In linguistics, prosody refers to intonation and vocal stress in speech. The prosodic features of a syllable are called suprasegmental features because they affect all the segments of a syllable. These suprasegmental features are manifested as syllable length, tone and stress. Broadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... Theoretical linguistics studies diverse questions: how certain languages managed to communicate, what properties all languages have in common, what knowledge a person must have to be able to use a language, and language acquisition. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word phone = sound/voice) is the study of speech sounds (voice). ... Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), or phonemics, is a subfield of grammar (see also linguistics). ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... In linguistics, syntax is the study of the rules, or patterned relations, that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... In general, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ... Lexical semantics is a field in computer science and linguistics which deals mainly with word meaning. ... Stylistics is the study of style used in literary, and verbal language and the effect the writer/speaker wishes to communicate to the reader/hearer. ... In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules of the language. ... Pragmatics is generally the study of natural language understanding, and specifically the study of how context influences the interpretation of meanings. ... Applied linguistics is concerned with using linguistic theory to address real-world problems. ... Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. ... Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. ... Cognitive linguistics is a school of linguistics and cognitive science, which aims to provide accounts of language that mesh well with current understandings of the human mind. ... Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. ... Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is actually spoken now (or how it was actually spoken in the past), by any group of people. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time, by means of examining languages which are recognizably related through similarities such as vocabulary, word formation, and syntax, as well as the surviving records of ancient languages. ... Etymology is the study of the origins of words. ... The following is a list of linguists, those who study linguistics. ... Broadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... Intonation is the variation of tone used when speaking. ... In linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence. ... Speech: (n. ... This article discusses the unit of speech. ... This article or section uses Ruby annotation. ... In linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence. ...

See also

• Phonological Hierarchy