What distinguishes linguistics from many other cognitive science subfields?

• A. It is defined solely by its methods.
• B. It is defined solely by its subject matter.
• C. It is characterized by both its subject matter and its methods.
• D. It has no defined approach.

Answer: (C)

Linguistics is defined by both what it studies and how it studies it. The subject matter is language—the structures, use, and acquisition of human language across communities. The methods are its distinctive toolkit: formal grammatical theories to describe how language is put together, plus empirical approaches such as phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics analysis, fieldwork, corpus analysis, and experiments that test processing and learning. This combination—a focus on language plus a specialized set of methods for analyzing it—sets linguistics apart from subfields that emphasize only the subject matter or only the methods.