Introduction to Linguistics 13
Who’s who in linguistics
Prof. Jo Lewkowicz
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The early linguists
• Pãņini (circa 5th century BC)
– Indian linguist
– Nothing is known about his life
– His work Astãdhayãyi is a culmination of his
studies on Sanskrit grammar & phonology
– He looked at the way words were ‘glued together’
and how the bits affected pronunciation
• impenetrable = in + penetrate +ble
– Gave insights to Chomsky
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The Greek & Roman linguists
• Aristotle (384-322 BC)
– Divided the sentence into 2 parts: subject + predicate
• The king of Persia (S) took a vast army to Greece (P)
• Dionysius Thrax (2nd to 1st centuries BC)
– Identified 8 parts of speech
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Nouns
Verbs
Articles
Prepositions
Conjunctions
Adverbs
Particles
– Thrax’s work became the basis of all grammar description in Europe until well
into 20th century (i.e. forms basis of traditional grammar)
• Roman scholars learned of the work done in Greece in mid 2nd century BC
and began to apply it to Latin
– Culminated in a description of grammar completed by Priscian in 6th c AD
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The birth of historical linguistics
• Towards the close of 18th century linguists such as
Franz Boop (1791-1867), Rasmus Rusk (1787-1832) &
Jakob Grimm (1785-1863) began to realise that
languages resembled one another and therefore many
developed from a common core
– E.g. Indo-European language family consisting of 10
separate branches, including Old Germanic languages from
which English derives and Balto-Slavic languages which
includes Polish
• Study of historical linguistics, i.e. how languages have
developed and changed, began to be the primary point
of interest
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Development of general linguistics
• Focus on historical linguistics in Europe continued
for approx a century
• Towards end of 19th c did the study of language
structure begin to reassert itself – that is how
languages are put together and how they work
• Prominent at the time were
– German: Georg von der Gabelentz (1840-1893)
– Poles: Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) &
Mikołaj Kruszewski (1851-1887)
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Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
• Father of modern linguistics
• His worked was put together and published by his
students after his death
• Introduced several key concepts into linguistics
– Distinguished between the study of language at a
particular point in time (synchronically) and over a period
of time (diachronically)
– Distinguished also between individual acts of speech
(parole) and the language (langue) shared by members of
a speech community
• de Saussure’s approach was called structuralism and
has been influential since 1920’s
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The Prague Circle
• This group of linguists congregated in Prague
after the Russian Revolution
• Developed structuralist ideas in a number of
directions over next 2 decades
• Particulary prominent were:
– Nicolai Trubetzkoy (1890-1938): ‘Principles of
Phonology’
– Roman Jakobson (1896-1992) – after 1938 fled West &
settled in the USA
• Contribution = role of context in language; relationship
between form and function; work on language universals &
how these influence the sequence of L1 acquisition
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Origins of American linguistics
• Started as a result of an interest in the dying cultures of native
Americans.
• Franz Boas (1858-1942) realised that to understand a culture one
needs to know the language.
– Influenced a generation of anthropologists to learn and record dying
languages
• One of Boas’ most eminent students was Edward Sapir (1884-1939).
He was interested in the relations between language and culture.
• Sapir’s student, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) proposed the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which states that the structure of a
language will, to some extent determine how its speakers perceive
the world (Navaho people see things in terms of geometrical
structures for which they have numerous terms, while English
speakers see things in terms of other objects). The hypothesis has
been largely discredited.
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Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949)
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Bloomfield is considered the father of modern linguistics
Anthropologist by training – he was interested in Native American
cultures
Published seminal work ‘Language’ in 1933
Found traditional descriptions of languages based on Latin did not
fit the languages he was studying
Developed his own structural form of analysis which could
account for the differences which exist between languages
Argued that each language needed its own structural analysis
Also wrote about how languages are learned.
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brought together his structuralist views on language with
behaviourist psychology (dominant at the time)
More interested in form than in meaning (in line with behaviourism
and with the current teaching methodology of audiolingualism)
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Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
• Political activist as well as a linguist
• Chomsky’s work is best know for 2 areas of his work:
– Transformational-generative grammar, i.e. Languages are rule
bound and we can generate rules that will only allow
grammatical structures to be generated (and not ungrammatical
ones). Saw meaning and form as separate (e.g. Colorless green
ideas sleep furiously)
– Criticised the work of B.F. Skinner who believed that language
learning was a matter of stimulus and response, showing that
language acquisition is not a matter of habit formation and must
be genetically motivated (LAD). All human being inherit a
Universal Grammar
• His approach to language analysis and LA can be described
as ‘mentalist’ of ‘formalistic’.
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Michael Halliday (b. 1925)
• Most influential linguist active today, particularly
in the U.K. & Australia
• Systemic-functional linguistics which attempt to
establish relationships between language form
and language function (compare with ideas of
Chomsky that these 2 are separate systems)
• Seminal account of child language development
(based on his own child – Nigel), suggested that a
child’s language develops from a primitive
protolanguage to a fully fledged form.
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Stephen Pinker (b.1954)
• On basis of what scientist have been able to
ascertain from people with language disorders,
Pinker has suggested that our language faculty
consists of 2 large, important and distinct
components:
– Word storage (we store new words one by one)
– Rules (we gradually construct rules as we acquire
language)
• This is in agreement with Chomsky, that
predisposition for learning a language is innate –
it is part of our genetic makeup.
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