In the discipline of
linguistics there have been three major directions in linguistics in the past two centuries. D: Let's tlak about it...
Historical linguistics.Before the 19th century, language in the western world was to interest to philosophers. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made major contributions to the study of language.
Plato is said to have been the first person to distinguish between nouns and verbs, how cool is that?
1786 is the year which many people regard as the birthdate of linguistics. Pretty old, huh?
On the 27th of September, 1786, and Englishman,
Sir Willian Jones, read a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta pointing out that
Sanskrit,
Greek,
Latin,
Celtic and
Germanic all had striking structural similarities. but, although Jones has the credit of making this discovery, it was an idea that was occurring independently to several scholars at the same time.
Now, for another hundred years, all other linguistic work was eclipsed by the general preoccupation with writing comparative grammars, grammars which FIRST compared the different linguistic forms found in the various members of the Indo-European language family, and SECOND, attempted to set up a hypothetical ancestor, PRoto-Indo-European, from which all these languages were descended.
Now let me tell you about the
Descriptive Linguistics. (:
In the 20th century, the emphasis shifted from language change to language description. Instead of looking at how a selection of items changed in a number o different laguages, linguistics began to concentrate on describing single languages at one particular point in time.
If ay one person can be held responsible for this change of emphasis, it should be the Swiss scholar
Ferdinand de Saussure, who is sometimes labelled as ''the father of modern linguistics''.
when he died, he didn't left any important work on general linguistics, but before you feel sad, let me tell you that his students collected together his lecture notes after his death and published the under the title
General Linguistics, which exerted a major influence on the course of linguistics.
his insistence that language is a careflly built
structure of intervowen elements initiated the era of the amazing structural linguistics.
The term ''structural linguistics'' does not necessarily refer to a separate branch or school of linguistics. ALL linguistics since de Saussure ins structural, as ''structural'' in this sense it merely means the recognition that language is a patterned system composed of interdependent elements, rather than a collection of unconnected individual items.
Leonard Bloomfield considered that linguistics should deal objectively and systematically with obsvervable data. so he was more interested in the way items arrand than in meaning.
-By around 1950, linguistics had lost touch with other disciplines and become and abstruse subject of little interest to anyone outside it. It was ready for a revolution. Hell yeah!!
Let's now talk a little bit about the
Generative Linguistics and the Search for Universals.
In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. Noam Chomsky, a teacher at hte Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a book called Syntactic Structures. This little book started a revolution in linguistics. Chomsky is the MOST influential linguist of the century, he is the linguist whose reputation has spread furtest outside linguistics.
Chomsky has shifted attention away from detailed descriptions of actual utterances, and started asking questions about the nature of the system which produces the output.
A grammar should be more than a description of old utterances. it should also take it into account possible fot further utterances.
A grammar which consists of a set of statements or rules which specify sequences of a language are possible, and which impossible, is a
generative grammar. Chomsky initiated the era of generative linguistics.
The particular type of generative grammar favoured by Chomsky is a so-called
transformational one. tha basic characteristics of
transformational-generative grammar.
chomsky has not only initiated the era of generative grammars. He has also redirected attention towards
language universals. He points out that as all humans are rather similar, their internalized language mechanisms are likely to have important common properties.
chomsky has given the label
Universal Grammar to this inherited core, and he regards it as a major task of linguistics to specify what it consists of.
The search of a universal generative grammar is a general characteristic of theoretical linguistics at hte present time, and various proposals have been made.
