History and concerns of Linguistics

Comparative method, 19^th century

Analogy, role of

Inner and outer form

Inner form, the pattern of grammar imposed on the raw, outer form

Outer form, the raw sounds, the forge of language

Outer and inner form

Phonetics and dialectology

Structuralism, 20^th century, begins 1916 with posthumous Cours de Linguistique Générale, Ferdinand de Saussure, [1] langue – regularities and patterns versus parole the facts or actual utterances and [2] form versus substance – form is inner, constant meaning of variant utterances

Structuralism, European sense – abstract relational structure underlying and different from utterances that is the linguist’s object of study, opposed to atomism, can be historical or diachronic and synchronic

Structuralism in America, impetus from the hundreds of indigenous languages, emphasizes uniqueness of languages and methods of analysis of unfamiliar languages – formulation of mechanical “discovery procedures”, description and recording before extinction and as data for theory, concern with distortion from Indo-European categories; Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, Benjamin Lee Whorf; the Whorfian hypothesis that language determines perception and thought

Transformational grammar, Chomsky, 20^th century, or generative grammar, first presented in Syntactic Structures, 1957, a reaction against post-Bloomfieldian preoccupation with discovery procedures… linguistics should, more modestly and realistically be concerned with evaluating alternative descriptions – on the basis of a precise mathematical formulation of grammar

Noam Chomsky, 20^th century, transformational grammar, mentalist theory – competence is more important than performance, challenged concept of the phoneme – regarded as the enduring result from the previous post-Bloomfieldian generation, claimed – contra-Structuralism – that languages significantly shared formal and substantive universals, is rooted in biology, that from the poverty of stimulus, the language ability is genetic and based in a “special organ,”… but the generative grammar was complex and had difficulty satisfying descriptive adequacy for linguistic variety and explanatory for the small number of inborn principles

Noam Chomsky, 1980’s – Principles and Parameters, 1990’s – minimalism: language is a system of connecting sound and meaning and, per minimalism, the system is optimal… discards most of the complex machinery of generative grammar… a controversial program that some find it impossible to work in, the promise is to be both simple and complex enough to fulfill the competing demands of a true universal grammar

Tagmemics, 20^th century, U.S. linguist Kenneth L. Pike, associates, work as Bible translators, used for analyzing many unrecorded languages, especially Central, South America, West Africa

Stratificational approach, 20^th century, stratificational grammar, of U.S. linguist, Sydney M. Lamb, seen by some linguists as alternative to transformational grammar, linked with European structuralism in its features, but not yet fully expounded or widely exemplified in the analysis of different languages

Prague school, functional approach to syntax, M.A.K. Halliday in England, quite extensively illustrated

Philology, the traditional approach of, historical development of languages as manifest in written texts

Linguistics, synchronic vs. Diachronic, theoretical vs. Applied, micro vs. Macro

India, Sanskrit, grammatical tradition, Panini, 5^th century BC, impact on modern linguistics, 19^th century, [1] grammar as data, [2] vastly superior phonetics, [3] Panini’s penetrating account of Sanskrit grammar

Linguistics, Renaissance, two new sets of data, taken for granted, [1] the vernacular languages of Europe and, [2] the languages of Africa, the Orient, the New World, and, later, of Siberia, Inner Asia, Papua, Oceania, the Arctic, and Australia

Comparative philology, development, 19^th century; shows, e.g., genealogical relations among languages with respect to sound systems, grammatical structure, and vocabulary; as Romance languages evolved from Latin, so Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit …Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages…many other languages of Eurasian languages evolved from some earlier Proto-Indo-European language; main impetus for this – 18th century, English orientalist Sir William Jones showed the striking resemblances among Sanskrit, Greek and Latin; all this results in research in phonetics and dialectology

Neogrammarian thesis, 19^th century, all changes in the sound system of a language are subject to the operation of regular sound laws, especially analogy

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Britannica 2002 Standard Edition CD-ROM and 1997 CD-ROM

Linguistics, methods: structural or synchronic linguistics: phonology, morphology, syntax, [morphosyntax,] and semantics; transformational-generative grammar: Harris, Chomsky, modifications in Chomsky’s grammar; tagmemics: structuralism and functionalism, phonology, theory of markedness, Prague School – functional sentence perspective; historical or diachronic linguistics: change: sound, syntax or grammar, semantic or meaning, borrowing or cross-evolution; comparative method: Grimm's law; Proto-Indo-European reconstruction; comparative method – methodology, criticisms; internal reconstruction; language classification; synthesis of linguistics with other disciplines, i.e., putting back together what was together: psycholinguistics, language acquisition especially by in development [by, primarily, in nascency – by children]; speech perception; sociolinguistics; anthropological linguistics; computational linguistics; mathematical linguistics; stylistics; philosophy of language; applied linguistics; dialectology and linguistic geography: dialect geography; [early] dialect studies, dialect atlases, value and applications of dialectology, social dialectology

Goals of linguistic theory

Description – a central goal in linguistics for the preservation of knowledge of the variety of human languages in the face of extinction, illuminating [documenting] the forms and variety of language… and the basis of other study: explanation and theory

Explanation – of performance in the variety situations, of the structures of human language, the common aspects of all language, i.e., what is language, why languages vary structurally, how languages change in time, how individuals produce and understand language – generally and in real time, the nature of native speakers’ knowledge of their language, how language is learned

Explanatory criteria, types; induction and deduction, hypothesis and data; alternative hypotheses at a given point in time: economy, hypotheses that mesh with other disciplines vs. Ad hoc hypotheses, predictive ability

Explanatory or theoretical levels or modes of adequacy – observational, descriptive, and explanatory; psychological, pragmatic and typological adequacy

Explanatory or theoretical perspectives on linguistic theory – the syntactocentric or Chomskian perspective – language is an abstract object that is independent of psycholinguistic, sociocultural, communicative considerations… language is a system for free expression of thought independent of pragmatic concerns, linguistic competence but not performance is important and it is this that transformational grammar studies, there is an innate language acquisition device and this follows from the poverty of stimulus, language is a vague concept, syntax or grammar alone is real; and the communication-and-cognition perspective that bands together, implicitly contra-Chomsky, characterized by the acceptance of external criteria and essence and, therefore, naturally, but also reactionarily, empirical in contrast to the conceptual focus of Chomsky…

Communication-and-communication perspective, examples, that also reject the syntactocentric point of view: Functional Grammar [FG], Role and Reference Grammar [RRG], Head-Driven Phase Structure Grammar [HPSG], Constructive Grammar [cong] Autolexical Syntax, Word Grammar [WG], St. Petersburg school of functional grammar, Meaning-text theory, Cognitive Grammar [cogg], Prague School Dependency Grammar, French functionalism, Blah Blahh Blahhh Communico-Cognitive Semantic Grammar [BBBCCG]…

Understanding the cognitive basis of language; processing – the cognitive and other processes involved, knowledge – what constitutes knowledge of language…, acquisition – the process

Philosophy of Language versus Linguistics

A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, eds., 1997

Linguistics – the study of language, studying language itself, especially as spoken, and as written; not essentially distinct from philology; modern linguistics emphasizes scientific method and that is a strength but also limiting if science means anything other than being critical, discerning, penetrating, imaginative and insightful and realistic

Philosophy of language – the concept of language: what is language, the relation of language to other abilities – language and communication / thought / expression, the origin and function / role of language, relation of language to other mental function [this is repetition] – consciousness, emotion etc., language and logic… and mathematics… and science, and evolution; philosophy tends to have esoteric connotations but there is a sense in which it is most central and basic, a sense in which philosophy as an exercise is the name for any discipline that comes before all disciplines, conscious being attempting the final adventure of thought and being is philosophical; analytic philosophy is the modern school that has language as a basic focus – originally the central focus and the essential method

Philosophy of language, central concerns – what are they and what should they be: what is happening in the individual as he or she is “languaging” – the subjective side: what is the sense or meaning and what is the nature of meaning… to which the formal answer is in theories of meaning; the objective side: thought includes the function of being about the world, so how is language about the truth and reality of the world… or how language enables expression and communication of the individual’s thoughts and other mental function that is about the world; and, finally, how does language accomplish what it does: to which a formal answer is in the concepts of reference, identity and necessity

Linguistics and philosophy of language, relationship – there is much potential for relationship yet there is little mutual influence between modern linguistics and modern philosophy of language. Lack of a relationship does not imply a poverty but insistence on rigid compartments would. Chomsky has suggested that work in generative grammar lends support to the rationalist view of the source of knowledge; and linguists have shown interest in treatments, in philosophy of language, of reference, quantification, and presupposition, in systems of modal logic, and in the “philosophy of ordinary language.”

Glossary

From Companion to Philosophy of Language

Unavailable on the Internet