Challenge: Language change 1
Professor Lam studies how languages are
used by analyzing them objectively. She has a structural approach. She analyzes
how people communicate in different environments, and never says how a language
should be, but she accepts it as it is to describe it. She deals with the
phonology, the morphology, the syntax and lexical derivation of a language.
Professor Ayin
deals with the following issues: he observes and describes changes in certain
languages; he reconstructs the pre-history of languages in order to understand
their relationships; he groups languages in language families and he studies
the history of words.
Professor Kaf’s
works focuses on how language varieties differ from each other in given groups.
He studies the social motivations of language change, code-switching and
language shift in speech communities, high and low prestige varieties, and so
on. He often collects data by conducting interviews.
Professor Alif has a very interesting branch. She studies the origin of language and the development of linguistic universals. However, she has to face a big challenge in her field: the lack of fossil records. She has an adaptationist approach to language origins. She is interested in big questions like whether human language origins must be looked as a continuum of animal communication or it is unique to human.
What linguistics
branches do the professors belong to?
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comment.