ABSTRACT
Term covering several linguistic subdisciplines as well as certain interdisciplinary areas that use linguistic methods: language pedagogy, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, second language acquisition, translation, contrastive analysis, language planning, lexicography,’ computational linguistics, ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and others. Applied linguistics differs from theoretical linguistics in that the latter is concerned with the formal structure of language as an autonomous system of signs. The term ‘applied linguistics’ is in some cases misleading, since in many of the subdisciplines language is studied from both a theoretical and practical (i.e. applied) perspective. Moreover, some areas should be considered ‘applications’ of linguistics. Applied linguistics has become a field of growing linguistic interest, as evidenced by the many journals devoted to these allied studies which have been launched since the 1960s.
