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Field of Linguistics, The

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

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Synonyms

None.

Definition

The scientific study of human language(s) and/or the human language faculty.

Introduction

“Asking a linguist how many languages they speak is like asking a biologist how many pets they have.” -Unknown

Comparing biologists with linguists illustrates one of the more common misunderstandings about linguistics: although language is the object of study in linguistics (like living things are the object of study in biology), the relationship between linguists and language is most often one of observation rather than ownership or fluency. Using a language and being able to describe how a language works are two very different things: for example, if you’re reading this, you are presumably fluent in English. But, unless you’ve studied linguistics before, it’s unlikely that you can say whether the ‘p’ at the end of the word stop is aspirated or not. (For interested readers, in the case of the word stop, the p is not aspirated; say pin and stopwith your hand directly in...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Christine Cuskley

Authors
  1. Christine Cuskley
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Correspondence to Christine Cuskley .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland Univ Dept of Psycholgy, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Viviana Weekes-Shackelford

  2. Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

  3. Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Cuskley, C. (2016). Field of Linguistics, The. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3349-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3349-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

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