Linguistics Notes

Introduction

• Linguistics is the scientific study of language, emerging in the mid-19th century to distinguish itself from philology.

• Philology focuses on the historical development of languages via written texts and their cultural context.

• Linguistics prioritizes spoken languages and their analysis at a specific time, though it may also consider written texts and historical development.

• Three dichotomies define the field of linguistics:

  • Synchronic vs. Diachronic: Synchronic describes a language at a given time, whereas diachronic examines its historical evolution and structural changes.

  • Theoretical vs. Applied: Theoretical linguistics aims to construct a general theory of language structure, and applied linguistics applies linguistic findings to practical tasks, such as language teaching.

  • Microlinguistics vs. Macrolinguistics: Microlinguistics analyzes languages for their own sake, disregarding social functions, acquisition, psychological mechanisms, literary aspects, etc. Macrolinguistics embraces all these aspects, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, dialectology, computational linguistics, and stylistics. Note that macrolinguistics should not be confused with applied linguistics.

History of Linguistics

Earlier History of Linguistics

Non-Western Traditions

• Linguistic investigation has been limited to a few societies.

• Chinese and Arabic learning dealt with grammar, but their treatments were deeply embedded in their languages, and had little impact on the Western linguistic tradition until recently.

  • Chinese scholarship focused on phonetics, writing, and lexicography.

• The most original non-Western grammatical tradition is that of India, culminating in Panini's grammar (5th century BCE).

  • Three major impacts of the Sanskrit tradition on modern linguistic scholarship:

    • Sanskrit's discovery led to the unravelling of comparative Indo-European grammar, laying the foundation for comparative philology and historical linguistics in the 19th century.

    • Ancient India's phonetics knowledge was superior to Western knowledge, impacting the growth of phonetics in the West.

    • Panini's rules offer a subtle account of Sanskrit grammar, explaining sentence construction and compound nouns through ordered rules operating on underlying structures, similar to modern theory.

    • The study of Indian logic in relation to Paninian grammar could bring illuminating insights.

• In ancient India, a sophisticated version of grammar developed alongside other sciences.

Greek and Roman Antiquity

• The emergence of grammatical learning in Greece is less clear than implied.

• The term hē grammatikē technē (“the art of letters”) had two senses:

  • The study of the values of the letters and of accentuation and prosody.

  • The skill of literacy and thus embraced applied pedagogy.

• Theoretical grammar grew out of philosophy and criticism, with a duality of themes.

• Greek philosophy distinguished between that which exists “by nature” and that which exists “by convention.”

  • Language was accounted for as ordained by nature (by onomatopoeia) or as arrived at arbitrarily by a social convention.

• This dispute paved the way for the development of divergences between the views of the “analogists,” and the views of the “anomalists,"

  • "Analogists" looked on language as possessing an essential regularity as a result of the symmetries that convention can provide.

  • "Anomalists" pointed to language’s lack of regularity as one facet of the inescapable irregularities of nature.

• The anomalists among the Stoics credited the irrational quality of language precisely to the claim that language did not exactly mirror nature.

  • The anomalist tradition brought grammar the benefit of their work in logic and rhetoric, leading to the distinction that, in modern theory, is made with the terms signifiant (“what signifies”) and signifié (“what is signified”).

• The Alexandrians, who were analogists working largely on literary criticism and text philology, completed the development of the classical Greek grammatical tradition.

  • Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BCE) produced the first systematic grammar of Western tradition; it dealt only with word morphology.

  • The study of sentence syntax was to wait for Apollonius Dyscolus (2nd century CE).

  • Dionysius called grammar “the acquaintance with *or observation of] what is uttered by poets and writers''.

• The Romans, who largely took over, with mild adaptations to their highly similar language, the total work of the Greeks, are important not as originators but as transmitters.

  • Aelius Donatus (4th century CE) and Priscian (African of the 6th century) and their colleagues were slightly more systematic than their Greek models but were essentially retrospective rather than original.

• The anomalists, who concentrated on surface irregularity and who looked then for regularities deeper down (as the Stoics sought them in logic) bear a resemblance to contemporary scholars of the transformationalist school.

• The philological analogists with their regularizing surface segmentation show striking kinship of spirit with the modern school of structural grammatical theorists.

The European Middle Ages

• The field of linguistics has almost completely neglected the achievements of this period.

• Some of the medieval treatises continue the tradition of grammars of late antiquity; so there are versions based on Donatus and Priscian, often with less incorporation of the classical poets and writers.

• The most obviously interesting theorizing to be found in this period is contained in the “speculative grammar” of the modistae.

  • For the development of the Western grammatical tradition, work of this genre was the second great milestone after the crystallization of Greek thought with the Stoics and Alexandrians.

• The scholastic philosophers were occupied with relating words and things—i.e., the structure of sentences with the nature of the real world—hence their preoccupation with signification.

  • The aim of the grammarians was to explore how a word (an element of language) matched things apprehended by the mind and how it signified reality.

  • Since a word cannot signify the nature of reality directly, it must stand for the thing signified in one of its modes or properties; it is this discrimination of modes that the study of categories and parts of speech is all about.

  • Thus the study of sentences should lead one to the nature of reality by way of the modes of signifying.

• The modistae did not innovate in discriminating categories and parts of speech; they accepted those that had come down from the Greeks through Donatus and Priscian.

• The great contribution of these grammarians, who flourished between the mid-13th and mid-14th century, was their insistence on a grammar to explicate the distinctions found by their forerunners in the languages known to them.

• Before the modistae, grammar had not been viewed as a separate discipline but had been considered in conjunction with other studies or skills (such as criticism, preservation of valued texts, foreign-language learning).

  • The Greek view of grammar was rather narrow and fragmented; the Roman view was largely technical.

  • The speculative medieval grammarians (who dealt with language as a speculum, “mirror” of reality) inquired into the fundamentals underlying language and grammar.

  • They wondered whether grammarians or philosophers discovered grammar, whether grammar was the same for all languages, what the fundamental topic of grammar was, and what the basic and irreducible grammatical primes are.

• Signification was reached by imposition of words on things; i.e., the sign was arbitrary.

The Renaissance

• The linguistic and philological developments of this period are interesting and significant.

• In the field of grammar, the Renaissance did not produce notable innovation or advance.

• Generally speaking, there was a strong rejection of speculative grammar and a relatively uncritical resumption of late Roman view.

• From time to time a degree of boldness may be seen in France:

  • Petrus Ramus, a 16th century logician, worked within

The 20th Century Linguistics

Structuralism

• The term structuralism was used as a slogan by a number of different schools of linguistics.

• A broad distinction is drawn between European and American structuralism.

Structural linguistics in Europe

• Structural linguistics in Europe is generally said to have begun in 1916 with the publication of the Cours de Linguistique Générale (Course in General Linguistics) of Ferdinand de Saussure.

  • Much of what is now considered as Saussurean can be seen in the earlier work of Humboldt and the full significance of the work was not appreciated at the time.

• Saussure’s structuralism can be summed up in two dichotomies:

  • langue versus parole

    • Langue: Is the system of language, i.e. the internal arrangement and relationship of rules which speakers of a language have a shared knowledge of. For example, the systems of syntax and phonology of English and French.

    • Parole: The actual utterances themselves i.e. the actual use of that language in speech or writing by individuals (For example, my language or your language or somebody else's language).

    • Langue involves the principles of language without which no meaningful utterances (parole) would be possible.

    • Saussure used the example of Chess to explain how langue and parole work by comparing langue to the rules of chess (the rules for playing the game) and compared the moves that an individual chooses to make (the individual's preferences in playing the game) to the parole. Langue is the rules in a Chess game while parole represents the individual's choice of moves.

  • signified versus signifier.

• It was Saussure who drew the terminological distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics in the Cours.

  • A diachronic approach considers the development and evolution of a language through history. In other words, it looks at the way in which a language develops or changes over time (For example, the change in English sound system from Old English to Modern English).

  • A synchronic approach considers a language rule at a specific time, i.e. it looks at language as it is in any particular point of time. For example, studying the syntax of American English in the early twenty-first century, or studying the system of Shakespeare's English.

  • For Saussure, it is not necessary to have knowledge of the historical development of a language in order to examine its present system.

  • He concentrates on the structure of a language and that's why it is called structuralism.

• The most important of the various schools of structural linguistics to be found in Europe in the first half of the 20th century included the Prague school, most notably represented by Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy (died 1938) and Roman Jakobson (died 1982), the Copenhagen school, centered around Louis Hjelmslev (died 1965).

• John Rupert Firth (died 1960) and his followers, sometimes referred to as the London school, were less Saussurean in their approach, but, in a general sense of the term, their approach may also be described as structural linguistics.

Structural linguistics in America

• American and European structuralism shared a number of features.

• Both European and American linguists of this period tended to emphasize the structural uniqueness of individual languages.

• There were hundreds of domestic American Indian languages that had never been previously described.

  • Many of these were spoken by only a handful of speakers and, if they were not recorded before they became extinct, would be permanently inaccessible. Under these circumstances, such linguists as Franz Boas (died 1942) were less concerned with the construction of a general theory of the structure of human language than they were with prescribing sound methodological principles for the analysis of unfamiliar languages.

  • They were also fearful that the description of these languages would be distorted by analyzing them in terms of categories derived from the analysis of the more familiar Indo-European languages.

• After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir (died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949).

  • Boas and Sapir were both attracted by the Humboldtian view of the relationship between language and thought, but it was left to one of Sapir’s pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf, to present it in a sufficiently challenging form to attract widespread scholarly attention.

  • Since the republication of Whorf’s more important papers in 1956, the thesis that language determines perception and thought has come to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the theory of linguistic relativity.

• Sapir’s work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists.

• When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt’s psychology of language.

• In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years.

• In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories.

  • Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response.

• Bloomfield’s followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning.

• One of the most characteristic features of “post-Bloomfieldian” American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics.

Transformational-Generative Grammar

• The most significant development in linguistic theory and research in the 20th century was the rise of generative grammar, and, more especially, of transformational-generative grammar, or transformational grammar, as it came to be known.

• Two versions of transformational grammar were put forward in the mid-1950s, the first by Zellig S. Harris and the second by Noam Chomsky, his student. It was Chomsky’s system that attracted the most attention.

• As first presented by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures (1957), transformational grammar can be seen partly as a reaction against post-Bloomfieldian structuralism and partly as a continuation of it.

  • What Chomsky reacted against most strongly was the post-Bloomfieldian concern with discovery procedures.

  • In his opinion, linguistics should set itself the more modest and more realistic goal of formulating criteria for evaluating alternative descriptions of a language without regard to the question of how these descriptions had been arrived at.

  • The statements made by linguists in describing a language should, however, be cast within the framework of a far more precise theory of grammar than had hitherto been the case, and this theory should be formalized in terms of modern mathematical notions.

• Within a few years, Chomsky had broken with the post-Bloomfieldians on a number of other points also.

  • He had adopted what he called a “mentalistic” theory of language, by which term he implied that the linguist should be concerned with the speaker’s creative linguistic competence and not his performance, the actual utterances produced.

  • He had challenged the post-Bloomfieldian concept of the phoneme, which many scholars regarded as the most solid and enduring result of the previous generation’s work.

  • And he had challenged the structuralists’ insistence upon the uniqueness of every language, claiming instead that all languages were, to a considerable degree, cut to the same pattern—they shared a certain number of formal and substantive universals.

Tagmemic, stratificational, and other approaches

• Among the rival schools in the mid-20th century were tagmemics, stratificational grammar, and the Prague school.

• Tagmemics was the system of linguistic analysis developed by the U.S. linguist Kenneth L. Pike.

  • Its foundations were laid during the 1950s, when Pike differed from the post-Bloomfieldian structuralists on a number of principles, and it was further elaborated afterward.

  • Tagmemic analysis was used for analyzing a great many previously unrecorded languages, especially in Central and South America and in West Africa.

• Stratificational grammar, developed by the U.S. linguist Sydney M. Lamb, was seen by some linguists in the 1960s and ’70s as an alternative to transformational grammar.

  • Stratificational grammar is perhaps best characterized as a radical modification of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics, but it has many features that link it with European structuralism.

• The Prague school has been mentioned above for its importance in the period immediately following the publication of Saussure’s Cours.

  • Many of its characteristic ideas (in particular, the notion of distinctive features in phonology) were taken up by other schools.

  • But there was further development in Prague of the functional approach to syntax.

• The work of M.A.K. Halliday derived much of its original inspiration from Firth (above), but Halliday provided a more systematic and comprehensive theory of the structure of language than Firth had, and it was quite extensively illustrated.

Methods of Synchronic Linguistic Analysis

Structural Linguistics

Morphology

• The grammatical description of many languages is divided into two complementary sections: morphology and syntax.

  • Morphology accounts for the internal structure of words, and syntax describes how words are combined to form phrases, clauses, and sentences.

• There are many words in English that are obviously analyzable into smaller grammatical units.

  • For example, the word “unacceptability” can be divided into un-, accept, abil-, and -ity (abil- being a variant of -able).

  • Of these, at least three are minimal grammatical units, in the sense that they cannot be analyzed into yet smaller grammatical units—un-, abil-, and ity. Minimal grammatical units like un-, abil-, and -ity are what Bloomfield called morphemes.

• Whereas Bloomfield took the morpheme to be an actual segment of a word, others defined it as being a purely abstract unit, and the term morph was introduced to refer to the actual word segments.

• The distinction between morpheme and morph may be explained by means of an example.

  • If a morpheme in English is posited with the function of accounting for the grammatical difference between singular and plural nouns, it may be symbolized by enclosing the term plural within brace brackets.

  • Now the morpheme [plural] is represented in a number of different ways.

• Most plural nouns in English differ from the corresponding singular forms in that they have an additional final segment.

  • In the written forms of these words, it is either -s or -es (e.g., “cat”: “cats”; “dog”: “dogs”; “fish”: “fishes”). The word segments written -s or -es are morphs. So also is the word segment written -en in “oxen.” All these morphs represent the same morpheme.

• But there are other plural nouns in English that differ from the corresponding singular forms in other ways (e.g., “mouse”: “mice”; “criterion”: “criteria”; and so on) or not at all (e.g., “this sheep”: “these sheep”).

• Within the post-Bloomfieldian framework no very satisfactory account of the formation of these nouns could be given. But it was clear that they contained (in some sense) the same morpheme as the more regular plurals.