Anyone here studying linguistics? i feel like its a really underrated science...

go to lit fagget

I took a few courses in syntax in undergrad.

Fun stuff, but as pointed out it's more appropriate with lit and not really a science in the same vein that CS isn't.

semanticsarchive.net/Archive/mM4MDc2N/keenan.stabler.pdf
>not really a science

>no experimentation

Start with Chomsky. Finish with Hermes Trismegistus.

undergrad here. it soothes my autism, it can get really fun
what does linguistics have to do with lit?

I actually study linguistics. I think it's true what OP says, and it should be treated like a more serious science. The fact that people ITT think it belongs on Veeky Forums just shows how underrated the field is.

I like this idea I think more linguists need to learn statistics and programming. My university offers "language technology" courses that include those, but is seems like the end goal there is developing software and tools for linguistically impaired people etc.

I don't think that it will ever lead anywhere but that doesn't mean it's not interesting since thought is based in language.

A big part of the reason people think they know what it is when they don't is that some important words used in lingusitics have different meanings outside linguistics. For example, "language" (not "a language" but just "language") used outside linguistics has all kinds of meanings. It can mean "communication," or "prose," or "symbolic formalism," etc. In lingusitics, it refers to the human ability to learn and use langauges. Unfortunately, "a language" or "langauges" is another one of those words that can have multiple different meanings outside linguistics. In linguistics, "a langauge" refers to an individual's mental state which licenses a potentially unbounded set of expressions.

So linguistics is the study of the human ability to learn and use languages. In other words, a human can produce and interpret a potentially unbounded set of expressions licensed by their language, but animals can't, so the idea is there must be something unique about humans, presumably part of our brains, that gives us that ability. We can use data from different people's languages to answer this question. It just so happens that an individual will always have a language that's shared with a larger group, and these groups can get pretty big, which allows us to talk, kind of informally, about data from "English" or "Chinese." What that really means is we're considering data collected from a group of individuals with mental states which we consider so similar as to be practically indistinguishable.

fact to follow

I think there are a lot of cool facts. For one, when children start acquiring a language, they make a lot of mistakes, as everyone who's been around a child of that age knows. What you might not know is that there are certain mistakes that children DON'T make. For instance, in English, when we want to form a question, we take the auxiliary and move it to the front.
John is learning algebra.
-> Is John __ learning algebra?
But what about when there's more than one auxiliary in the sentence, like in
>The man who Bill is talking to is learning algebra.
Sentences like these, where there's an auxiliary in a relative clause in the subject, are extremely rare in child-directed speech. Children almost never encounter these kinds of sentences, so any time they produce a sentence like this, it's a novel utterance, not a copy of something they've heard before. In all the other examples they encounter, the FIRST auxiliary is moved to the front.
John is saying Bill is smart
-> Is John __ saying Bill is smart?
Even though the very simple rule "put the first auxiliary at the beginning of the sentence" accounts for potentially all of the sentences they've encountered, children don't make the following mistake,
The man who Bill is talking to is learning algebra.
-> Is the man who Bill __ talking to is learning algebra?
Children somehow know that the simple rule which could actually account for all the relevant sentences they've been exposed to is fundamentally incorrect. The real rule relies on structure. The structurally highest auxiliary is fronted, not the first one in the linear order.
[The man [who Bill is talking to]] is learning algebra.
-> Is [The man [who Bill is talking to]] __ learning algebra?
We'd like to have an explanation for why certain mistakes are prevalent in language acquisition, while other mistakes never happen. Many have hypothesized that it's a property of language.