【正确答案】Since linguistics is defined as the scientific study of language, it seems obvious that such a study would help a lot in language teaching and learning, although there is much difference between linguistics and language teaching or learning in their attitudes towards language, their goals, and their methods. Linguistics is a rich and exciting fields.
However, there have been arguments about whether linguistics is a science, especially when it was just coming into being. But now the arguments die away and linguistics has firmly established its place as a major branch of social science. As a recognized academic subject, it is an area with immense research potential, and a scholarly "industry" which produces a large amount of books, dissertations and papers every year; its preoccupations are expressed in such specialize journals as Languag , Journal of linguistic, Lingua, Applied linguistics etc., and at regular conferences.
The justification for all these booming ventures should be obvious from our previous discussion. Language is so valuable to the individual, so critical to the efficient functioning of human societies, and in itself so impressively intricate and profound in structure, that it is bound to attract a great amount of intellectual attention. And since this must produce studies which have practical importance (e.g. in speech therapy, education, techniques of translation and many more "applied" concerns), linguistics is bound to be an academically and economically favored pursuit. It is also a subject of theoretical importance, for one thing, structuralism originating from Saussure's views has influenced many other related social sciences such as literary studies and social studies. In China, the study of language has a long history but modem linguistics still has a long to go to enjoy a "boom".
As a science, linguistics now has a set of established theories, methods and sub-branches. As for its data, now the argument over intuition or corpus also fade as people realize the advantage of both and as corpus linguistics develops rapidly with the advent of computer technology. Lyons predicted in the seventies by pointing out that linguistics is empirical, rather than speculative or intuitive: it operates with publicly variable data obtained by means of observation or experiment (Lyons, 1982:38).
It is generally agreed that linguistics should include at least several parameters, namely, phonologic, morphologic, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The following are these main branches of linguistics:
1)Phonetics
PHONETICS studies speech sounds, including the production of speech, that is how speech sounds are actually made, transmitted and received, the sounds of speech, the description and classification of speech sounds, words and connected speech, etc.
2)Phonology
PHONOLOGY studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. It deals with the sounds systems of a language by treating phoneme as the point of departure.
3)Morphology
MORPHOLOGY is concerned with the internal organization of words. It studies the minimal units of meaning-morphemes and word-formation process.
4)Syntax
SYNTAX is about principles of forming and understanding correct English sentences.The form or structure of a sentence is governed by the rules of syntax.
5)Semantics
SEMANTICS examines how meaning is encoded in a language. It is not only concerned with meanings of words as lexical items, but also with levels of language below the word and above it.
6)Pragmatics
PRAGMATICS is the study of meaning in context. It deals with particular utterances in particular situations and is especially concerned with the various ways in which the many social contexts of language performances can influence interpretation. In other words, pragmatics is concerned with the way language is used to communicate rather than with the way language is structured.

【答案解析】[解析] 本题考查教授和学习语言学的重要性。语言学通常被定义为语言的科学，或语言的科学研究。语言学是一个丰富而有意思的领域。作为一门科学，语言学现在已经建立了一整套理论、方法和分支。通常，语言学至少包括以下几个分支：语音学、音系学、形态学、句法学、语义学和语用学。