Department of Philology // University of Patras  What is
Linguistics?  Linguistics is a comparatively new science, or
new, at least, in the form it has taken in recent years. The
science seeks to answer the following questions: (a) what
exactly do we know when we know a language (b) how is this
knowledge acquired and (c) how is such knowledge used?
Linguistics examines language as a part of human behaviour from
a psychological and a social and cultural aspect and attempts to
determine which characteristics are unique to a language and
which are universal (found in all the world's languages), how
individual languages differ, how and why they change, "die" or
"are born". Like all sciences, linguistics is divided into
theoretical and applied.  Theoretical Linguistics examines a
language at different levels of analysis, i.e. its phonological
system, articulation and perception of sounds (phonetics), word
formation (morphology) and phrases and sentences (syntax), the
meaning of linguistic expressions (semantics),