Page 42 - DLIS407_INFORMATION AND LITERATURE SURVEY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

Unit 5: Social Science Disciplines: Developments and Problems

Self Assessment Notes

Fill in the blanks:
4. The ……………social science often develop nuanced descriptions rather than the general
laws derived in physics or chemistry, or they may explain individual cases through more
general principles, as in many fields of psychology.
5. ………………geography combines physical and human geography and looks at the
interactions between the environment an humans.

5.1.3 Law

Law in common parlance, means a ruler which (unlike a rule of ethics) is capable of enforcement
through institutions. The study of law crosses the boundaries between the social science and humanities,
depending on one's view of research into its objectives and effects. Law is not always enforceable,
especially in the international relations context. It has been defined as a "system of rules", as an
"interpretive concept" to achieve justice, as an "authority" to mediate people's interests, and even as
"the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction". However on likes to think of law,
it is a completely central social institution. Legal policy incorporates the practical manifestation of
thinking from almost every social science and humanity. Laws are politics, because politicians create
them. Law is philosophy, because moral and ethical persuasions shape their ideas. Law tells many of
histories stories, because statutes, case law and codifications build up over time. And law is economics,
because any rule about contract, tort, property law, labour law, company law and many more can have
long lasting effects on the distribution of wealth. The noun law derives from the late Old English lagu,
meaning something laid down or fixed and the adjective legal comes from the latin word lex.

Task Identify the key laws which are not enforceable at international level.

5.1.4 Linguistics

Linguistics investigates the conitive and social aspects of human language. The field is divided into
areas that focus on aspects of the linguistic signal, such as syntax (the study of the rules that govern
the structure of sentences), semantics (the study of meaning), morphology (the study of the structure
of words), phonetics (the study of speech sounds) and phonology (the study of the abstract sound
system of a particular language); however, work in areas like evolutionary linguistics (the study of
the origins and evolution of language) and physcholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in
human language) cut across these divisions.
The overwhelming majority of modern research in linguistics takes a predominantly synchronic
perspective (focusing on language at a particular point in time), and a great deal of it partly owing to
the influence of Noam chomsky airm at formulating theories of the cognitive processing of language.
However, language does not exist in a vacuum, or only in the brain, and approaches like contact
linguistics, creole studies, discourse analysis, social interactional linguistics, and sociolinguistics
explore language in its social context. Sociolinguistics often makes use of traditional quantitative
analysis and statistics in investigating the frequency of features, while some disciplines, like contact
linguistics, focus on qualitative analysis. While certain areas of linguistics can thus be understood
as clearly falling within the social science, other areas, like acoustic phonetics and neuro linguistics,
draw on the natural science. Linguistics draws only secondarily on the humanities, which played a

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