PhD student at a Chomskyan school working mostly on formal problems.

>>8704960
Are you the guy who was working on something to do with a recent paper by Ed Stabler and Chris Collins?