Linguistics: Formalism and Forms

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves the analysis of language form, meaning and context, as well as an analysis of the social, cultural, historical and political factors affecting language. It analyses human language by studying the relationship between sound and meaning. The meaning can be studied in its directly spoken or written form by the field of semantics, as well as in its indirect forms through the discipline of pragmatics. Formalism is a theoretical approach within linguistics which considers human language to be a formal language like programming languages and the language of mathematics. Anatomy of syntax is one of the prominent assumptions of linguistic formalism. It states that syntactic structures are constructed by operations which make no reference to meaning, discourse or use. This book provides significant information of this discipline to help develop a good understanding of linguistics and formalism. It presents this complex subject in the most comprehensible and easy to understand language. The book is appropriate for students seeking detailed information in this area as well as for experts.