Human languages are structured systems for making
articulated thoughts fully explicit both internally (mentally) and externally
(in a form perceptible to other humans), and linguistics studies all components
of such systems, together with the ways in which they are used……
Most communication, even between humans, has nothing to
do with language (think of frowning, winking, shrugging, grinning,
eyebrow-raising, caressing, or glaring). Some of it isn’t even voluntary
(blushing, limping, trembling).
The systems that linguists study connect virtually
unbounded numbers of sentence meanings (arbitrarily complex thoughts) to
external realizations, in a medium-independent way (a given sentence can be
presented in either written or spoken form). Thus the subject matter for
linguists extends from the study of the ways in which speech sounds are made (phonetics)
to the study of how meaningful sentences are used in context to convey implicit
meanings (pragmatics).
Sentences can instruct or query or exhort or signal
emotion, and crucially they can express claims, either true and false, and can
be used not only externally, for communication or easing of social interaction,
but also internally, for reasoning.
--- Geoffrey K. Pullum, Linguistics: Why It Matters.
2018.
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