What is linguistics? What is it good for?

[Angus Grieve-Smith]

On 9/8/2011 12:04 PM, s.t. bischoff wrote:
>    Hi all,
>
> I've been asked by my Dean to give a talk which he has titled "What is
> linguistics? What is it good for?". This talk will be given to a general
> audience of faculty, students, and administrators.  I have several ideas how
> to approach this, but I wanted to ask folks how they might go about
> answering the two questions in the title in such a situation.
>

     In my intro classes, I have a slide titled "Who uses linguistics, 
anyway?" with the following list.

  * Linguists
  * Computer programmers
  * Speech therapists
  * Language teachers
  * Literary theorists
  * Editors
  * Lexicographers
  * Politicians

     I go through each group briefly and talk about how they use 
linguistics.  I have a similar slide for phonetics, and I should 
probably make one for each of the other subfields.

-- 
				-Angus B. Grieve-Smith
				grvsmth at panix.com