This section presents short insights about linguistics, applied linguistics and the most common linguistic theories around the world
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Linguistics
Before addressing all the Important Theories for ESL Teachers, it is necessary to define what Linguistics is. Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves analyzing language form, language meaning, and language in context. It also deals with the social, cultural, historical and political factors that influence language. The sub-branches of historical and evolutionary linguistics focuses on how languages change and grow. Read more.
Applied linguistics
Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties within particular languages and among all languages. Applied linguistics takes these results and “applies” them to other areas, such as language education, lexicography, translation, language planning, which involves governmental policy implementation related to language use, and natural language processing. Read more.
Second-language acquisition
Second-language acquisition (SLA), second-language learning, or L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics, but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education. Read more.
Cognitive grammar
Cognitive grammar hypothesizes that grammar, semantics, and lexicon exist on a continuum instead of as separate processes altogether. In this system, grammar is not a formal system operating independently of meaning. Rather, grammar is itself meaningful and inextricable from semantics. Read more.
Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation. Dependency is the notion that linguistic units, e.g. words, are connected to each other by directed links. The verb is taken to be the structural center of clause structure. All other syntactic units (words) are either directly or indirectly connected to the verb in terms of the directed links, which are called dependencies. Read more.
Functional theories of grammar
Functional theories of grammar sees the functionality of language and its elements to be the key to understanding linguistic processes and structures. It proposes that its structures are best analyzed and understood with reference to the functions they carry out. It tends to pay attention to the way language is actually used in communicative context. Read more.
Generative grammar
Generative grammar regards linguistics as a hypothesized innate grammatical structure. It considers grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. Read more.
Phrase structure grammar
Phrase structure grammar is a type of generative grammar in which constituent structures are represented by phrase structure rules or rewrite rules it provides a formal notation for the analysis of the internal structure of sentences. . Read more.
Model-theoretic grammars
Model-theoretic grammars, aka constraint-based grammar, contrast with generative grammars in the way they define sets of sentences: they state constraints on syntactic structure rather than providing operations for generating syntactic objects. Read more.
Stochastic grammar
Statistical natural language processing uses stochastic, probabilistic and statistical methods. The technology for statistical NLP comes mainly from machine learning and data mining, both of which are fields of artificial intelligence that involve learning from data. Read more.