LINGUISTICS

Linguistic Analysis

Linguistic Analysis

Introduction

Language is an important social phenomenon of our society. We use many different languages in our society. Many people in our society learn and know more than two languages. People try to grasp over more than one language. The language is the representation of the society. People living in the similar societies speak different languages. Similarly, the language is the force, which binds different people together. Language is being taught at different schools. Similarly, many institutes and the colleges are introducing different programs regarding the linguistics. People are also interested in finding the origins of different languages. Many languages are spoken today, some of them are very old, however, a few new languages have also emerged by the mixing of two or more languages (Appel, & Vermeer, 1998).

Discussion

There is no substitute for the detailed examination of the history of individual words. However, it may also be of value to explore the way meanings change in a larger sample of words belonging to the vocabulary of psychology and for which historical information is available. Raymond Williams made extensive use of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and Benjafield (2012) observed that there are good reasons for the continued use of the OED as a research tool. For example, the OED provides excellent coverage of the history of the vocabulary of the sciences (Hoare & Salmon, 2008, p. 170). Benjafield examined 600 words sampled from the OED and identified dimensions along which these words varied. As Benjafield (2012) acknowledged, his results applied to Anglophone psychology only and should not be generalized to the vocabularies of psychology in other languages. The same qualification applies to the results of the present study. Where the word psychology is used, it should be read as Anglophone psychology (Chomsky, 1972).

Benjafield (2012) recognized words for which their mental sense is the first to happen in the historical backdrop of the composed dialect (essential mental words) and words for which their mental sense just rises after one or more different faculties have gotten secured in the composed linguistic (auxiliary mental words).

An example of the former is subception, which was introduced by McCleary and Lazarus (1949). An example of the latter is divergent, which was given a psychological sense by Guilford (1956), but the original sense of which was the change in direction of light rays after refraction (date-of-entry 1696). To utilize a distinction made popular by Ebbinghaus (1908, p. 3), auxiliary psychological words have both a past and a history in brain science, while essential psychological words just have a history (Gass, & Selinker, 2001).

Benjafield (2012) found that secondary psychological words are used by psychologists more often than are primary psychological words. This is partly because secondary psychological words are older in the history of the language than are primary psychological words. Once established, a word can proceed to become used in a variety of contexts and thus increase in its frequency of usage. The result will be that the longer a ...