What do we mean by scientific study of language? Macro Linguistics - Micro Linguistics- Diachronic Linguistics -Synchrony or Synchronic Linguistics - Syntagmatic Relation - Paradigmatic Relation - Competence and Performance -Language Acquisition - Parole and Langue -

Linguistics

The scientific study of language, its use, development, and variation, is called Linguistics.

Micro Linguistics: It is a sub-discipline of Linguistics that deals with the constituents of language, its sounds, structure of words, sound system, sentence structure, meaning of sentences and meaning in context come under the study of micro linguistics.

The branches of Micro linguistics are Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics.

Macro Linguistics: It deals with the broader picture of Linguistics, how language is used in society, its variation in different ways, how language evolves, how it was used in the past and how we perceive language. The branches of Macro linguistics contain Sociolinguistics, Historical Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Psycho linguistics, Anthro Linguistics.

What do we mean by scientific study of language

By the scientific study of language we mean that whatever methods are used by scientists to carry out research to understand nature, linguists use the same methods of observations, close examinations, hypothesis and use these hypotheses against data to formulate theories to understand the origin of Language, formation of language, comprehension of language, production of language and how language changes throughout history.

This information has been taken from the book Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction by Anne Denham and Kirsten Lobeck page no 18.

Diachronic Linguistics 

A sub-discipline of Linguistics in which we study how language evolves throughout history, it is also known as historical linguistics. 

Synchrony or Synchronic Linguistics

A sub-discipline of Linguistics that deals with how language is used by people of a specific period. It is also known as descriptive linguistics. 

Syntagmatic Relation

The relationship between the words in a sentence. By swapping or altering the position of the words we can change the meaning of the sentence.

Example:

A man was beaten by the woman. A woman was beaten by a man.

This kind of relationship is always horizontal as it can be seen in the example above.

Paradigmatic Relation

It shows that by changing the word(s) belonging to the same class in a sentence we can change the meaning of the sentence.

Example:

The man paid his bill.

The man paid his taxes.

This kind of relationship is always vertical.

Competence and Performance

These two terms were put forth by Noam Chomsky. According to him, competence is the knowledge of language we have in our minds, and performance is our ability to speak a language. Our performance depends on our competence. Our competence can not be equal to Performance as our performance can have errors based on our age, attention, and other factors.

Parole and Langue

Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure gave his idea two terms: parole and Langue. Parole may be defined as the actual use of language, how we give output of language based on our knowledge and ability, performance can have flaws because of lack of attention, not having enough knowledge of language and low confidence.

Langue: The knowledge of language we have in our minds is called langue, whatever we know about the language, its rules and vocabulary all these things are counted in langue.

Language Acquisition 

The adaptation of language at an early stage is called language acquisition.It focuses on how human beings acquire languages through social contact and listening. For children to acquire language they must have social contact or audible material to learn a language, and all normal children are born with the ability to acquire language.