Dannyboy-the-Dane

With respect to natural v.s. social sciences: the natural sciences are the sciences of the natural world, and so include physics, chemistry and biology. This contrasts with social sciences which study the emergent phenomena of social interaction and so on. Linguistics can be approached as a natural science (e.g. language being an aspect of biology), a social science (e.g. sociolinguistics), a formal science (e.g. the formation of mathematical models of grammar regardless of ontology), or a humanity (e.g. philosophy of language, literary and discourse analysis).