Let's consider a few expanded definitions of linguistics.

"Everyone will agree that linguistics is concerned with the lexical and grammatical categories
of individual languages, with differences between one type of language and another, and with
historical relations within families of languages."
(Peter Matthews, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford University Press, 2005)

"Linguistics can be defined as the systematic inquiry into human language--into its structures
and uses and the relationship between them, as well as into its development through history and
itsacquisition by children and adults. The scope of linguistics includes both language structure (and its
underlying grammatical competence) and language use (and its underlying communicative
competence)."
(Edward Finegan, Language: Its Structure and Use, 6th ed. Wadsworth, 2012)

"Linguistics is concerned with human language as a universal and recognizable part of the
human behaviour and of the human faculties, perhaps one of the most essential to human life as we
know it, and one of the most far-reaching of human capabilities in relation to the whole span of
mankinds achievements."
(Robert Henry Robins, General Linguistics: An Introductory Survey, 4th ed. Longmans, 1989)
The "tension" that Hall refers to in this last passage is reflected, in part, by the many different types of
linguistic studies that exist today.

Branches of Linguistics
Like most academic disciplines, linguistics has been divided into numerous overlapping subfields--"a
stew of alien and undigestible terms," as Randy Allen Harris characterized them in his 1993 book The
Linguistics Wars (Oxford University Press). Using the sentence "Fideau chased the cat" as an
example, Allen offered this "crash course" in the major branches of linguistics. (Follow the links to
learn more about these subfields.)
Phonetics
concerns the acoustic waveform itself, the systematic disruptions of air molecules that occur
whenever someone utters the expression.

Phonology
concerns the elements of that waveform which recognizably punctuate the sonic flow--consonants,
vowels, and syllables, represented on this page by letters.
Morphology
concerns the words and meaningful subwords constructed out of the phonological elements--that
Fideau is a noun, naming some mongrel, that chase is a verb signifying a specific action which calls
for both a chaser and a chasee, that -ed is a suffix indicating past action, and so on.
Syntax
concerns the arrangement of those morphological elements into phrases and sentences--that chased
the cat is a verb phrase, that the cat is its noun phrase (the chasee), that Fideau is another noun phrase
(the chaser), that the whole thing is a sentence.
Semantics
concerns the proposition expressed by that sentence--in particular, that it is true if and only if some
mutt named Fideau has chased some definite cat.
Though handy, Harris's list of linguistic subfields is far from comprehensive. In fact, some of the most
innovative work in contemporary language studies is being carried out in even more specialized
branches, some of which hardly existed 30 or 40 years ago.
(http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/a/What-Is-Linguistics.htm)

Language is succinctly defined in our glossary as a "human system of communication that

uses arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols." But frankly, language is
far too complicated, intriguing, and mysterious to be adequately explained by a brief definition.
The following observations on language, drawn from the works of various writers and scholars, take
us beyond definitions. Approaching the subject from different metaphoricalperspectives, these
quotations may serve as points of departure for your own exploration of the mysteries--and the
limitations--of language.
Answers:

Fossil Poetry
"The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil
poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so
language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to
remind us of their poetic origin."
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet," 1844)

A Museum Inside Our Heads

"Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. . . . We are walking lexicons. In a
single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our
heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard."
(Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger, 1987)

The Armory of the Human Mind

"Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the
weapons of its future conquests."
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

Records of Other People's Experience

"Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has
been born--the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other
people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the
only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for
data, his words for actual things."
(Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954)

An Art
"Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands
of generations."
(Edward Sapir)

An Instinctive Tendency
"As Horne Tooke, one of the founders of the noble science of philology, observes, language is an art,
like brewing or baking; but writing would have been a better simile. It certainly is not a true instinct,
for every language has to be learnt. It differs, however, widely from all ordinary arts, for man has an
instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; whilst no child has an

instinctive tendency to brew, bake, or write. Moreover, no philologist now supposes that any language
has been deliberately invented; it has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps."
(Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871)

The Instrument of Science

"I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth and that things
are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of
ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be
permanent, like the things which they denote."
(Samuel Johnson, Preface, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755)

Laws
"In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned."
(Richard Duppa, Maxims, 1830)

A Process of Free Creation

"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the
principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words
involves a process of free creation."
(Noam Chomsky)

A Finite System
"Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite
variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are 'prefabricated' in the sense that we
dont coin new ones every time we speak."
(David Lodge, "Where Its At," The State of the Language, 1980)

A Stage Beyond Ape-Mentality

"Language is incomplete and fragmentary, and merely registers a stage in the average advance beyond
ape-mentality. But all men enjoy flashes of insight beyond meanings already stabilized
inetymology and grammar."
(Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 1933)

A Cracked Kettle
"Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we
long to move the stars to pity."
(Gustave Flaubert)

A Barrier to Progress
"Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance.
Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way."
(Edward de Bono)

Intrinsically Approximate
"Language is intrinsically approximate, since words mean different things to different people, and
there is no material retaining ground for the imagery that words conjure in one brain or another."
(John Updike, The New Yorker, December 15, 1997)

A Sheet of Paper
"Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back;
one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can
neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound."
(Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 1916)

An Object Between Sound and Thought

"The language is an intermediate object between sound and thought: it consists in uniting both while
simultaneously decomposing them."
(Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 1964)

A Labyrinth

"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way
about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about."

"In the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by side-roads. We see the
straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed."

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of

language."

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953)

The Mother of Thought

"Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden."
(Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta)

The Shaper of Thought

"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about."
(Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, 1964)

(http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/f/whatislang.htm)