ABSTRACT
Linguistics traditionally has encompassed the study of the rules, patterns, origins, and acquisition dynamics of human language on multiple levels. These levels can be summarized in terms of sound (phonetics, phonology), form (syntax, morphology), and meaning (semantics, pragmatics). Sociolinguistics examines the linguistic units of sound, form, and meaning to understand their provenance and organization in social contexts, thus encompassing the study of language in society, in interaction, in social settings, and in use – in multiple social domains. Discourse analysis, looking at longer stretches of talk and text, also examines how language is used in context, how we get things done with it, how we structure it, and how we assign judgments and values that language as it is used by human beings then encodes. Together, buttressed by ethnographic, functional, critical, cognitive, and multidisciplinary insights, these are the primary linguistic frameworks that deal with language, communication, and interaction in society. In their application to media, these approaches can be seen as constructing a “media linguistics” (see Perrin, this volume, Chapter 1).
