Linguistics emerged as a science in the late 1800s when scholars began to apply scientific methods of observation and experimentation to the study of language and signs. Semantics and phonetics were the first two fields of linguistics. They focused on the relationship between words and sounds. Linguistics also included the study of grammar, including syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, and phonology.
Linguistics grew out of philology, the study of language through textual sources. It was influenced by the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who theorized about language as an object of study. Linguistics became a discipline in its own right in the early 1900s, when scholars looked at language as a system of communication and not just as a means of conveying meaning. A number of other disciplines were later added to what had become known as ‘the linguistic sciences, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics. These studies all shared the goal of analyzing language as an objective phenomenon.
In the 1950s, Roland Barthes took the study of language and signs to a new level. He argued that all signs were imbued with social meaning, and therefore had a political dimension. In his view, signs could be used to enforce certain ideas and values within society. In his book Mythologies, he wrote about how the signifier (the word) could be used to imply something other than what was intended. For example, the word “love” might suggest an emotion, when in fact the speaker didn’t mean that at all. Barthes believed that this kind of misuse was widespread in modern culture.
