Second language acquisition. Contrastive analysis was used extensively in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) in the 1960s and early 1970s, as a method of explaining why some features of a target language were more difficult to acquire than others. According to the behaviourist theories prevailing at the time, language learning was a question of habit …

In psychology, the term "cognition" is usually used within an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions, and such is the same in cognitive engineering. In the study of social cognition, a branch of social psychology, the term is used to explain attitudes, attribution, and group dynamics. However, psychological research within the field of cognitive science has …

Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across linguistic, national, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature "performs a role similar to that of the study of international relations but works with languages and artistic traditions, so as to understand cultures 'from the inside'".

Rhetoric (/ ˈ r ɛ t ə r ɪ k /) is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic (or dialectic), is one of the three ancient arts of discourse.Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. Aristotle defines rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available …

Philology. Tolkien was a professional philologist, a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics.He was especially familiar with Old English and related languages. He remarked to the poet and The New York Times book reviewer Harvey Breit that "I am a philologist and all my work is philological"; he explained to his American publisher Houghton Mifflin that this was …

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce …

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (baptised 25 October 1714; died 26 May 1799) was a Scottish judge, scholar of linguistic evolution, philosopher and deist.He is most famous today as a founder of modern comparative historical linguistics. In 1767 he became a judge in the Court of Session.. As such, Burnett adopted an honorary title based on the name of his father's estate …

Andrew File System (AFS) ended service on January 1, 2021. AFS was a file system and sharing platform that allowed users to access and distribute stored content. AFS was available at afs.msu.edu an…

Public Administration (a form of governance) or Public Policy and Administration (an academic discipline) is the implementation of public policy, administration of government establishment (public governance), management of non-profit establishment (nonprofit governance), and also a subfield of political science taught in public policy schools that studies this implementation and …

Lumpers and splitters are opposing factions in any discipline that has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories.The lumper–splitter problem occurs when there is the desire to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example schools of literature, biological taxa and so on. A "lumper" is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns ...

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical.The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and in his 1956 paper "Three Models for the Description of …

The grammar of Modern Greek, as spoken in present-day Greece and Cyprus, is essentially that of Demotic Greek, but it has also assimilated certain elements of Katharevousa, the archaic, learned variety of Greek imitating Classical Greek forms, which used to be the official language of Greece through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Modern Greek grammar has preserved …

Etymology (/ ˌ ɛ t ɪ ˈ m ɒ l ə dʒ i /) is the study of the history of the form of words and, by extension, the origin and evolution of their semantic meaning across time. It is a subfield of historical linguistics, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, semiotics, and phonetics.. For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts, and texts …

Diacritics can be used for finer detail. For example, apical and laminal alveolars can be specified as [s̺] vs [s̻]; a dental (or more likely denti-alveolar) sibilant as [s̪]; a palatalized alveolar as [sʲ]; and a generic "retracted sibilant" as [s̠], a transcription frequently used for the sharper-quality types of retroflex consonants (e.g. the laminal "flat" type and the "apico-alveolar ...