linguistics

the discipline that studies language as a system — its structure, meaning, change, and use. linguistics bridges lang (the phenomenon of symbolic communication) and comp (formal grammars, parsing, computational models)

in the crystal, linguistics spans two domains:

• lang — syntax, semantics, alphabet, writing system, language families, translation
• comp — formal language theory, compilers, parsing, NMT

branches

phonology → sound systems, phonemes, prosody morphology → word structure, inflection, derivation

• syntax → syntax (sentence structure, phrase grammar, constituency)
• semantics → semantics (natural language semantics, meaning, reference) pragmatics → context, speech acts, implicature
• historical linguistics → lang + meta (language change, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan)
• computational linguistics → lang + comp + ai (NMT, NLP, LLMs)
• sociolinguistics → lang + socio (dialect, register, language policy)