Language Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Subdisciplines=== The academic study of language is conducted within many different disciplinary areas and from different theoretical angles, all of which inform modern approaches to linguistics. For example, [[descriptive linguistics]] examines the grammar of single languages, [[theoretical linguistics]] develops theories on how best to conceptualize and define the nature of language based on data from the various extant human languages, [[sociolinguistics]] studies how languages are used for social purposes informing in turn the study of the social functions of language and grammatical description, [[neurolinguistics]] studies how language is processed in the human brain and allows the experimental testing of theories, [[computational linguistics]] builds on theoretical and descriptive linguistics to construct computational models of language often aimed at processing natural language or at testing linguistic hypotheses, and [[historical linguistics]] relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace their individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by using the [[comparative method]].<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Trask|2007}}</ref> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page