What sorts of subjects are studied in linguistics?
Linguistics is an incredibly broad area of study which crosses many other academic areas like sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. The modules which you decide to take on the programme will determine the overall direction of the linguistics that you will study. In general there are two ways of looking at this. On the one side you have the more socially-oriented subject areas in linguistics such as sociolinguistics, pragmatics, ethnography, and discourse, with a great deal of overlap between them. In these areas the main focus is the nature of human communication: how language is used to enable us to cooperate effectively to construct meaning, what strategies we employ when we are communicating to suggest different kinds of intention, how social groups engage in communicative activities which construct their cultural identity. We are also interested in the broader relations between how language is used to make sense of the world that we live in, and to make our societies
