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This is the most common question a linguist is ever asked. The question a misnomer in the sense usually intended because of confusion created by groups such as the military referring to translators as linguists. Translation is a language art, while linguistics is a language science. Theoretical Linguistics deals with the mechanics of languages in a descriptive sense.
On the other hand most linguists know several languages, yet only a few would venture to call themselves a translator.
Question No. 1
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Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. Theoretical (or general) linguistics is concerned with frameworks for describing individual languages and theories about universal aspects of language; Scholars who call themselves simply linguists or theoretical linguists, with no further qualification, tend to be concerned with autonomous, theoretical synchronic linguistics, which is acknowledged as the core of the discipline. Chomsky calls this the I[nternal]-language: the nature of language abstracting away from many aspects of its day-to-day usage.
Question No. 2
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Question No. 4
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My job is as a computational linguist, specializing in the research and development lexicons (dictionaries), heuristics (rules which allow the computer to understand aspects of a language), and taxonomies (the classification of words into logical groupings).
My academic focus is theoretical (see above) concentrating on the motivations and constraints which allow lexical categorical changes to occur. A common example of this is known as verbing, a process where we take a noun (such as a fax) and create the a verb (fax). (I know it looks really simple...)
I am also actively engaged in research in the native American Language of Shoshoni. I am currently compiling database of Shoshoni Dictionaries and doing research in Shoshoni Phonology.
The languages I have studied to the extent that I can read and/or speak them are Classical & Koine Greek, German, and Shoshoni.
Question No. 5
How many or what languages do you speak?
What is the technical definition of linguistics?
What do you actually do?
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics. Computational linguistics was formerly usually done by computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Recent research has shown that language is much more complex than previously thought, so computational linguistics work teams are now sometimes interdisciplinary, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics - like me).
What is computational linguistics?
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Question No. 3
While applied linguists specialize in matters of language teaching and techniques and all linguists could (we hope) instruct in the proper use of pronouns (e.g who vs. whom) or the in the proper usage of prepositional phrases, it is not the goal of a theoretical linguist to prescribe proper forms, but to describe whatever forms might occur in a language. We care less about how things are said than why they are said and the manner in which they are said.
Can a linguist tell me the proper way to speak?
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