QUESTIONS FOR THE EXAM IN "HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS" (4™ YEAR MPGU)
1. Language science and its history. The substantive and methodological approaches to the history of
linguistics.
Linguistics – 1) is the study of language as a system of communication.
Although linguistics has a very long history. The studies of language phenomenon have been carried out for
centuries. It is fairly recently that linguistics has been accepted as an independent discipline.
Linguistics – 2) the term “linguistic” appears from the Latin word “lingua” and this is the study of human
natural languages. It studies all languages existing now. Those languages which existed in the past and may be
disappeared; and those that may appear in the future. It studies languages in general.
The concept of linguistics is becoming the most essential term in the course of the history of this study.
There are 2 different conceptions how to study the history of linguistics:
1st conception describes all the traditions that are scientifically related to one or more aspects of that which
can be called language or linguistic communication. This point of view is usually known as a substantive
understanding (независимое понимание) of the history of linguistics. In this case we are to talk about
heterogeneous (different) things.
Ex.: different mythological traditions relating to the origin of the language, popular believes, about different
and similar things.
Speaking about this substantive approach we are to include the prehistory of linguistics, some naive
opinions, some ideas of plain people and individuals who didn’t have a scientific interest in language, in
modern sense. In this case we are to mention those ideas which were introduced in philosophy in ancient
Greece, Rome, India, China; theories that appeared in the middle ages, in the epoch of Renaissance &
Enlightenment.
2-nd approach – methodological – alternative approach. The concept of linguistics reconstructs step by step
the model of the respective linguistic theoretical approach. But inside this one there may be also different
theories describing how to deal with the history of science.
2. An episteme and paradigm and their correspondence to the philosophy of linguistics. Periods in the
history of linguistics (prof. Amirova's classification).
The term “episteme” was introduced by Michael Foucault. Episteme – the foundations on which the
intellectual building of a particular collection of way of thinking are built.
He thought that science in general may have different epistemes. Some of them are more important for the
science than the others. Afterwards old epistemes may disappear & new ones may be created.
Thomas Kuhn has expressed the same idea but with the help of different term. Paradigm. He thought that
scientists is a group of people who want to discuss the same problem. That’s why their theory is based on a set
of basic assumptions. The existence of a paradigm is period of Norman science. But some time later scientists
can solve the problems. That’s why new questions are usually asked. Trying to answer them scientists usually
come to a completely new paradigm.
Between the 2 paradigms:
- a period of different anomalies (crises)
- a set of questions
- fact
From anomalies they came to a new paradigm. In this case they have to create a new theory, new concepts
& notions & the metalanguage of a new science.
The period from the previous paradigm to the new one called a paradigmatic shift. It may be of 2 kinds:
- a revolution
- an evolution
4 paradigm of linguistic knowledge:
- the historical comparative paradigm
- the structural paradigm
- the generative transformational paradigm
- cognitive communicative paradigm
Periods in the history of linguistics:
1. the theory of naming (теория номинирования). Appeared centuries ago in ancient philosophy. The
works were the 1st attempt to systemize everything in the language & the surrounding reality.
2. the grammatical traditions of the philosophy which are represented by different theories in antiquity &
in the middle age in the west & east grammars.
3. Universal grammar which tried to show the common source in the system of languages. It was rather
prescriptive than descriptive.
4. Historical comparative linguistics discussed aspects concerning the source of the Indo-European
languages & the relationships between different languages & words.
5. the systematic linguistics formed the philosophy of language, discussed general proprieties of human
communication & examined conceptions in the psycholinguistics & sociolinguistics.
6. structural linguistics displays the main language units & the relationships between them on different
levels of language; shows how phonetics, morphology, lexicology & syntax work.
3. Linguistic ideas of Antiquity. The theory of naming in Greece: "phusei" and "thesei" theories,
Plato's Cratylos, Aristotle's categories.
The science of language began approximately when the minds of men first turned to problems like this:
1) How is it that people do not speak one and the same language?
2) How were words first created?
3) What is the relation between a thing and the name it stands for?
4) Why is such and such a thing (person) called this but not in the other way?
The answers to these questions will be largely theological. It must be connected with religion. Nowadays we
get to know that all theories of antiquity thought that there must be only one God, who gave the language to
people. That may happen in a different ways when the God could give his language to the 1st man and his
name was Adam. The God brought all the animals to Adam and he gave the names and Adam afterwards gave
these names to people. This very story is written in the Old Testament.
One more story about “Babylon”. People tried to reach the God. The God ruined the tower. In the punishment
for men’s crimes and presumption (самонадеянность) but these were only legends. Nowadays we tried to
base linguistics on some particular facts. These facts and theories appeared in Hellenic linguistics
(эллинистическая = греческая). The linguistic analysis of Greek writers can be classified according to 3
main epochs.
1st epoch
It is usually concerned with pre-Socratic philosophers with such names as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. This
period is characterized by its relating of grammatical categories and structures to entities. These philosophers
mostly dealt with the problems of existence. That is why they spoke about truth value. This particular epoch is
usually called the early philosophic period. The main interest of all the philosophy of antiquity was devoted
to etymology. They tried to speak about similarities in different sounds of words. They showed rather fanciful
connections in different words. They tried to explain the same meanings in words by similar sounds and
pronunciations. One of the philosophers of antiquity compared different words in Greek and showed the
common sounds which are met in things and names. Ex.: the word “mel” which means “honey” is also
pronounced like smth sweet, the same with the word “lana” which means “wool” and if we take such words as
“sharp”, “knife” they are both rude in pronunciation and in the meaning. We can find similarities between the
meaning and sound of a word. The speculative minds of Greek thinkers proved the problem to be the most
attractive and this problem was rather abstract and general. The problem is rather complicated from the
position of today’s linguistics because these linguists compared to sides of the sign:
1) form (sound)
2) meaning of the word
A bit later Socrates described the similarities between the form and the meaning in Greek words. He pointed
out that the Greek words must be short. They must contain sweet sounds [l, r, n, m] – nasal sounds. The
meaning of the word must correspond to nice things surrounded the person. Endless discussions were
discussed in works of Plato. Plato wrote dialogs in which different philosophers are becoming main
characters. Socrates was his teacher. That is why we find this particular hero in almost all dialogs. In one of
his famous dialogs “Cratolos” Plato describes the connection between the form of the word and the meaning
of this unit. Plato wrote that …… objects are imperfect copies of people’s ideas. That is why peoples’
thoughts represent not only the surrounding world but also human understanding of different objects. This
dialog “Kratylos” shows the difference between 2 main theories which existed in Greek philosophy.
The 1st theory is known to be Phusei theory. It explains the word according to its nature. Ex.: “mel”, “lana”,
“sharp”.
The 2nd theory was Thesei theory (Тесей). It is translated “by convention”. For centuries before Plato these
2 theories divided philosophers and grammarians into 2 camps. Plato in his dialog thinks that there is no
connection between a word and a thing and the main hero Socrates speaks about some words which represents
rather ideally sounds in nature. Ex.: “koo-koo”, “bow-wou”, “honk-honk” – horses, “buzz-buzz”.
But some of the words in the language don’t follow there ideas because they are becoming rather
abstract:
Ex: table, chair, floor
In this case we are to know the history of these words or models according to which they are created.
Now Aristotle – a pupil of Plato.
Many of Aristotle’s works are dealing with different sciences such as logics, metaphysics, rhetoric, literary
studies.
Aristotle maintained that human sensual experience is our only source of knowledge. Through our
senses we can discover main properties of things and through the senses we distinguish qualities of objects.
Aristotle is writing that the simplest ability of a person is his perception and reasoning. But at the same
moment he thinks that everything is made by the God. The God is the course of any changes in the world and
a human being is created by the God. This idea is one of the supreme ideas in his writings. But for the history
of linguistics we are to know that thanks to Aristotle we are to distinguish between two main categories. By
the word category he meant the division of words into parts of speech. He thinks that a natural language can
be analyzed according to the system of logics.
By the word “sentence” he means two notions connected with each other. His term is translated as
“суждение”. Any sentence must consist of a subject and a predicate. These are two main parts of speech.
Sometimes he thought that one more part of speech can be – the conjunction – may appear in the middle or in
the end of a sentence.
After that he came to the conclusion that the main parts of the speech are a noun and a verb.
It is interesting to know that Aristotle introduced the notion of case. He distinguished between the
following phrases: the table, on the table, under the table, going to the table.
4. Linguistic ideas of Antiquity. Stoic and Alexandrian Grammar, the Roman "Ars
grammaticae".
The successor of the pre-Socratic period is the period of the stoics. They were a group of philosophers who
mostly spoke about the same things concerning the investigation and differences in sentences. They showed
the difference between simple and complex sentences. They discussed the case of a proposition. They showed
differences in conjunctions. They describe “and” and “but” and they thought that not everything in the
language can be explained with the help of logics.
This second period influenced greatly those Greek philosophers who settled near the Alexandrian
library. These were mostly Greek philosopher and grammarians who continued to discuss the subdivision of
words into parts of speech. It is interesting to know that one of the philosophers – Dionisy introduced his own
classification of parts of speech. We distinguish 8 parts: a noun, a verb, a participle, an adverb, a numeral, a
pronoun, an adjective and integration. This Greek grammar was a brilliant one at that period. It described
everything at the Greek language. This kind of grammar was brought to Rome in 396. This grammar was
brought by the main Greek grammarian – Crater. He not only brought it, he read lectures on different classes
of words in the language. Afterwards the Latin writers translated this grammar into Latin. It is interesting to
know that the Latin grammar has very curious mistakes:
- Greek word: geniki – the case of kind. It was rendered as the genitive case (genetivus). And it is
translated as the case of origin.
- A most bad mistake – the Akk case doesn’t mean to accuse but it means the case of the object.
The philological school of Alexandrian grammar is very important to us because philosophers and
grammarians tried to interpret texts of old poets. They spoke about the peculiarities in the language. They
showed cases of regularity and irregularity and that’s right to understand better the language of their own
times.
The most fam and influential grammarian of the centurv IS Aclius Donatus, for both his Ars major
and Ars minor are classics. The organization of the former represents an ideal culmination to the process we
have seen develop from Aristotle through Quintilian. First comes phonology, then the parts of speech, and
finally stylistics, which is treated primarily in terms of errors. The Ars minor is a series of questions and
answers which concentrate exclusively on the partes orationis and which therefore testify to the central role
of morphology in Latin grammar.
5. Sanscrit grammars of ancient India (Panini, linguistic concepts of phoneme and morpheme, kinds
of compound words).
The Indian tradition presupposes careful observations and systematic classifications. Indian linguists
tried to observe scientific facts that is why we can call the Indian tradition the linguistic tradition or the Indian
Grammar.
The Indian grammarians tried to investigate very old secret texts, which were written on the Sanskrit
language. The Sanskrit language is one of the oldest of the Indo-European family. It is characterized by a very
important feature: it may be called the source language of the whole Indo-European family. Some of the
linguists of the 19th century admitted the idea that Sanskrit was the stimulus to the investigations in historical
linguistics. It is essential that sacred texts which are written in Sanskrit had become obsolete even many
centuries ago but nobody could change any line from these texts. The main purpose of linguists was to
observe the facts, to describe them without any change. This was a scrupulous oral tradition everybody had to
remember all these texts by heart that is why these Vidic Sanskrit sense needed to be kept unchanged from
generation to generation. The main purpose of a linguist was to present the exact analysis of speech sounds
to point out every detail of articulation and to describe main grammatical forms presented in old texts.
Everything in the grammatical works may be called a system rather small but in some cases with a bit
artificial terminology.
So we are to understand that the treatment of grammar and phonological problems in Sanskrit was
entirely different from those ideas which we find in Greek and Roman traditions. The most famous Indian
grammarian is Panini. He lived approximately in the 4th century B. C. he provided a complete and theoretical
analysis of all the principles according to which phonetics and morphology of Vidic Sanskrit texts is
organized. His main book consists of 8 parts, which described the synchronic layer of the language. He
presented 3959 rules according to which the language was. He described all the elements of Sanskrit:
phonology. But what is important in his work that his analysis is a particularly detailed description of Sanskrit
morphology. It is on a high level of the linguistic inside (лингвистическое озарение). He introduces such
terms as “phoneme” and “morpheme” and explained different kinds of roots which may appear in a word. His
system of description is a complete integrated grammar of Sanskrit. His system is based on a number of rules,
transformations to describe all linguistic phenomena.
It is very interesting that every rule was described with the help of one sentence and people had to
memorize them by heart. Indian grammars existed not in the written form, they had to be studied and
memorized everything about 10 years. Panini formulated the morphological structure of Indian words. Some
of the tribes of Indian words have become international and they are even used in the modern linguistic.
They are:
 Dvandva - is used to correspond to a compound word which consists of two substantives
(nouns). The parts of the word may be :
- identical
- partially identical
- different
But the elements of these words are coordinated.
Ex.: nick-nock (карусель), topsy-turvy (мир вверх тормашками)

Bahuvrihi – compound word, which means much rice but it is difficult to understand the direct
meaning of the word while looking at its elements. It imitates the form of the object.
Ex.: block-head (a person, whose head doesn’t think), eye-lid (сопло ракеты)

Tatpurusha – a compound word, which explicates the second component of the word.
Ex.: a dog-house.
In Panini’s work we can find more terminology to explain the peculiarities of morphological and
syntactical structure of words and sentences. When his book appeared in Europe in the 19th century linguists
were greatly admired by the systematic organization of all linguistic phenomena.
6. Linguistics in the Middle Ages. The inventory of printing and its influence on the stud) Greek,
Latin and other languages.
The chief thing in the middle ages were learning Latin language. The Latin language was the language
of Church and of general civilization. Latin wasn’t studied in the scientific spirit but at that time it was a
language with the help of which people communicated. People tried to use it as a means of oral
communication. It was used as a language for documents, laws, court and besides that Latin was the language
of literature. The Renaissance brought about a change in this position. One more language became the
universal means of communication – Greek and grammarians during the period of Renaissance tried to
compare these 2 classical languages. Both languages were taught at schools, colleges. Everybody wanted to
write as the greatest Cicero and to speak as Aristotle. But at the following centuries we witnessed the
constantly developing interest in living languages, which can be used in oral communication. Among them
we name: Italian, French, German, Spanish, English, Celtic languages and many others. These languages
were different from Latin or Greek. One more very important factor happened in Eastern countries and in
Europe that was an invention of printing. Printing helped to study national languages. It accelerated
grammatical studies and studies of spelling. There was one more very important language whose influence is
very great and is concerned with theological (religious) interest. This language is Hebrew (Иврит). This
language is the original of the Old Testament (Ветхий Завет).
The acquaintance with this language was different because it belonged not to the Indo-European
family but to the Semitic languages. It was spoken by a great number of people in Europe, Asia and north
part of Africa. The importance of this language stimulated interest in linguistic studies of Hebrew. During the
period of Renaissance it was thought that many European languages descended (came from) Hebrew. But this
language was also different from Latin and Greek. It is connected with an investigation of old Germanic texts.
In the German language there was a Gothic language, which was not spoken even in Renaissance
period but the European grammarians managed to find out Wulfillar’s Gothic translation of the Bible. This
text was compared with the text in old English, German and Icelandic and linguists proved that the Gothic
language belonged to the Germanic brunch of languages but to the eastern part of this brunch old German
and Icelandic are his relatives. They are cognate languages (related) especially those which were spoken
during the period of Renaissance. The interest in linguistic studies from the historical perspective was rather
small but linguistic thinkers thought that it was an urgent problem to show treasures of different languages,
especially those which were spoken.
Besides during the period of Renaissance there appeared different philosophers, mathematicians,
logicians who began to talk about the universal character existing in any language. They tried to describe the
properties of the language irrespective on the spoken form. Among these philosophers we are to name 2
persons: Bekard and Leibniz who presented their own ideas on the peculiarity of the ideal means of
communication. They thought that Latin can be such a language or it can be look like a Latin. They wrote in
Latin and Latin was the 1st language whose grammar was described rather properly.
Scholars of Europe thought that Latin grammar and grammar of any language were synonyms. Besides
that, Latin was a language rather rich in grammatical forms. All categories observed in Latin grammar
corresponded to other living languages. In the English we have 2 cases: Nominative and Possessive. Then it
contained 5 cases, because they were in Latin (Nominative, Possessive, Dative, Accusative, Ablative). Latin
was taught as a written language. Sometimes when different scholars from different countries began speaking
Latin they didn’t understand each other, because they didn’t study phonetics. The real life on the language
comes through the mouth and the ear but not through the pen and eye.
Latin at that period was a main means of communication between educated people. That is why works
written by Descrates and Leibniz are written with the help of the Latin language. It is very important to know
that Leibniz preserved his 1st classification of European languages. In his classification we can find:
- flexional languages
- root languages
- languages with agglutination
But Leibniz didn’t described polisyntactical languages because he didn’t know about them.
Товарищи, советую не говорить про Ренессанс, в вопросе только средние века. Напечатано на
всякий случай, чтоб, если спросит, было, что ответить.
7.
The origin of language in philosophers' works of the 17-18 centuries (Rousseau. Descartes Leibniz).
This problem is the most controversial problem in linguistics; the idea of this problem began to exist
many centuries ago, when two main theories appeared: the theory of Phusei and the theory of Thesei – these
theories originated to philosophical theories of antiquity.
A bit later during the period of the Renaissance and the period of Enlightment (17th – 18th centuries)
were mostly connected with 2 main ideas:
1) a language appeared as the result of imitation of different sounds in the natural environment
2) a language could appear as a result of agreement between different people.
The theory of imitation
The theory of imitation was concerned with different names, among them we usually name Lord
Monboddo (lived in the 18th century). He solved the problem by resort to the principle of imitation.
He supposed that people required their speech imitating the sounds of animals, plant, birds and other
phenomena. This was the case of the onomatopoeia.
The problem was mostly connected with the articulation of sounds but this scholar thought that we are
to describe how a monkey can imitate different sounds. He tried to describe the situation when a monkey
could use his fingers for taking different things – these natural movements led the animal to delicate
operations and afterwards to the development of the monkey’s brain. He thought that the process was very
slow, but this particular ape could change into a human being, who used different sounds to name the
surrounding world.
He thought that individuals were in constant intercourse and afterwards could recognize the meaning
of different words. The opposite idea was introduced by 2 French philosophers: Rousseau and Condillac.
Rousseau thought that the nature origin of the language could be framed by an agreement or social
content between different people. It is obvious in this case that some primitive men agreed to name certain
things with the help of particular words, but in this case they are to use some speech, words; they are to feel
the want of the language and in this case the problem arises: which particular words people used to name
some other words
Condillac expressed his thoughts in a bit different way. He thought that people started their
communication with instinctive cries, violent gestures and notions. And afterwards they repeated these
movements and notions many times, so their children could acquire some languages from his / her parents.
People simply enriched and developed their real language generation after generation.
Condillac wrote: “People uttered certain sounds in circumstances where everybody would be led to
refer them to the same perceptions. They fixed the meanings more precisely according to the circumstances,
being repeated, accustomed the mind more and more to attach the same ideas to the same signs.”
The idea of Condillac differs greatly from the Rousseau’s understanding of the origin of the language.
At the end of the 18th century the European philosophers tried to introduce some other understandings
of the same problem. They thought that a language could be developed as a conventional language for private
use; in this case the private language must consist of a number of conventional signs, rather convenient and
concise. Opposite to this idea was the idea to create some artificial language for communication.
Descrates saw clearly that thinking of a person involved not only words and their meanings but also
ideas in a human mind. He thought that it was necessary to describe the real nature of the thinking process.
That is why he formulated the rules of his own philosophical language. This language had to be characterized
by a concise structure and must look like the mathematical formula. He described this language in detail using
methods of manipulating the symbols of algebra and arithmetic. He spoke about the possibility of creating
such a language for purposes of communication.
In the 17th century there were about 50 attempts to create an artificial language based on the Descrates’
principles.
Some scholars tried to use the mathematical formulas, some others used analytical geometry and
physical laws.
Leibniz tried to catalog the universe. He also used some mathematical formulas, a system of symbols;
he invented a guasi – mathematical language – a mixture of logics, maths and linguistics.
Nowadays computational linguistics regards this language to be the most systematic description of the
surrounding world. Only in the 20th century on the basis of this Leibniz’s language two other artificial
languages were created: the basic and the passal. But mathematical symbols, logical symbols can’t represent
a natural language.
In the course of time, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries scholars from different countries came to
the other idea how to describe different languages.
8. Conditions influencing the appearance of historical and comparative ideas (San: sound
correspondences, Pierre Coerdoux, William Jones). The historical-comparative linguistics (R. Rask, F.
Bopp, J. Grimm, A. Vostokov) and their inventions.
The historical-comparative linguistics
The 19th century witnessed an enormous growth and development of the language science. The
language science presented the features which were unknown before to the previous generations of scholars.
These were the conditions which influenced the development of historical linguistics.
1)
the linguistic horizon was widen. Many new languages were described. Firstly we are to
mention Old Hebrew, which didn’t look like other languages. This language belonged to the
Semitic linguistic family. Besides that Arabic, Syrian became known to scholars of Europe.
They were also different from other European languages.
2)
Many new languages became the topic of deeper investigations; among these languages
linguists tried to point out the features of living languages, but not the dead ones. Linguists
described languages of America, Africa and Asia. They represented catalogues of these
languages, especially the grammatical and lexical layer.
3)
At the beginning of the 19th century more comprehensive classifications of languages were
obtained. These classifications presented new linguistic forms and showed the connection
between language and literature.
4)
Linguistics is becoming not a descriptive science, but an explanatory study. It tried to
explain the development of languages from the historical point of view.
Different scholars introduced into linguistics terms from the biological science. They began to speak
about the birth of the language, its growth and even its death.
Scholars introduced 2 main principles according to which any language should be described:
1. the notion of history
2. the principle of comparison
According to the 1st principle language science as well as any language is usually changing. The
language is a natural organism.
According to the 2nd principle languages can be compared with the living and the dead languages. The
European languages were compared with the Sanskrit language and this comparison gave a mighty influence
to linguistic studies.
The main idea was that linguists tried to look at different languages from the position of comparison.
They looked at following languages: Sanscrit compared with examples from Greek, Latin, Gothic, German
and English.
Sanscrit – pitar [pi’ta:r]; bhratar
Greek – patir [pa’ter]; phrater
Latin – [‘pa:tə]; frater
Gothic – ‘fadar; brothar
German – ‘Vater; Bruder
English – ‘father; Brother
1) These are historically related words
2) There are some connections between p, p, p; bh, ph, f,
f, v, f; b, b, b
3) They tried to describe these incidences. The first scholars who began to speak about it was the French
monck who in 1767 showed the connections between Latin and Sanacrit. His name was Pierre Couerdoux. He
added the material from French. He was simply amazed with these connections. He wrote a special letter to
the French academy of science about the similarities between these 3 languages. But they didn’t pay attention
to this letter.
4) A bit later in 1796 William Jones read a report in India, Calcutta and he pronounced memorable words
which are usually included into books in linguistics.
“The Sanscrit language is of a wonderful structure more perfect than the Greek more copious that Latin and
more exquisitely refined than either, that couldn’t happen by exident. They may have appeared from one
common source and this language may be called one of the Indo-European languages because it belongs to the
same linguistic family”.
5) Linguists were not satisfied with general and universal theories of the past (Dekat, Leibniz). These theories
didn’t reflect the real world of the language.
6) The philological science tried to find some new ideas which can represent not only language in particular
but also thinking and cultural of different people. Mother linguists who paid attention to all these features
were 4 linguists:
- Rasmus Rask
- Franc Bopp
- Jacob Grimm
- A. Ch. Vostokov
Rasmus Rask in 1814 wrote the following words: “A language is our principal means of finding anything
about the history of nations. Sometimes it’s very difficult its earlier forms because there are no written
documents. The linguists must proceed methodically to examine the whole structure of the language”. These
words explain his aim of search. He tried to compare old Islandic with a great number of languages such as
Celtic, the Greenlandic language, Slavik languages, Greek, Latin, Gothic and Lethuanian. He showed quite
clearly that some of the languages are not connected with each other because they are far from each other.
OI------------Sl – no connection
Then he compared Celtic, Greek, Latin and Lethuanian: there’s some connection between them and
Greenlandic and Old Islandic are closely connected.
But he wrote his book in Dutch. That’s why his ideas were unknown to the linguists of Europe.
His book was translated into German only 4 years later.
Franc Bopp wrote his famous book about inflections in Germanic language in 1816. It was a careful
description in which he came to the conclusion that all Germanic languages had common grammatical forms
both in inflections and in the verbal roots.
He wrote that languages may be considered as natural organic bodies, which are formed according to fixed
laws. These languages are developed on the base of inner principles that’s why languages are always
changing.
Two years later (1818 - 1820) Grimm compiled his german grammar. He was a very clever linguist who
collected the data about the development of languages. In it he carefully described each instance (example) of
words from Patronemic languages. They belonged only to some particular classes of words. They denoted
plants and animals, kinship (brother, sister), colour terms, numerals from 1 – 100, verbs denoting main actions
and states. He came to the conclusion that all the germanic sounds came from Indo-European source.
He thought that the correspondences between the germanic languages and Indo-European languages in
general may be characterized by certain linguistic laws. This law became very famous because it described the
consonant shift between voiced and voiceless sounds.
IE p, t, k, -» b, d, g -» p, t, k
b, d, g -» bh, dh, gh
p -» f
pitar, pater, ‘pater, father…
A. Ch. Vostokov in 1822 gave a talk to the Russian academy of science. He spoke about the same
coincidences which happen between the IE languages and the Slavik languages. He compared Russian, old
Slavik, the Ukranian language, the Polish and the Check language.
He came to the conclusion that the Slavik languages appeared from some source which is quite close to the
Sanscrit language.
The ideas expressed by this scholar determined the development of the language science in the 19-th centiry.
These scientists gave a new way of looking at different IE languages as they tried to trace the origin of these
languages.
Their investigations made possible to declare linguistics and independent study different from philosophy and
natural sciences.
Besides that these people introduced a comparative in linguistics. This method helps to find correspondences
between two or more languages especially in the consonant and vowel system.
These scholars came to the conclusion that only the relationship between similar languages could demonstrate
the phonetic, morphological and sometimes the syntactic development of languages belonging to one and the
same IE linguistic family.
Approximately at the beginning of 70-th on the 19-th century a lot of data showed that the IE linguistic family
is characterized by a common source many brunches and subbranches. Among them e usually name germanic,
italic, romanic, slavik, botic, albanian and other languages. Each of these brunches may include living
language and dead ones.
|9. The linguistic laws of the 19th century (Grimm's law, Verner's consonant alternations and other
laws). August Schleiher's notions of reconstruction, protolanguage and genealogic classification.
Development of the comparative method
It is generally agreed that the most outstanding achievement of linguistic scholarship in the 19th century was
the development of the comparative method, which comprised a set of principles whereby languages could be
systematically compared with respect to their sound systems, grammatical structure, and vocabulary and
shown to be “genealogically” related. As French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and the other
Romance languages had evolved from Latin, so Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit as well as the Celtic, Germanic,
and Slavic languages and many other languages of Europe and Asia had evolved from some earlier language,
to which the name Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European is now customarily applied. That all the Romance
languages were descended from Latin and thus constituted one “family” had been known for centuries; but the
existence of the Indo-European family of languages and the nature of their genealogical relationship was first
demonstrated by the 19th-century comparative philologists. (The term philology in this context is not
restricted to the study of literary languages.)
The main impetus for the development of comparative philology came toward the end of the 18th century,
when it was discovered that Sanskrit bore a number of striking resemblances to Greek and Latin. An English
orientalist, Sir William Jones, though he was not the first to observe these resemblances, is generally given the
credit for bringing them to the attention of the scholarly world and putting forward the hypothesis, in 1786,
that all three languages must have “sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists.” By
this time, a number of texts and glossaries of the older Germanic languages (Gothic, Old High German, and
Old Norse) had been published, and Jones realized that Germanic as well as Old Persian and perhaps Celtic
had evolved from the same “common source.” The next important step came in 1822, when the German
scholar Jacob Grimm, following the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask (whose work, being written in Danish, was
less accessible to most European scholars), pointed out in the second edition of his comparative grammar of
Germanic that there were a number of systematic correspondences between the sounds of Germanic and the
sounds of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in related words. Grimm noted, for example, that where Gothic (the
oldest surviving Germanic language) had an f, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit frequently had a p (e.g., Gothic
fotus, Latin pedis, Greek podós, Sanskrit padás, all meaning “foot”); when Gothic had a p, the non-Germanic
languages had a b; when Gothic had a b, the non-Germanic languages had what Grimm called an “aspirate”
(Latin f, Greek ph, Sanskrit bh). In order to account for these correspondences he postulated a cyclical
“soundshift” (Lautverschiebung) in the prehistory of Germanic, in which the original “aspirates” became
voiced unaspirated stops (bh became b, etc.), the original voiced unaspirated stops became voiceless (b
became p, etc.), and the original voiceless (unaspirated) stops became “aspirates” (p became f). Grimm's term,
“aspirate,” it will be noted, covered such phonetically distinct categories as aspirated stops (bh, ph), produced
with an accompanying audible puff of breath, and fricatives (f ), produced with audible friction as a result of
incomplete closure in the vocal tract.
In the work of the next 50 years the idea of sound change was made more precise, and, in the 1870s, a group
of scholars known collectively as the Junggrammatiker (“young grammarians,” or Neogrammarians) put
forward the thesis that all changes in the sound system of a language as it developed through time were
subject to the operation of regular sound laws. Though the thesis that sound laws were absolutely regular in
their operation (unless they were inhibited in particular instances by the influence of analogy) was at first
regarded as most controversial, by the end of the 19th century it was quite generally accepted and had become
the cornerstone of the comparative method. Using the principle of regular sound change, scholars were able to
reconstruct “ancestral” common forms from which the later forms found in particular languages could be
derived. By convention, such reconstructed forms are marked in the literature with an asterisk. Thus, from the
reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word for “ten,” *dekm, it was possible to derive Sanskrit dasa, Greek
déka, Latin decem, and Gothic taihun by postulating a number of different sound laws that operated
independently in the different branches of the Indo-European family. The question of sound change is dealt
with in greater detail in the section entitled Historical (diachronic) linguistics.
The role of analogy
Analogy has been mentioned in connection with its inhibition of the regular operation of sound laws in
particular word forms. This was how the Neogrammarians thought of it. In the course of the 20th century,
however, it has come to be recognized that analogy, taken in its most general sense, plays a far more
important role in the development of languages than simply that of sporadically preventing what would
otherwise be a completely regular transformation of the sound system of a language. When a child learns to
speak he tends to regularize the anomalous, or irregular, forms by analogy with the more regular and
productive patterns of formation in the language; e.g., he will tend to say “comed” rather than “came,”
“dived” rather than “dove,” and so on, just as he will say “talked,” “loved,” and so forth. The fact that the
child does this is evidence that he has learned or is learning the regularities or rules of his language. He will
go on to “unlearn” some of the analogical forms and substitute for them the anomalous forms current in the
speech of the previous generation. But in some cases, he will keep a “new” analogical form (e.g., “dived”
rather than “dove”), and this may then become the recognized and accepted form.
Inner and outer form
One of the most original, if not one of the most immediately influential, linguists of the 19th century was the
learned Prussian statesman, Wilhelm von Humboldt (died 1835). His interests, unlike those of most of his
contemporaries, were not exclusively historical. Following the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von
Herder (1744–1803), he stressed the connection between national languages and national character: this was
but a commonplace of romanticism. More original was Humboldt's theory of “inner” and “outer” form in
language. The outer form of language was the raw material (the sounds) from which different languages were
fashioned; the inner form was the pattern, or structure, of grammar and meaning that was imposed upon this
raw material and differentiated one language from another. This “structural” conception of language was to
become dominant, for a time at least, in many of the major centers of linguistics by the middle of the 20th
century. Another of Humboldt's ideas was that language was something dynamic, rather than static, and was
an activity itself rather than the product of activity. A language was not a set of actual utterances produced by
speakers but the underlying principles or rules that made it possible for speakers to produce such utterances
and, moreover, an unlimited number of them. This idea was taken up by a German philologist, Heymann
Steinthal, and, what is more important, by the physiologist and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and thus
influenced late 19th- and early 20th-century theories of the psychology of language. Its influence, like that of
the distinction of inner and outer form, can also be seen in the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss
linguist. But its full implications were probably not perceived and made precise until the middle of the 20th
century, when the U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky re-emphasized it and made it one of the basic notions of
generative grammar (see below Transformational-generative grammar).
Phonetics and dialectology
Many other interesting and important developments occurred in 19th-century linguistic research, among them
work in the areas of phonetics and dialectology. Research in both these fields was promoted by the
Neogrammarians' concern with sound change and by their insistence that prehistoric developments in
languages were of the same kind as developments taking place in the languages and dialects currently spoken.
The development of phonetics in the West was also strongly influenced at this period, as were many of the
details of the more philological analysis of the Indo-European languages, by the discovery of the works of the
Indian grammarians who, from the time of the Sanskrit grammarian Panini (5th or 6th century BC), if not
before, had arrived at a much more comprehensive and scientific theory of phonetics, phonology, and
morphology than anything achieved in the West until the modern period.
10. The development of historical-comparative ideas at the end of the 19 century.
11. Main periods and paradigms in linguistic knowledge of the 19th century.
Our Russian ling-t Professor Georgiev a specialist in historic.-comp. ling., introduced his classif. of hist.comp. ling-cs. He said there are 3 periods, that characterize the development of h.-c. ling.
The first period(1814-1870)
The period of collecting the data & systematization of facts, because during this period the 1st ling. laws
appeared:
a)consonant set shift(by Grimm)
b)the idea of Protolang-ge(from it all I.-E. lang-s appeared& developed).This idea was expressed by August
Schleicher in 1862,1870
c)I.-E. ling. family. The description of all language belonging to it. August Schleicher made possible to
introduce his own ideas, concerning correspondences in grammar ,phon-cs,vocab-ry & syntax. He influenced
the development of ling-cs in the 19-20th centuries, because he made clear the conception that phonolog.
changes govern gr.& vocabulary of the Lang. He made possible to describe that sounds is a most stable
system in any lang-ge over cent-s than meanings of the word are. A ling-t who wants to describe a lang-ge
must pay attention to the history of l-ge.
d)He introduced the method of reconstruction of Protolang-ge phenomenon.
These 4 results made possible to explicate the development of dif. lang-ges.
The second period (1870 - 1916)
During this period many new linguistic laws were formulated because at this period in Germany a new
linguistic school appeared. This school is known as Young Grammarian School. The school is represented
by the scholars: Karl Blugman, German Ostgoff, Henry and others. These scholars studied different
languages and came to the conclusion that a language is not a natural organism.
These scientists tried to describe language phenomenon according to 2 different principles:
1) according to the linguistic analogy
2) according to the inner reconstruction
The numbers of these schools tried to pay attention to the pronunciation of words in which we can find
out physiological and acoustic properties.
The 2nd trend of school was the attention to psychologic processed of a communicative situation. The
scholars representing both trends in linguistics tried to investigate related and non-related languages
irrespective of the stage of their development. They didn’t speak about the language age such as Sunscrit,
Greek, Latin, Gothic and German. These languages were studied as if they belonged to one and the same age
but now we know that some of languages are older, some of them are rather new languages.
The main representative of this school was Hanry Paul. His main book appeared in 1880. It was
called “The principles of the history of language”. In this work he spoke about necessity to pay attention to
the associations in the language. The associations in the language may appear dew to semantic changes in
words, that is why cases of metaphor and metonymy, examples of hyperbola and litotes (литота) must be
examined on the base of associations. These associations may show how a person thinks when he is using
stylistic devises. Some other semantic changes for example: the widening and narrowing of the meaning may
be described on the basis of the logical principle. In general Young Grammarian School tried not only to
uncover linguistic laws but to study also fairy-tales, proverbs and other examples of folk texts.
In 1877 Karl Verner formulated an additional law which can explain some cases of correspondences
which were not described by the Grimm’s law. K. V. found out that there can be changes in consonants in old
Germanic languages which depended upon the stress of the word. This law is concerned with the shift of
stress which happened ≈ 3d century BC. In Sanskrit the stress like in Greek is on the 2nd syllable, Germanic
languages – 1st syllable is stressed.
Ex.:
Sanskrit – pitár
Greek – patér
Gothic - fádor
German – Váter
English – fæder
He thought that the shift of the stress corresponds to German languages in which the absent change
changed from the musical stress to the dynamic stress. That is why the Grimm’s law couldn’t describe
peculiarities of pronunciation in unstressed position.
Ex.:
Gothic – fádor
English – fæder
This was a very serious addition to the 1st consonant shift. There was one more very important event
that happened in 1889. This event is associated with the name of Ferdinand De Saussure. He predicted in his
work the existence of some laryngeal sounds which were observed in the Indo-European language. He stated
that there must be a language where these particular sounds are met, but this descriptions of these 3 sounds
were not observed in any living languages. He tried to use the method of internal reconstruction
(внутренний) to describe the peculiarities of these elements. Only after his death these sounds were found in
some unknown texts in Turkey. When these texts were read by linguists they were simple amazed for De
Saussure’s discovery. We are to state that many other linguistic laws appeared during the 2nd period of the
Historical Comparative Linguistics.
The third period (1916 - 1950)
According to professor Georgiev’s classification we are to speak about the 3d period. There were
very interesting discoveries in Comparative Linguistics which were made by Boris Grosny (Bulgarian
scientist), Egi Kurilovich (Czech), Gankrilidze and Ivanov.
B. G. discovered that particular language in Turkey where Ferdinand de Saussure described the
language sounds.
E. K. described the peculiarities of some dead Greek languages. During this very period new noncomparative theories were proclaimed. One of these theories is called the Nostratic theory
(настротическая). According to it languages form different linguistic families, which are included into one
bigger family.
The other theory that appeared described the place…with the old Indo-European lived. This theory
was introduced by Gankrilidze and Ivanov.
Professor Amirova’s Classification
She thinks that main conceptions and theories in Historical Comparative Linguistics should be
subdivided into 3 main trends:
1) Historical Comparative Linguistics
This trend was associated with the birth of historical comparative ideas. Linguists like Bopp, Rask, Grimm
and Vostokov and afterwards Schlachter, Brygmann, Ostgoff, Paul studied genetic peculiarities of languages
in connection with social communities, speaking these languages.
2) Comparative Typological theories, which studied the types of language structures irrespective of
historical and cultural correspondences of Indo-European languages. To this particular belong the Young
Grammarian School and some mentioned scholars: Egi Kurilovich, Boris Grosny.
3) It is associated with theoretical linguistics which forms the philosophy of language and describes
general properties of languages in descriptive and comparative linguistics. These general properties of varies
languages were formulated by Вильгельм фон Гумбольдт. He thought that languages have to be described as
cases of general linguistics. That is why it is very important to study human speech and communication and
even to spek about the ability of human being to construct phrases and sentences. Вильгельм фон Гумбольдт
thought that human language activity is associated with his nature and ability to interact.
The last trend in linguistics influenced greately the scholars of the end of the 19th and the
beginning of the 20th century. One of the most beneficial changes of the end of the 19th century was a new
attitude to the study of living human speech. The greatest stress way laid on phonetics and on the psychology
of the language.
At the end of the 19th century we observe the rise of the Descriptive Linguistics. This kind of
linguistics were opposed to Comparative studies, Descriptive Linguistics became the source of some major
developments in contemporary linguistics. Besides that, descriptive analysis of the language made possible
the appearance of some synchronic studies.
The work of the Young Grammarian school led directly to some main theories in language
studies, that appeared in the 20th century. Among the pioneers of the Descriptive Linguistics we are to
mention the British scientists Henry Sweet. He laid the foundations of all general theories which could
describe phonetics on one hand and the history of the language. He was the first grammarian who introduced
the grammar of the English language based on the descriptive analysis. According to him the principles of
Descriptive Linguistics differed greatly from the principles of the historical comparative studies. He
introduced and applied the spelling reform at the description of the language. He introduced the system of
transcriptions applicable to any phonetic system of the language. That system we are using now in phonetics
and phonology was described by him. He spoke about the case of the phoneme, phonological environment of
the investigated sounds, he also made possible to describe all linguistic phenomena in the English grammar.
12. W. von Humboldt's ideas on language, human activity and comparative linguistics.
13. Ideas of A. Boudouin de Courtenay on structural notions in linguistics. F. de Saussure’s “Course on
General Linguistics”
The explicit terminological distinction between a sound and a phoneme was given in works of a
Russian scholar Baudouin de Courtenay. Firstly, he introduced the term”фонема” in general linguistics to
speak about the peculiarities of an abstract sound system. This happened in 1894. His theory of the phoneme
was a great progress in linguistics. This language unit was defined as a psychological unit of all sound
changes. He and his pupil Krushevskiy tried to distinguish a psychological aspect, which is connected with a
speaker and the morphological description of the sound change which is associated with the functional aspect
of pronunciation. Afterwards this term “phoneme” gained wide currency and became a linguistic universal.
This theory of a phoneme closed the studies of the 19th century associated with the historical comparative
linguistics.
1) Firstly, he formulized and made explicit to main dimensions in the language study. They are as
follows: synchrony and diachrony.
Synchrony is related as a self-contained system of communication of any particular time. He
described synchrony as one of the axes. The other ax is represented in diachrony. It shows those changes
which may appear when we can compare 2 different levels of the language.
Time
A
21 century
18 century
B
Шекспир
In this case all notions in the language are treated diachronically. These 2 dimensions of the language
may possible to speak about synchronic and diachronic linguistics.
2) He distinguished between two main notions of a speaker langue and parole those actual
phenomena which are connected with utterances and speech. Langue and parole have become international
terms in structural linguistics. They categorized language activity of a human being. He thought that language
is connected with the society and speech is associated with a particular individual. A linguist has to
investigate what can happen in the language and in this case he is to study the lexicon, grammar, phonetics.
Each of these language levels represents their own peculiarities, each of them can be regarded as a separate
system and a language is a very complicated system which may include everything. Main units of each levels
(phonemes, morphemes, lexemes) and the relations between them.
3) He examined the interrelations between 2 main structures of the language. They are called
synthegmatic relations and paradigmatic relations. S. relations are observed in a sentence when all the
words are put in line. Ex.: I read a book. (pronoun + verb + noun) We may add smth else. P. relations
describes system of contrasted elements in different categories. We can change the example as we like:
instead of “I” we can put “he”, “she”, “they”; instead of “read” we can put “run”, “write” and so on. Here we
are putting word according to our communicative aims and associations which may appear in our mind. This
statement on the structural approach to language underlies principles of modern linguistics. This idea justifies
his idea that linguistics is an independent science and subject of study. Linguistics should be discussed as a
discipline which must represent inner peculiarities of a language characterized by phonetical, morphological
and lexemic levels. Фердинанд де Соссюр in his course of general linguistics spoke also about signs and
their peculiarities. He thought that it is necessary to investigate the form of the word, the concept of the word
and to show how they are connected with things in reality. This very idea was based on achievements of the
German philosopher and mathematician Gotlap Frege.
thing
form
concept
Nowadays all these connections are known as a semantic triangle which can describe 2 different sides of a
word. The form of a word is associated with the way we pronounce the word, with the way we spell the word.
The concept of a word introduces our thoughts about a particular object in the surrounded reality. Ex.: cat is a
domestic animal, 4 legs, one head and so on, we get to know some particular features that helps to distinguish
it from a dog or other animals. The semantic triangle allowed to show properties of any sign beside that a
language is a semiotic system. Besides the language there are many semiotic systems, surrounding a human
being. Фердинанд де Соссюр in his course spoke about a separate study of semiological systems. He called
the study – semiology.
14. Main antinomies of the "Course on General Linguistics" by F. de Saussure.
Fds’s book “A course on General Linguistics” appeared in 1916. He read lectures, which impressed his
students so greatly, that they decided to reconstruct all lectures. His notes & notes of his students are used.
All FdS’s ideas may be put under 3 main heads:
1. He formalized & made explicit 2 main dimensions in the language studies: Synchrony (s) and
Diachrony(d). S is treated as a self-contained system of communication at any particular time. He
described S as one of the axes. The other axe is represented in D. it shows those changes which can
appear when we compare 2 different levels of the language (16th century & 20th century. In this case
all notions in the language are treated diachronically). These 2 dimensions of language made possible
to speak about Synchronic & Diachronic Linguistics.
2. FdS distinguished between 2 main notions:
- langue (L) (language competence of a speaker)
- parole (P) (phenomena which are connected with utterances & speech)
L &P have become international terms in structural linguistics. They categorize language activity of a
human being.
FdS thought that language is connected with the society & speech is associated with a particular individual.
A linguist has to investigate what can happen in the language (lexicon, grammar, phonetics). Each of the
language units represented their own peculiarities each of them can be regarded a separate system & a
language is a very complicated system which may include everything: main units of each level (phonemes,
morphemes, lexemes) & the relations between them.
3. FdS examined the interrelations between 2 main structures of the language:
- syntagmatic relations
- paradigmatic relations
The syntagmatic relations are observed in a sentence when all the words are put in line
I read a book . (pronoun + verb + noun)We may add smth else.
P. relations describes system of contrasted elements in different categories. We can change the example as
we like: instead of “I” we can put “he”, “she”, “they”; instead of “read” we can put “run”, “write” and so on.
Here we are putting word according to our communicative aims and associations which may appear in our
mind. This statement on the structural approach to language underlies principles of modern linguistics. This
idea justifies his idea that linguistics is an independent science and subject of study. Linguistics should be
discussed as a discipline which must represent inner peculiarities of a language characterized by phonetical,
morphological and lexemic levels.
15. The development of the semantic triangle (by G. Frege, F. de Saussure. C.K. Ogden and LA.
Richards). F. de Saussure's understanding of the linguistic sign. Referential approach.
. Фердинанд де Соссюр in his course of general linguistics spoke also about signs and their peculiarities. He
thought that it is necessary to investigate the form of the word, the concept of the word and to show how they
are connected with things in reality. This very idea was based on achievements of the German philosopher
and mathematician Gotlap Frege.
thing
form
concept
Nowadays all these connections are known as a semantic triangle which can describe 2 different sides of a
word. The form of a word is associated with the way we pronounce the word, with the way we spell the word.
The concept of a word introduces our thoughts about a particular object in the surrounded reality. Ex.: cat is a
domestic animal, 4 legs, one head and so on, we get to know some particular features that helps to distinguish
it from a dog or other animals. The semantic triangle allowed to show properties of any sign beside that a
language is a semiotic system.
FdS spoke about the connection between 3 different sides of a linguistic sign. According to him 1 of the
sides which is connected with phonological form was called a sign. The other side of the triangle was called a
signifier ( or a concept which exists in the speaker’s or listener’s mind). The relationship between a
phonological form & a concept is showed by dotted line & it usually concerns linguistics. But now the sign is
not the unity of the phonological form & a grammar form. It’s a unity between the outer side of a unit & inner
side of it, represented by the phonological & grammar forms related to a concept.
The 3d side of the triangle is a referent. Originally this triangle scheme was suggested by Gotlib Frege. Then
the American linguists Ogden & Richards adopted the 3-conner schemer with modification. According to it
the sign is a 2-faced unit, which is characterized by the phonological & graphical form, is known to be a
symbol & the referent is usually named by a linguistic unit. Now this schemer is known as the semantic
triangle, but instead of the concept linguists speak about the meaning. In general this approach is called the
referential approach because the referent is reflected in a name.
16. Structural schools of linguistics (Copenhagen, Prague). American school of descriptivism &
structuralism.
It was developed by a number of linguists in different countries. Each Structural school of linguistics tried to
observe different notions. They elaborated different theories and methods but the main aim of various
linguistic tendencies is concerned with the form of a language existing against substance. This was the main
emphasis in his studies. There are several Structural schools of linguistics:
1) Copenhagen linguistic school
2) The Prague linguistic school
3) American school of linguistics.
Copenhagen linguistic school appeared in Denmark, the main representative is Luis Hjelmsliv. (L.H) He
introduced a term “glossemantics”. The word is taken from Greek “gloss” – a language. Glossematics studied
a language & paid attention to the form, which was important for the understanding of notions, which are
represented in linguistics. L.H. used the semantic triangle, described by FdS, but he didn’t use FdS’s terms (a
sign, signifier, a referent). He introduced new terms: sign = expression plane; signifier=content plane. Plane –
a case of studies in phonology. Content plane – studies in semantics & grammar. Nowadays notions
expression plane & the content plane have become international term & are used not only in the structural
linguistics. A form is described as main units & relations between them on the levels of phonology, grammar
& semantics. His analysis is called the “Content Analysis”. This kind of analysis is independent of
extralinguistic notions & criteria. L.H. thought that linguistic is an independent science & every level in the
language can be analyzable & dependent on the ultimate constituency(UC). On the level of phonology this
UC are separate phonemes (ex: [dog] represented by 3 phonemes, the spell of the same word is characterized
by 3 graphemes, on the level of grammar this word is characterized by a number of categories:
1. a noun
2. number
3. gender
4. case
5. article
Level of semantics:
1. animal
2. domestic animal
3. dog family
4. barking)
Each level exists independently of each other. Many scholars spoke about equivalent of such analysis which
is built of logics & formality. Each level is a strictly limited field of units& relationships between them. But
the semantic level shows the limitless boundaries in the content plane, which may depend upon a particular
discourse meaning.
The Prague Linguistic School (PLS)
Represented by Czech & Russian scholars (Матезиус, Трубецкой, Якобсон).
Трубецкой was a professor in Vienna & published works in different spheres of linguistics but his main book
“ Foundations of Phonology”(1938) described the principles of the phonological analysis elaborated in PLS.
Трубецкой & PLS applied theory of FdS to the elaboration of the phoneme concept. He paid attention to
main notions introduced by FdS – langue & parole. He thinks that to the level of the language a phoneme may
belong that is why he tried to study languages as systems of interrelated elements & he treated a phoneme as a
separate class of sounds & as a complex phonological unit, this unit is realized in the sounds of speech. The
relations between units of the phonological level have become fundamental to the PL theory. Each phoneme
was regarded as a linguistic entity, which may be shown as consisting of common (universal) features &
distinctive properties or markers.
(Ex: [p]/[b]
- consonants
- bilabial
- not palatalized
- voiced/ voiceless)
Phonetical systems of different languages represent 30 – 70 phonemes, which characterized phonetical
system of each language (Russian – 39 – 40 phonemes; English – 44; German – 38; Armenian – 62).
Трубецкой thought that the main notion for the description of phonemes is opposition (p vs b). the 2nd term
is useful for description of opposition both in Eng & in Ru
Лук – луг (г – is neutral & only one plosive can occur) marked opposition.
Трубецкой introduced the term “archiphoneme” to speak about some universal features on the level of
phonology. The term “phoneme” was carefully investigated by a PLS & afterwards the phonological analysis
was applied to features connected with syllables. This analysis is rather fruitful for the prosodic description of
the language. It’s possible to characterize the stress, the length, the pitch +intonation & other phenomena on
the level of speech. This kind of analysis also helped to describe the syntagmatic study & functions of certain
sound units in communication.
The American Linguistic School
It’s represented by Leonard Bloomfield & his book “Language” (1933). His approach was scientific,
mechanistic & formal interpretation of language. He paid more attention to the phonological level & the
morphemic level. He introduced his own theory for the description of morphemes & phonemes. His analysis
is now known as the “Immediate Constituance Theory”.
Poor John / ran away
May be analyzed by the binary principe
a) 1. Poor John
2. ran away
immediate Constituance
b) Poor John
ran away
ran
(uc)
Poor
away
John
Ultimate Constituance(uc)
(can’t be divided further)
c)
away
a (uc)
way (uc)
The basic units in the language study:
- sentence
- phrase (construction)
main levels in American Linguistics
- morpheme
- phoneme
17. American linguistics of the beginning of the 20lh century. Behaviorism in linguistics. Leonard
Bloomfield "Language".
18. Anthropological linguistics in America. Franz Boas and Edward Sapir. Linguistic relativity,
American linguistics.
It is represented by 3 outstanding figures:
1) Franz Boas
2) Edward Sapir
3) Leonard Bloomfield
F.B. taught several generations of American linguists and anthropologists The anthropological interest of
FB was reflected in close collaboration (сотрудничество; участие) of anthropology and linguistics. These 2
science were studied in American universities at the beginning of the 20th century. Anthropologists tried to
describe the American-Indian population who spoke different languages. This population was illiterate and
they lived in very small communities over 30 much of the US and Canada. Since colonial days different
people tried to put down words and phrases from American-Indian languages and thus the 1st dictionaries and
grammars of native languages of the American continent appeared. Among these authors there were many
missioners, traders but there were no linguists among them. FB became the 1st professional linguist who was
really interested in descriptive linguistics and human resources. At the beginning of the 20th century there
were no special research procedure for the description of unknown languages. That is why this scholar tried to
adopt not only discovery procedures but he tried to analyze various language phenomena on the basis of a
framework of the analytical statements.
He paid great attention to description of the phonological, grammatical and lexical peculiarities of Indian
languages.
Each of his successors of his works were outstanding American linguists and they developed their own
point of view for the language study.
LB paid much attention to behaviorism (trend in psychology) associated with the description of language
events from the position of inductive generalizations. On the one hand LB paid much attention to the
linguistic form. He defined the meaning of a linguistic form “as the situation in which the speaker utters
some sentence and the response it calls forth in the hearer”. According to this definition the meaning is the
whole situation.
LB illustrated this situation with the help of 2 men: Jack and Jill. They are going along the road. Jill is
hungry and she sees an apple on the tree and with the help of the language gets Jack to get that very apple.
When she sees the apple it is a stimulus after that it is followed by reaction (S→R). Jack can understand the
whole situation. His stimulus is different (linguistic reaction) to the whole situation. After linguistic reaction
he tries to fetch that apple (it is the other stimulus).when he gets it he returns to her and gives it (stimulus)
then she eats this apple. T.E.: Jill - S→R это порождает у Jack Linguistic Reaction→S (стимул достать
яблоко) дальше S Джека отдать яблоко→R (Jill съедает яблоко).
Meaning according to LB is the realization btw speech and the practical events that follow this linguistic
situation afterwards. A very important point of his Theory is as follows: LB tries to describe all kinds of
stimulus and reactions as physical events.
LB tries to describe the language on the basis of the mechanism theory according to this idea a human being
behaves like an animal which doesn’t have any feelings and emotions. For LB it is important to describe some
thought s concepts and images, which are connected with human behavior but he denied that possibility of
description. Human communication based on thoughts, movements and human experience. His description of
the language is rather analytical. That is why his analysis of immediate constituence is usually regarded to be
a formal kind of language description.
ES introduced his own theory which was based on the description of American-Indian languages. He
described the languages of the Canadian tribes, he paid attention to the grammatical structure of these
languages and he introduced his own idea for the descriptive linguistics. His idea is usually known as
linguistic relativity (относительность). He paid attention to the difficulty in relating language to the outer
world. He stated that “we see the world as if we depend on the language we use”. “Language shapes our
perceptions”. Cultural behavior is closely connected with the language spoken by the peoples. According to
this ideas people categorized the objects of the surrounding reality according to their experience and the
understanding of the world. He stresses the situation in which language influences our experience and our
perceptions are determined by our language. This idea was rather new in the 20th century because scholars
thought that the influence usually goes from the surrounding world to human understanding of it expressed in
the language. ES suggested that a person in his mind may built up his own picture of the world. This picture
may be different from other people’s models
He introduced the idea of linguistic relativity associated with the well-known hypothesizes expressed
by him and his pupil Benjamin Whorf. According to this hypothesis people don’t know the background of
the language. A language doesn’t describe ideas but it can shape the ideas. People usually cut down their own
experiences into certain pieces.
The principle of relativity corresponds to the idea that the same physical evidence may be expressed
with the help of different units. ES & BW tried to describe European languages and American-Indian
languages corresponding to nouns and verbs. According to this description American-Indian languages show
all the events with the help of verbs. They don’t use nouns. Besides there is no distinctions btw nouns and
verbs at all (lightning, waves, storm, flame). In Hopi there is only one word for insect, plane and pilot.
When ES was tried to describe a number of words they came across: in Arabic there are 300 words
denoting sand, 30 words for camel, 55 words describing a yellow colour; in American-Indian there are many
words that describe snow, white, gray, blue and no colours as black and yellow. BW showed that Hopi and
American-Indian languages have no words that can describe time.
The only distinction they make is btw what is subjective and what is objective. The subjective
phenomena include the future and everything that is mental and the other phenomena are objective. They have
no distance in time and place. Only present tense. They think that the word is determined by the language and
we see here and experience what we do because the language habits of our culture presupposes certain choices
of interpretation.
19. Descriptive linguistics on form and meaning in Britain (Firth and his ideas).
The development that had taken place after the main structural schools: the Prague linguistic Circle,
The Copenhagen ling. sch. And Bloomfield’s and Sapir’s theories in American linguistics were connected
with differences of each particular theory of language and equal concern for all levels of the language.
Scholars of different schools mostly paid attention to the development of phonology but in the 50s of the 20th
century
1) phonology is no longer determines the course of linguistic theory and linguistic methods.
2) the grammatic studies of the 1st part of the 20th century were mostly concerned with the3 description
of morphology and morphemes and only in some cases scholars devoted their works to the description of
sentences.
3) the 3d trend in linguistics is mostly associated with the description of lexicon but the semantic study
due to the influence of Bloomfield was neglected in American linguistics because it was thought that it can’t
be the competence of linguistic science. This very moment in the 50s of the 20th century one of the famous
British linguist John Firth introduced his own theory of the language. His understanding of the language
structure was associated with 2 main conceptions:
- The 1st assumption represented in his works was that: it is important to investigate not only a
linguistic science but also the context of situation which is the means of making statements using the means of
the word.
As the previous generation of linguists JF paid much attention to the linguistic form but not to the
substance represented in the language. The whole theory of the language described the phonetics
independently from linguistics. (Таблица)
Nowadays this view point is of great importance because of the usage in descriptive linguistics such
terms as context, situation, extra-linguistic features. The part of phonology was described paying attention to
prosodic elements. He spoke about the stress of the word, the division of word into syllables, the pitch of the
voice and the length of a word or phrase.
His pupils involved 4 fundamental categories in the language theories:
1) unit
2) structure
3) class
4) system
Each of these categories is influenced by rank and other features. Units – sentences have structures in which
units lower in rank are grouped into classes by reference to their function in structures. The members of
classes are grouped into systems.
4 main levels of the language: Rank – Grammar
1) unit-sentence-word
2) structure – clauses (phrases) – syllable group
3)class – separate words – syllables
4) system- morpheme – segments
All the categories in the language are organized according to their actual data observed by linguists. For JF
the category of unit is the most important one. There are other criteria according to which the same categories
are described in detail. His pupils paid attention to either to phonological level of the grammatical level. The
semantic of a word was not observed by the British linguistic school. One of his pupils Halliday devoted all
his works to the description of grammatical categories paying no attention to the phonological level of the
language.
20. Transformational-generative phase of linguistics. N. Chomsky's "Syntactic structures": the object
of research, methods and assumptions.
Интернет 1
A linguistic theory developed by Noam Chomsky, first put forth in his book Syntactic Structures
(1957), that provides a methodology for describing the relationships between sentences expressing similar
concepts to underlying "deep structures" by means of various transformational rules. A central premise of
Chomsky's work is that humans are innately predisposed to language abilities, and that such transformational
processes are linguistic universals.
Интернет 2
These introduce yet another innovation. Rules that transform phrase structures into alternative forms.
Transformations provide especially economical explanations for the formation of questions, and passive
voice, but also in accounting for deletions ('John and Mary like Jill' instead of 'John likes Jill and Mary Likes
Jill') that we may be using to help memory chunking that helps overcome the 7 plus or minus 2 constraint on
short term memory.
The transformational grammar was a theory of how grammatical knowledge is represented and
processed in the brain. Developed by Noam Chomsky in the1960's, the transformational grammar consisted
of:
1) Two levels of representation of the structure of sentences: an underlying, more abstract form,
termed 'deep structure', and the actual form of the sentence produced, called 'surface structure'. Deep structure
is represented in the form of a heirarchical tree diagram, or "phrase structure tree," depicting the abstract
grammatical relationships between the words and phrases within a sentence.
2) A system of formal rules specifiying how deep structures are to be transformed into surface
structures.
Consider the two sentences "Steven wrote a book on language" and "A book on language was written
by Steven." Chomsky held that there is a deeper grammatical structure from which both these sentences are
derived. The transformational grammar provides an characterization of this common form and how it is
manipulated to produce actual sentences.
Or take the sentence "Who will John see." This corresponds to its surface structure. According to the
transformational grammar, we form this sentence by unconsciously applying transformation rules to the
underlying deep structure given in the phrase structure tree of the form "John will see who." In this particular
case, the transformation rule applied is termed "Wh-movement."
The transformational grammar formed the basis for many subsequent theories of human grammatical
knowledge. Since Chomsky's original presentation, many different theories have emerged. Although current
theories differ significantly from the original, the notion of a transformation remains a central element in most
models.
Consider the following sentence pairs:
"The cat chased the mouse."
"The mouse was chased by the cat."
"Where did John drive?"
"John drove (where)."
According to the transformational grammar, there is an abstract level of representation that underlies
the syntactical structures of each pair member. For instance, the forms first and second sentences correspond
to "surface structures." The linguist Noam Chomsky proposed that these surface structures are derived from a
common underlying grammatical representation, called their "deep structure." Within the theory, their deep
structure is represented in the form of a heirarchical tree depicting the grammatical relationships between the
various constituents that make up the sentence, such as the noun phrases* "the cat" and "the mouse," and the
verb phrases "chased" and "was chased ." The application of certain transformation rules to this tree produces
the surface structures seen above.
Phrase Structure Tree
A phrase structure tree is a form of representation of sentences in which nodes or elements are labelled
by syntactic category (noun phrase (NP), verb phrase (VP), prepositional phrase (PP), etc.)
The
man
hit
the
ball (пример из лекции)
(definite component)
Phrase Structure Rules
Phrase structure rules govern the structure of sentences in a language. One example is the rule that
English sentences must consist of a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP)).
Noun Phrase
A word or sequence of words consisting of a noun or a noun plus one or more modifiers. For example, 'cat',
'the cat', 'the black cat' are all noun phrases. In the sentence, 'The black cat is happy,' 'the black cat' is the noun
phrase; 'the black cat is' is not a noun phrase. Noun phrases can be constructed recursively. That is, a noun
phrase can contain another phrase within it (such as a verb phrase or another noun phrase), that contains
within it another phrase, and so on. The noun phrase is one type of phrase among others in contemporary
theories of grammar.
Verb Phrase
A word or sequence of words consisting of a verb (refers to an action, existence or occurence) or a verb plus
an object (e.g. 'write', 'write a letter').
Лекция гребанная
It the 50s of the 20th century on the American continent the other outstanding scholar Zellig Harris
developed the notions of IC (immediate …) and distribution. ЯР began his investigations in phoneme
sequences and morpheme sequences. He described the preceding the following phonemes cases of context
btw phonemes and morphemes and afterwards came to the conclusion that there are 3 models of distribution
both on phonological and morphological levels of the language. These procedures helped to distinguish btw
syntax and morphology and afterwards showed that it is possible to describe the distribution on any formal
level except the lexemic level. In the 50s he extended the descriptive analysis of texts beyond and across
sentence boundaries. On the 1st hand he tried to relate distribution with transformation btw 2 more actual
sentences. Some cases of transformations had been anticipated by the representatives of the Port Royal
Grammar (Universal Grammar) and in works by Humboldt. This was the most radical and important change
in Am. Descriptive linguistics.
The H’s pupil – Noham Chomsky tried to use transformations in his own analysis. In 1957 the book written
bh NC which is called “Syntactic structures” made the author well-known all over the world. NC introduced
Generative-Transformational theory of linguistics. Generative grammar described by NC made possible to
speak about the birth of a new paradigm in linguistics (Transformational Generic Paradigm). It is different
from the structural approach as it studies the principle descriptive method and orientation in the sphere of
linguistics. According to the new theory the linguistic descriptions are based on a number of rules. The main
thing in this theory is that the creative capacity of a native speaker is to generate and to produce language
message and to understand an infinite number of sentences. Both messages and sentences have never been
uttered before and heard before they are usually created on the spot. A speaker or a listener must follow
grammar of rules to understand messages and sentences. NC didn’t use Saussure’s terms langue and parole he
introduced 2 other terms language competence and lang. performance. The whole theory was based on
Gumboldt’s ideas that language is created by a human being and the task of a linguist is to describe how a
person codes and decodes sentences and communication in general. The rules of Transformational
Generative Grammar fall into 3 components:
1) the rules of phrase (phrase structure). Any sentence may be subdivided into phrases; 2 kind of phrases:
noun phrase: verbal phrase. Each of these phrases may be represented by trees. (Табличка выше)
2) According to this rule the transformations are applied. All the sentences are divided into central (ядерные)
and non-central.
3) it takes into consideration the deep and the surface structure of the sentence.
21. Main periods and paradigms in linguistic knowledge of the 20th century.
Девчонки!! Это обобщение по всему 20 веку, брала из Интернета…примерно все разбито по
школам.. если не хотите читать эту
Что нужно упомянуть здесь:
1) вклад Соссюра
2) Копенгагенская школа
3) Пражская школа
4) Американская школа
5) Лондонская школа
хрень, тогда загляните в билеты № 14 – 20))
ПрЕДЛАГАЮ ПОСЛЕ 9ОГО УПИТЬСЯ В ЗЮЗЮ….ЛИБО ОТ ГОРЯ, ЛИБО ОТ
ЩАСТЬЯ))))))))) СО СВОИМИ ПРЕДЛОЖЕНИЯМИ ПРОШУ ОБРАЩАТЬСЯ ПО ТЕЛ:
6511077
Structural linguistics in Europe
Structural linguistics in Europe is generally said to have begun in 1916 with the posthumous publication of
the Course in General Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Much of what is now considered as Saussurean
can be seen, though less clearly, in the earlier work of Humboldt, and the general structural principles that
Saussure was to develop with respect to synchronic linguistics in the Cours had been applied almost 40 years
before (1879) by Saussure himself in a reconstruction of the Indo-European vowel system. The full
significance of the work was not appreciated at the time. Saussure's structuralism can be summed up in two
dichotomies (which jointly cover what Humboldt referred to in terms of his own distinction of inner and outer
form): (1) langue versus parole and (2) form versus substance. By langue, best translated in its technical
Saussurean sense as language system, is meant the totality of regularities and patterns of formation that
underlie the utterances of a language; by parole, which can be translated as language behaviour, is meant the
actual utterances themselves. Just as two performances of a piece of music given by different orchestras on
different occasions will differ in a variety of details and yet be identifiable as performances of the same piece,
so two utterances may differ in various ways and yet be recognized as instances, in some sense, of the same
utterance. What the two musical performances and the two utterances have in common is an identity of form,
and this form, or structure, or pattern, is in principle independent of the substance, or “raw material,” upon
which it is imposed. “Structuralism,” in the European sense then, refers to the view that there is an abstract
relational structure that underlies and is to be distinguished from actual utterances—a system underlying
actual behaviour—and that this is the primary object of study for the linguist.
Two important points arise here: first, that the structural approach is not in principle restricted to synchronic
linguistics; second, that the study of meaning, as well as the study of phonology and grammar, can be
structural in orientation. In both cases “structuralism” is opposed to “atomism” in the European literature. It
was Saussure who drew the terminological distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics in the
Cours; despite the undoubtedly structural orientation of his own early work in the historical and comparative
field, he maintained that, whereas synchronic linguistics should deal with the structure of a language system at
a given point in time, diachronic linguistics should be concerned with the historical development of isolated
elements—it should be atomistic. Whatever the reasons that led Saussure to take this rather paradoxical view,
his teaching on this point was not generally accepted, and scholars soon began to apply structural concepts to
the diachronic study of languages. The most important of the various schools of structural linguistics to be
found in Europe in the first half of the 20th century have included the Prague school, most notably
represented by Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy (died 1938) and Roman Jakobson (born 1896), both Russian
émigrés, and the Copenhagen (or glossematic) school, centred 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 appropriately as
structural linguistics.
Structural linguistics in America
American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In insisting upon the necessity of treating
each language as a more or less coherent and integrated system, both European and American linguists of this
period tended to emphasize, if not to exaggerate, the structural uniqueness of individual languages. There was
especially good reason to take this point of view given the conditions in which American linguistics
developed from the end of the 19th century. There were hundreds of indigenous 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). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at home in anthropology and linguistics, the
alliance of which disciplines has endured to the present day in many American universities. 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 Whorfian hypothesis.
Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it
was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive
manifestation of American “structuralism.” 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. Because science was still a long way from being able to give a
comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study
of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the
grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. 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.
Another characteristic feature, one that was to be much criticized by Chomsky, was its attempt to formulate a
set of “discovery procedures”—procedures that could be applied more or less mechanically to texts and could
be guaranteed to yield an appropriate phonological and grammatical description of the language of the texts.
Structuralism, in this narrower sense of the term, is represented, with differences of emphasis or detail, in the
major American textbooks published during the 1950s.
Transformational grammar
The most significant development in linguistic theory and research in recent years 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 pupil. It is Chomsky's system that has attracted the
most attention so far. 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 (see below), 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
The effect of Chomsky's ideas has been phenomenal. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is no major
theoretical issue in linguistics today that is debated in terms other than those in which he has chosen to define
it, and every school of linguistics tends to define its position in relation to his. Among the rival schools are
tagmemics, stratificational grammar, and the Prague school. Tagmemics is the system of linguistic analysis
developed by the U.S. linguist Kenneth L. Pike and his associates in connection with their work as Bible
translators. Its foundations were laid during the 1950s, when Pike differed from the post-Bloomfieldian
structuralists on a number of principles, and it has been further elaborated since then. Tagmemic analysis has
been used for analyzing a great many previously unrecorded languages, especially in Central and South
America and in West Africa. Stratificational grammar, developed by a U.S. linguist, Sydney M. Lamb, has
been seen by some linguists as an alternative to transformational grammar. Not yet fully expounded or widely
exemplified in the analysis of different languages, 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) have been taken up by other schools. But there has been further
development in Prague of the functional approach to syntax (see below). The work of M.A.K. Halliday in
England 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 has been quite extensively
illustrated.
P. S. аффтор выпей йаду
22. Semiotics. Semantic triangle. Ideational (conceptual) approach (John Locke, Charles Peirce) and
functional approach to language meaning.
Language is usually regarded to be the system of communication, like all other systems language makes use
of signs. The systematic study of signs is usually included in semiotics, which analyses verbal and non-verbal
systems of hhuman communication as well as animal communication.
When we speak about Saussure, we usually remember that he spoke about the connection between 3 different
sides of a linguistic sign. According to him one of the sides which is connected with the phonological form
was called a sign; the other side of this triangle was called a signifie (a concept), which exists in the speaker’s
or listener’s mind. Between sign and concept, the relation btween them is shown by a solid line and it usually
concerns linguistics. But nowadays the sign is not a unity of the phonological form and a grammatical form. It
is a unity between the outer side of the unit and the inner side of unit represented by the grammatical and
phonological forms related to a concept.
The third side of the triangle according to Sassure is the referent. Originally this triangler skeamer was
suggested by a German mathematician Gottieb Frede. Afterwords the American linguist Ogden and Richards
adopted the 3 sided schemer with modofications. According to their idea a sign is a two-faced unit which is
characterized by the phonological and graphical form and is known to be a symbol. The referent is usually
named by a linguistic unit.
1
2Δ3
1- referent, 2 – sign, outer side (symbol), 3 – signifie, innet side (cocept)
Nowadays this scheme is known as a semantic triangle, but instead of the concept linguists prefer to speak
about the meaning.
In general this approach is called the referential approach because the referent is reflected in a name.
In American descriptive linguistics a word meaning was understood as an object of linguistic studies which
deal with externalized by dictionary definition which is associated with the physical phonetic and spelled form
of a word. This kind of abstraction is very useful for many important goals:
1) it can help to describe peculiarities of a particular language (in teaching) as well as contrastive studies.
The other approach wich is usually opposed to referential approach is assiciated with the idea expressed and
this approach is usually called the ideational theory. It is considered to be the first in the description of the
meaning. It was defined by medieval grammarians: meaning originates in the mind in the form of ideas and
words are just symbols of them. This idea goes to Aristotle, but it is usually associated with the name of the
British philosopher John Locke, who in the 17-th century tried to repeat the words of Aristotle and his famous
work was concerned with human understanding and there he wrote: “words in their primarly or immediate
signification stand for nothing but the idea existing in the human mind”. He points out that ideas are private
and individual, they are connected with a particular person though the largest component of meaning derives
from common perception of the world in which we live. These ideas are connected with our abilities to
reason, to think, which is a guarantee of sameness of meaning.
Locke thinks that individual ideas preexist their linguistic expression. The difficulty with this theory is as
follows: it is not clear why commnunication and human understanding of different things are possible if
linguistic expressions stand for only individual experience. And the reference to God as a mediator of
everything is not helpful enough, but the ideational theory is deeply rooted in modern semantics. The main
thing of this theory whether language or thought exist earlier is still debatable nowadays. But Russian and
Western linguists think that thought usually appears before language. This viewpoint studies meaning as a
mental experience represented by linguistic expressions is very influential.
Many linguists especially those who are interested in psychology and human cognitive abilities point out that
meaning is mainly a psychological phenomena. It exists in our minds with specific structure. This view point
is represented by Anna Wierzbicka and Ray Jackendoff. The difference between the word meaning and the
concept is concerned with the problem that not all the concepts are named with the help of language units.
That’s why not all the concepts may be called lexicalized. Understanding the meaning as a concept seem quiet
promising because only the direct association of the word with the ever changing and active concept gives the
word a dynamic, a creative and a generative character. It provides variation and the use in different contexts.
Some important questions remain unanswered within this linguistic framework. If the meaning is the concept,
why do people of different nations speak different languages and why do they have different conceptual
systems in their minds? If people speaking different languages have the same conceptual systems how does it
happen that identical concepts are represented by different words having different lexical meanings?
Ex: палец = a finger
If the meaning is different from the concept it must be related through the referent to the referent in the real
world. In this case the ideational theory presupposes to decide the following questions:
1) the relations between the lexical meaning (knowledge) and encyclopidic knowledge
2) the semantic and the conceptual levels of information
3) the difference between different conceptual systems
These problems are becoming problems of hot debate and besides words be characterized by different
meaning, different kinds of knowledge and different parts of the conceptual system.
Ex: to go, to take, to want – these verbs do not include any encyclopedic knowledge, but if we turn to
scientific terms: atom, coloury, conformation – these terms are based on encyclopedic knowledge. Besides
some verbs are connected with the human being (to travel), but some others are becoming more abstract and
in this case we pay more attention to the context than to the definition of a word in the dictionary.
Nowadays the ideational approach is assosiated with the cognitive perspective in linguistics. This theory holds
that language is a part of the cognitive system of a human being which may also include some other cognitive
systems (perceptions, emotions, abstraction processes, reasoning). All these abilities interact with the
language and are influenced by language. Thus the study of a language is devoted to the study of the way we
express and exchange ideas and thoughts.
23. Sign systems. Types of signs: indices, icons, symbols. General principles of relationship
forms and meaning.
between
In 1914 the term “semiotics” was introduced by the mathematician and philosopher Charles Pierce. He
introduced 3 types of signs represent 3 different structural principles relating form and content:
1) indexical sign = index (means to point to smth in the immediate environment, that’s why in Greek it
means “a pointing finger”). This sign may be represented by a sign post for traffic. We can meet this
sign when we look at human beings. The index points to some information addressing the other
person, some emotions and many other things.
2) Icon (iconic sign). Greek origin. It means “an answer”. This sign provides some visual auditorial
perception. It is presented as an image standing for some object.
Ex: a traffic sign: children crossing the road
3) symbol (symbolic sign). This sign doesn’t have any link between the form and the content. Words,
flags, emblems are symbols. In this case we deal with the symbolic representation by a word or any
other sign connected with its content. This kind of sign represents the agreement between the form and
the meaning.
Indexical signs are the most primitive. They are restricted to the situations of here and now. If we try to
depict the relationship between the form and meaning of this sign it may be represented by a restangular
which links the form with the meaning. These are the relations of contiguity.
The icon is a more complex sign which is based on similarity between the form and the meaning. It
reflects the more general principle of using the image for the real thing.
In the case of symbols people use these signs for the help of communicative needs to point to different
things and replicating things but in many cases these signs are more abstract in nature, because they may
represent not only concrete objects but also different events, phenomena of reality, objects which are from
us, hopes etc.
Humans usually rceate symbols for the purpose of communication, the link between form and meaning is
based on connection that allows the human beings to go beyond the limitations of contiguity and
similarity.
Ex: a rose stands for love
an owl stands for wisdom
the name for the thing stands for the referent
The semiotic framework concentrated on the link between the form and the meaning of linguistic
sign.This link is realized in language units and especially in words, but language exists not in the
dictionaries, but in the minds of speakers of the language. That’s why it is necessary to look at our
conceptual world and to speak about how the world shapes the science.
24. The cognitive basis of language. Word, concept and meaning. Linguistic and conceptual categories.
24. The cognitive basis of language. Word, concept, meaning. Linguistic & conceptual
categories.
>
> In American descriptive linguistics a word meaning was understood as an object of
linguistic studies which deal with externalized by dictionary definition which is
associated with the physical phonetic and spelled form of a word. This kind of
abstraction is very useful for many important goals:
> 1) it can help to describe peculiarities of a particular language (in teaching) as
well as contrastive studies.
> The other approach which is usually opposed to referential approach is associated with
the idea expressed and this approach is usually called the ideational theory. It is
considered to be the first in the description of the meaning. It was defined by medieval
grammarians: meaning originates in the mind in the form of ideas and words are just
symbols of them. This idea goes to Aristotle, but it is usually associated with the name
of the British philosopher John Locke, who in the 17-th century tried to repeat the
words of Aristotle and his famous work was concerned with human understanding and there
he wrote: words in their primarly or immediate signification stand for nothing but the
idea existing in the human mind". He points out that ideas are private and individual,
they are connected with a particular person though the largest component of meaning
derives from common perception of the world in which we live. These ideas are connected
with our abilities to reason, to think, which is a guarantee of sameness of meaning.
> Locke thinks that individual ideas preexist their linguistic expression. The
difficulty with this theory is as follows: it is not clear why communication and human
understanding of different things are possible if linguistic expressions stand for only
individual experience. And the reference to God as a mediator of everything is not
helpful enough, but the ideational theory is deeply rooted in modern semantics. The main
thing of this theory whether language or thought exist earlier is still debatable
nowadays. But Russian and Western linguists think that thought usually appears before
language. This viewpoint studies meaning as a mental experience represented by
linguistic expressions is very influential.
> Many linguists especially those who are interested in psychology and human cognitive
abilities point out that meaning is mainly a psychological phenomena. It exists in our
minds with specific structure. This view point is represented by Anna Wierzbicka and Ray
Jackendoff. The difference between the word meaning and the concept is concerned with
the problem that not all the concepts are named with the help of language units. That's
why not all the concepts may be called lexicalized. Understanding the meaning as a
concept seem quiet promising because only the direct association of the word with the
ever changing and active concept gives the word a dynamic, a creative and a generative
character. It provides variation and the use in different contexts. Some important
questions remain unanswered within this linguistic framework. If the meaning is the
concept, why do people of different nations speak different languages and why do they
have different conceptual systems in their minds? If people speaking different languages
have the same conceptual systems how does it happen that identical concepts are
represented by different words having different lexical meanings?
> Ex: палец = a finger
> If the meaning is different from the concept it must be related through the referent
to the referent in the real world. In this case the ideational theory presupposes to
decide the following questions:
> 1) the relations between the lexical meaning (knowledge) and encyclopidic knowledge
> 2) the semantic and the conceptual levels of information
> 3) the difference between different conceptual systems
> These problems are becoming problems of hot debate and besides words be characterized
by different meaning, different kinds of knowledge and different parts of the conceptual
system.
> Ex: to go, to take, to want - these verbs do not include any encyclopedic knowledge,
but if we turn to scientific terms: atom, coloury, conformation - these terms are based
on encyclopedic knowledge. Besides some verbs are connected with the human being (to
travel), but some others are becoming more abstract and in this case we pay more
attention to the context than to the definition of a word in the dictionary.
> Nowadays the ideational approach is assosiated with the cognitive perspective in
linguistics. This theory holds that language is a part of the cognitive system of a
human being which may also include some other cognitive systems (perceptions, emotions,
abstraction processes, reasoning). All these abilities interact with the language and
are influenced by language. Thus the study of a language is devoted to the study of the
way we express and exchange ideas and thoughts.
>
>
> Linguistic & conceptual categories.
> The semiotics concentrates on the link between the form & the meaning of linguistic
signs. (triangle: form, referent, meaning)
> This link is realized on the language units & words. But language exists not in the
dictionaries, but in the minds of the speakers, so its necessary to speak about how the
word shapes the signs. Language covers not all the concepts existing in the minds but
only some part of them=> the notion of concept is usually understood as a person's idea
of what smth in the word is like. More specially concepts can relate to single entities
such as the concept of my mother & the concept of a vegetable.
> Concepts may be simple or complicated (characterized by a certain structure). E.g.
vegetable (carrots, cabbage, beetroot) but it doesn't include oranges, apples, bananas.
> Slice reality into certain pieces, represented by relevant units, included into a
category=> thus conceptual categories are represented by concepts as certain sets.
> Whenever we perceive an object, we simply try to characterize it.
> The subdivision of conceptual categories was introduced in 1934 by the German linguist
TRIER who opposed conceptual fields to semantic fields, represented in the language, but
the phenomenon of a conceptual field is a phychological entity, representing human
thinking & his interpretation of some piece of reality=> the word is not shaped by our
categorizing activity. It usually represents our human experience. Conceptual categories
are not equal to linguistic categories.
> Besides the process of categorization we are to pay attention to a human- being who
characterizes everything=>he is a human conceptualist.
>
> The outer world
> |
> Human conceptualist
> |
> The experienced world
>
> The outer world is perceived & described as human attitude towards the reality, as a
kind of knowledge of the verbal & non-verbal activity of a human- being. => the
experienced world is different from the outer world.
> Signs represent conceptual categories based on a human conceptualiser & his model of
the world but in the minds of different people.
> The conceptual world may be also different: e.g. a half-filled glass of water (halffull or half empty- it depends on a person)
> If we take one & the same object in different languages, this object is represented by
different names. In each lang. the word represents the way people construal or shape the
surrounding world. Human- being is represented also in the grammatical categories.
> e.g. Look at he rain| it's raining today | and the rain, it raineth every day| => 1 &
the same lexical category rain", which ay be illustrated be 2 grammatical classes (
noun & verb). Each lexical category is at the same time the grammatical category which
depends on the specific context, which structures the lexical material & the lexical
category rain" as a noun & as a verb.
> Each grammatical class in the lang. may be made by means of word classes, number,
tense, aspect+In all the lang. there may be about 10 parts of speech. The dominant are
nouns, adj. & verbs. Besides that, adverbs, prepositions, particals, conjunctions,
numerals. The basic ones are nouns, adj. & verbs. They are called prototypical parts of
speech. They denote time-stable phenomena & unstable phenomena as adj. & verbs. But even
a category of a noun may be described from the point of view of the concrete phenomena.
E.g. (man, child), ( animal, tree), (table, chair), ( hatred, affection, love).In the
category of a verb we also find out different categories, pointing at actions,
processes, mental perceptions=> gr. Categories frame the lang. & describe it as certain
entities, existing in the mind of the human- conceptualizer. Lexical categories are
different from gr. categories. They cover a wide range of different instances( the
category of chair: kitchen chair, armchair, rocking chair, a simple chair, wheel chair).
A prototypical member of chair-is a simple chair. A prototype is the most prominent
member or category, which is usually represented by a simple word.
> 1. This word is usually included into 1000 first basic terms of the language.
> 2. This is the psychologically prominent member, representing the culture of a certain
nation.
> 3. These words are easily remembered & most often used in the every-day speech
communication.
> 4. They create many derivatives & compound words.
> The classification of notions in the lexical category is based on the logical
principle.
> All those words represent the periphery of the category. This phenomenon is called
hyponymy.
> Cognitive linguistics studies the structure & dynamics of lang. units from a cognitive
& functional prospective. This prospective pays great attention to language meanings
which are conceptualized, represented dynamically in the system of the text & discourse.
> Cognitive linguistics describes the following processes, which are of vital interest.
> Problem 1. There are problems of categorizations & conceptualization processes
including prototypicality, metaphor, metonymy& other cognitive models. In this sphere of
ling. We are to point works by Rosch, Lakoff.
> Problem 2. Relations between lang. & thought, human knowledge & the experienced world,
compared to the outer world.
> Problem 3. The link between semantics & syntax. Linguists pay much attention to the
cases of development of grammatical & lexical categories.
25. Methodological approach (Thomas Kuhn "Structures of Scientific Revolutions", paradigms and
normal science). 4 main paradigms of linguistics.
Thomas Kuhn has expressed the same idea as Michael Foucault about episteme, but with the help of
different term “Paradigm”. He thought that scientists is a group of people who want to discuss the same
problem. That’s why their theory is based on a set of basic assumptions. The existence of a paradigm is period
of Norman science. But some time later scientists can solve the problems. That’s why new questions are
usually asked. Trying to answer them scientists usually come to a completely new paradigm.
Between the 2 paradigms:
- a period of different anomalies (crises)
- a set of questions
- fact
From anomalies they came to a new paradigm. In this case they have to create a new theory, new concepts
& notions & the meta-language of a new science.
The period from the previous paradigm to the new one called a paradigmatic shift. It may be of 2 kinds:
- a revolution
- an evolution
According to this idea of Thomas Kuhn, in linguistics according to general principles & aims trere were 4
main paradigms of linguistic knowledge:
- the historical comparative paradigm
- the structural paradigm
- the generative transformational paradigm
- cognitive communicative paradigm
26. Functional approach to the language meaning. Discourse Analysis.
The term “discourse analysis” has come to be used with a wide range of meanings, which cover a wide range
of activities. It is used to describe human language activities in socio-linguistics, psycholinguistics,
philosophical linguistics and computential linguistics. Scholars, working in different fields tend to
concentrate on different aspects of discourse.
1. Socio-linguistics concentrates on the structure of social interaction, which is manifested in
conversations & their descriptions emphasize features of social context. , so discourse in this study is
concerned with generalizing of real instances, examples of language in use. Socio-linguistics usually
deals with spoken data & is interested in cases of socio- educational status of various interlocutors.
2. Psycho-linguistics is particularly concerned with issues, related to language comprehension. They
typically employ a strict methodology, which is derived from experimental psychology. They pay
attention to separate words, phrases & constructions to investigate problems of comprehension in
rather short texts. Psycholinguists don’t investigate spoken data, but deals with the written documents.
3. Philosophical ling. is concerned with semantic relationships between constructed pairs of sentences &
with their syntactic realizations. They speak about some special words, which may unite different
sentences in discourse. They try to formulate the truth values, expressed by separate words &
sentences. They pay attention to a connection between constructed sentences of the speakers &
listeners, which may be called typical texts & messages. The number of sentences, they investigate, is
not very great. The study may include up to 10 sentences, attributed to typical speakers & listeners.
4. Computentional linguists are concerned with producing models of discourse- processing. So discourse
is studied as a process, but again linguists deal with the highly limited context & mostly show the
connections between those ideas, expressed in the sentence & those, which are observed in the
surrounding world.
Speakers construct linguistic messages for listeners & how these listeners work on ling. messages in order
to interpret them. We call on insides from all the disciplines, which also deals with discourse.
In functional linguistics we take into account how language forms are used in communication. The main
idea in functional linguistics is to discuss different functions of the language.
R. Langacker: Functions deal with a number of factors. These factors are of extra-linguistic & linguistic
character. They are: environmental, biological, psychological, developmental, historical, socio-cultural.
Functions.
1. semiological (sign)
2. communicative
Different linguists spoke about meta-language function, poetic function, expressive function, cognitive
function & so on..
The semiological & communicative functions are 2 sides of the same coin. We can explore it for purposes for
silent thought. We acquire language through social interaction & we speak about discourse, when we pay
attention to meta- process in a human mind.
All these functions are discussed in linguistics, when we pay attention to the notions of the text is the result of
some active processes in structural & generative linguistics. Linguists usually discuss the structure of
sentences. In this case a sentence or a number of sentences are usually observed as objects. In the case of
discourse linguists in different spheres pay attention to dynamic processes. They usually speak about actual
speech behavior & mental experience of a human- being.
So discourse is regarded as a process, here we deal with a number of constituencies of the process: firstly we
pay attention to a person who is speaking, he is one of the interlocutors, who is the producer of an utterance.
In this case we get to know how a communicative event makes it possible to imagine what this person is
likely to say, which knowledge is represented in a message & which one in his brain. On the other side, there
is one more interlocutor- addressee (listener, reader, audience). If a linguist is trying to depict the knowledge
of an addressee, he analyses expectations of this person or the audience.
Addressee -> setting ->addressee
(speaker
(place
(listener
Writer)
time
reader)
language
terms
gestures)
The main question of cognitive & functional linguistics is to describe the link between semantics & syntax in
connection with human speech activity & mental processes.
Несколько подходов.
- Соссюр- Refential approach
- ideational- репрезент. идея в голове
- functional approach
functional approach to the meaning is concerned with the representation of the semantic level of the language
meaning to the development from the primary meaning to some secondary.
e.g. Будагов предложил схему
face primary meaning
to make faces(metaphor)
outward appearance(metonymy)
the front part of the building (metaphor)
In traditional linguistics, in the cognitive sphere of linguistics the meaning is aquated with conceptualization. .
Semantics interprets the meaning of the word as an abstract entity which includes thoughts & concepts. In this
case the semantic structure of the words acompo new conceptions as well as fixed concepts. The
conceptualization includes the information about the sensory, kinesthetic and emotive experience of a person.
In this case we speak about the prominence of 1 meaning, from which all others may appear.
Prominent meaning - primary meaning. All other meanings can be represented as rather salient in the process
of communication. ( how this meaning appear)
1. functional linguistics pays attention to the network form of the semantic function.
2. … pays attention to the speaker’s knowledge of a lexical item which represent a word as a system of
meanings & 1 of these meanings in a particular situation focuses on some particular features of an
object.
Ring---------prominent feature- circular object
- a piece of jewelry
a circular entity
a circular mark
a group people
the most prominent meaning is becoming a prototype which shows the development of knowledge in some
particular communicative situation.