HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTICS
While
ancient India and Greece had a remarkable grammatical tradition, throughout
most of history, linguistics had been the province of PHILOSOPHY, RHETORIC,
and LITERARY.
In 1786,
there are regular sound correspondences among many of the languages spoken in
Europe, India, and Persia. For example, the English ‘f’ sound often corresponds
to a ‘p’ sound in, among others, Latin and Sanskrit, an important ancient
language of India.
English, Latin and Sanskrit
Scholars
realized that these correspondences – found in thousands of words- could not be
due to chance or to mutual influence. The only reliable conclusion was that
these languages are related to one another because they come from a common
ancestor.
Much of
the 19th century linguistics was devoted to working out the nature
of this parent language, spoken about 6,000 years ago, as Russian, Hindi, and
its other modern descendants.
The Study of Language Structure
At the beginning of the 20th Century,
attention shifted to the fact that not only language change, but language
structure as well, is systematic and governed by regular rules and
principles.
The attention of the world’s linguists turned more
and more to the study of grammar- in the technical sense of the term the
organization of the sound system of a language and the internal structure of
its words and sentences.
This period also saw an intensified scholarly study
of languages that had never been written down. It had by then become
commonplace, for example, for an American linguist to spend several years
working out the intricacies of the grammars of Chippewa, Ojibwa, Apache, Mohawk, or some other indigenous language of North America.
Language Use: Study of Language
There is
also a long tradition in the study of what a word or sentence ‘means’ a particular thing and how these
meanings go back to the ancient Greeks:
§
One
is that meanings are mental
representations of some sort; another is that the meaning of an expression
is purely a function of how it is
used. Both ideas have launched research programs that are active today.
They have been joined by a third
approach, building on work by philosophers such as Gottlob Frege and Bertrand
Russell, which applies formal methods derived from logic and
attempts to equate the meaning of an expression with reference and the
conditions under which it might be judged to be true or false.
THE
ORIGIN OF MODERN LINGUISTICS
Language Uses:
·
Studies of Meaning
·
The Social Studies of Meaning
Language Use:
The Social Side of Language
Ø In the past 50 years
-
Increasing
attention to the social side of language as well as the mental.
The
national liberation movements active in third world countries after the war
posed the question of what would be their official language(s) after
independence, a pressing question, since almost all of them are multilingual.
This led
to scholarly study of the language situation in the countries of the world.
In addition,
the movements for minority rights in the United States and other Western
countries have led to a close examination of social variation that complements
earlier work in geographical variation.
Scholars
have turned the analytical tools of linguistics to the study of nonstandard
varieties like African American Vernacular English and Chicano Spanish. And the
women’s movement has led many linguists to investigate gender differences in
speech and whether our language has to perpetuate sexual inequality.
Linguistics- as a study endeavors
to describe and explain the human faculty of language.
In
ancient civilization, linguistic study was originally motivated by the correct
description of classical liturgical language, notably that of
Sanskrit
grammar by Panini (fl, 4th Century BCE) Tolkappiyam in Tamil, or
by the development of logic and rhetoric among Greeks.
Beginning
around the 4th Century BCE, China also developed its own grammatical
traditions and Arabic grammar and Hebrew grammar developed during the Middle
Ages.
Modern
linguistics began to develop in the 18th Century, reaching the “golden
age of philology” in the 19th Century.
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1 Antiquity
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1.1 India
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1.2 Greece
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1.3 Rome
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1.4 China
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2 Middle Ages
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2.1 Middle East
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2.2 Europe
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3 Modern Linguistics
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3.1 Historical Linguistics
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3.2 Descriptive Linguistics
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3.3 Generative Linguistics
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3.4 Other Subfields
Modern Linguistics
Modern linguistics does not
begin until the late 18th century, and the romantic or animist
theses of Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Christoph Adelung
remained influential well into the 19th century.
THE INFLUENCE OF LINGUISTICS
Linguistics is not a teaching technique. It is not a method of beginning reading
instruction; neither is it a panacea for eliminating most of the reading
problems.
Administrators,
supervisors, and classroom teachers need to understand both the essential of
linguistics as a discipline and the implications of these principles to the
teaching and learning of reading and all the other language skills.
Many Aspects of Language
Linguistics is the scientific
study of many aspects of language. Each part of the study is worthy of serious,
independent consideration: descriptive, comparative, and historical
linguistics; transformational and generative grammar and tagmemic analysis; and
the study of phonology, morphology, dialectology, and lexicography.
Comprehending
the vital role of meaning which is carried by the suprasegmental features of stress,
pitch, juncture in oral language, we recognize the lack of punctuation,
capitalization, or other devices in the written language to carry this full
meaning.
Natural Patterns
The
study of Linguistics has many implications in understanding the process of how
meaning can be derived from printed symbols, when it is clearly understood that
those symbols are a secondary representation of speech.
A child who reads a sentence
like, “The heavy spring rains made the ball park a mass of oozy, sticky mud”,
with a heavy stress on each word is not getting a proper feel for his language
and the groupings of its words into structures of meanings. The teacher might
help the pupil to “hear” reading which follows the rhythm and flow and pauses
of oral English intonation by having him listen to sentences read easily and
naturally and then having him imitate the pattern he hears.
While it is necessary during the
skill development portion of the reading lesson to study, analyze, discuss and
relate new words to other words, the teachers should realize that words in
isolation always carry primary stress. Linguistics has focused our attention on
many different ways words enter a language.
Economy in Learning
When the
meaning of a new word is developed, considerable learning time could be saved
if the word if the word and its various forms were related and taught together.
A suffix can change the part of speech or form class to which a word may be
assigned, thus enabling a single word function in more than a single position
or form class.
The area
of dialectology
has been overlooked in the elementary school, but as teachers gain an
understanding of the variations in language- variations in pronunciation, in
vocabulary, and in grammatical structure- they can help students to bridge the
gap from their own dialect to that of the printed page as well as to that of
characters in stories and books the children are reading. Through the study of
dialect and its insights into the way our language actually functions, more
effective teaching can be done in teaching acceptable usage.
Dialect and Usage
As we
become aware of the role of dialect and usage we gain a new insight into the
place, function, and design of the dictionary. The information we teach about
words and the dictionary should be accurate and in accordance with the
principles of lexicography. When we really understand the impact of the
profound statement that dictionaries are descriptive and not prescriptive, we
change our approach to dictionary study and even simple glossary activities
become more realistic and significant.
Recently, Andrew Schiller, writing in Harper’s
Magazine on English instruction, states that the old will be eventually be
supplanted by the new; and although the tools have been given us in structural
linguistics, it is necessary for us to learn to use them.
BIG NAMES
IN LINGUISTICS WITH THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS
Aristotle
Ø He developed a system
of categories that continues to influence the way
linguists approach the question of how language carries meaning.
Panini
Ø Famous for developing
the first comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar.
Ø His Sanskrit grammar
is the first known attempt to provide a complete description of a language.
Plato
Ø He presents the naturalistic
view that word meanings emerge from a natural process, independent
of the language user.
Ø His arguments are
partly based on examples of compounding, where the meaning of the whole is
usually related to the constituents.
Leonard
Bloomfield
Ø An American linguist
who led the development of structural
linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s.
Ø His influential
textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive
description of American structural linguistics.
Ø He made significant
contributions to Indo-European
historical linguistics, the description
of Austronesian languages, and description
of languages of the Algonquian family.
Charles J.
Fillmore
Ø He has been extremely
influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics.
Ø His seminal article The
positioning of embedding transformations in a Grammar introduced the
transformational cycle, which has been a foundational insight for theories of
syntax since that time.
Ø He was one of the
founders of cognitive linguistics, and developed the theories of Case
Grammar (Fillmore 1968), and Frame Semantics (1976).
Michael Halliday
Ø A British-born
Australian linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistic
model of language.
Ø His grammatical
descriptions go by the name of systemic
functional grammar (SFG)
Ø Describes language as
a semiotic system, “not in the sense
of a system of signs but a systematic resource for meaning.”
Robert Lado
Ø Predict and describe
the patterns that will cause difficulty in Learning ESL and those that will not
cause difficulty by comparing systematically the language and culture to be
learned with the native language and culture of the student.
Contrastive Hypothesis
associated with 2 branches:
1.)
Psycholinguistics
2.)
Contrastive Linguistics
Ferdinand de
Saussure
One of his translators Roy Harris summarized his
contribution as:
“Language is no longer regarded as peripheral
to our grasp of the world we live in, but as central to it. Words are
collective products of social interaction, essential instruments through which
human beings constitute and articulate their world. The 20th view of
language influenced development throughout the whole range of human sciences
particularly in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and
anthropology.”
Benjamin Lee
Whorf
Ø Contributed his ideas
about linguistic relativity, the hypothesis that language influences
thought.
(Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)
- is the idea that differences
in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way
people think.
Edward Sapir
Ø
Major Contribution
•
Classification
of indigenous languages of the Americas
•
Develop
the modern concept of the phoneme in phonology
Noam Chomsky
Ø Compared his initial
formulation of generative grammar with his structuralist predecessor's approach
to syntax and then compared that formulation to the current perspective.
In the intervening six decades, Chomsky:
a) Constructed a formal
theory of grammar and explored its foundations
b) Developed a cognitive/
epistemological interpretation of the theory, leading to the biolinguistic
perspective
c) Contributed major
proposals for constraints on grammars resulting in a significant reduction in
and simplification of the formal grammatical machinery; and
d) Re-evaluated the
theory of grammar in terms of language design, raising the possibility of
empirical proposals about the language faculty as a biological entity with
properties of economy, simplicity and efficient computation
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