Linguistics

**flowrish** · 24-04-2009, 09:01 PM

what are the major steps in the story of modern Linguistics?

- Linguistics in ancient India, long tradition in “grammar studies” in different regions
- european discovery of Sanskrit in 18th century
- historical-comparative approach during 19th century
- grimms laws as turning point to a scientific methodology
- neo-grammarian manifesto as a turn point to natural science
- Kulturwissenschaft social, psychological aspects also important
- Saussure’s structuralism in the early 20th century
- Structuralist phonology: Trubetzkoy
- Chomskys Mentalism

what was the main approach in earlier language studies? who are the two most important persons at this?

Historical-comparative linguistics as part of study of culture (also religious interests concerning bible translations, etc)
Schlegel, von Humboldt.

Saussure’s Structuralism

- language as a system of signs
- as a structure of relations, “où tout se tient”
- relations of similarity and contrast between other elements
- only way to understand each element of a language
- la parole provides evidence for la langue
- ignored outside facts (culture, society)
- priority of spoken language (la parole)
- descriptive, not prescritive
- synchronic, not diachronic
- arbitraryness of the linguistics sign

Structuralism: which types of relations?
- paradigmatic relations: relations with all elements that can occur in the same context (free variation, contrast) -> substition
- syntagmatic relations: relations with preceding and following elements in its context -> positioning

what is american structuralism?
objective system (langue)
discovery procedures (induction from speech data, i.e. parole)
behaviourist psychology: human behaviour as conditioned response
Bloomfield, Harris

Universal grammar
- not grammar in strict sense!
- concept of possible human language
- hypotheses about universal properties of human language
- innate human language faculty (linguistics nativism)
- parameters along which languages differ from each other
- comparing all grammars to investigate the structure of UG, studying indirectly by studying languages
- child ‘knows’ what to look for in the linguistic input
- “poverty of stimulus”: ungrammatical sentences are not uttered and therefore not heard by language learners - how do they know them?

Prescritive vs Descriptive grammar

- prescritive: what you should do, rules, conventions
- descriptive: what you do, implicit hypothesis what speakers know about their language

-> linguistics normally speak of Descriptive grammar.

performance vs. competence

performance - language use
competence - knowledge of a grammar

Levels of Linguistics:

Phonetic: sounds recognized as speech and classified.
Morpho-phonological: speech sound classified as words.
Syntactic: words classified and organized into phrases.
Semantic: meaning computed from words and structure.
Pragmatic: meaning assigned contextually relevant interpretion.

Ferdinand de Saussure’s Structuralism

8 attributes
- languages as a structure “où tout se tient” (where everything fits in with everything else), as a system of signs
- la parole provides evidence for la langue
- each element can be understood only in relation to others
- no appeal to something outside the system
- priority of spoken language
- descriptive, not prescriptive
- synchronic, not diachronic
- arbitraryness of the linguistics sign

Structuralism: which types of relation?
- paradigmatic relations: relations with all elements that can occur in the same context (free variation, contrast).
- syntagmatic relations: relations with preceding and following elements in its context.

Structuralism Phonology: How do linguistic sounds receive their identity?
not from physical quality (as in phonetics), but from distinctiveness (relevant difference) within the sound system of a language.
phonemes, minimal pairs.

Synchronic vs Diachronic study
state (Saussure’s structuralism) vs process (study of history)

American structuralism
scientific explanation of linguistic behaviour:
- structuralism (langue)
- discovery procedures (induction from speech data)
- behaviourist psychology

Chomsky’s mentalism
- focus on competence (vs. performance)
- creativity
- generative grammar (finite mechanism -> infinite set of sentences)
- empiricism, deductively developed hypotheses

Universal grammar
- characterises the innate human language faculty.

Grammar (linguistic meaning)
- a theory of what the system underlying the language use is like ??

Components of a grammar
- phonetics (speech sounds)
- phonology (the sound patterns)
- morphology (structure of the words)
- syntax (patterns of words)
- semantics (meanings)
- pragmatics (intentions)

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