ABSTRACT
General linguistics is concerned with human language as a universal and recognizable part of human behaviour and of the human faculties. General linguistics includes a number of related subjects involved in the study of language. The most important and immediate subdivisions of the subject are descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, and comparative linguistics. The relations of linguistics with philology in this last sense are very close and allow of considerable overlapping. The term science has been used in the definition of general linguistics. In more specific and particular terms it indicates the attitude taken by the linguist today towards his subject, and in this perhaps it marks a definite characteristic of twentieth-century linguistics. That part of linguistics that deals with the material of speech itself is called phonetics. The concern of the linguist for the uses of language is much wider. Formalized logical inference and philosophical discourse in general are an important part of people's use of language in several civilizations.
