THE DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTICS Linguistics first developed as a subject in its own right in the late 18th century.

Before then, linguistics had been largely the interest of philosophers and prescriptive grammarians (people concerned to enforce particular language forms as correct) In 1786, Sir William Jones, an Englishman, delivered a paper demonstrating that the ancient Indian Language, the Sanskrit, bore striking similarities to Gitch, Celtie, Latin & Germanic. Early history He then drew the conclusion that these languages must have sprung from a common source. Comparative linguistics became the dominant branch of linguistic enquiry. Toward the end of the 19th century, a group of German linguistics began to study the effect of sound changes within a given language on other related sounds in the same language The discovered that sounds do not change in isolation. Once a change takes place, it tends to work its way productively through the language. E.g.: In English the letters ch occurring initially before e or I used to be pronounced /k/, but then sometimes in the Old English period, a change took place in this environment, affecting the most commonly used words to begin with, and eventually spreading to all. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) The father of modern linguistics. Ferdinand de Saussure was dissatisfied with the 19th century linguistics. He felt that it avoided hard questions about what language is and how it works so he set out to fix it. By 1911, he had taught his course on general linguistics 3 times and inspired his students with a new vision of how to approach the subject. Saussure was so unimpressed by his own work that he didnt bother to write it down. When he died in 1913, his students compiled his teachings and published them as the Course in General linguistics, which had and continues to have a profound influence on linguistic. Saussure was instrumental to the development of structural linguistics. Because linguists had confined their interest to the historical study of language, its origins, its growth, the changes it underwent and especially because linguistics analysis has always been based on written texts, Saussure asked his students to examine instead the spoken word as a starting point for understanding the unique and absolute individuality of every expressive act. This leads to the first of the pairs of terms that Saussure used to develop a framework for linguistics, the difference between langue and parole (language and speech) Langue: the conceptual level of language, the abstract system of rules which comprises it. Parole: the substance side, the representation of those rules in actual sentence on utterances. Saussure thought of language sounds as a series of linguistic signs that are purely arbitrary, as can be seen in the linguistic signs or word for horse: German Pferd, Turkish at, French cheval and Russian loshad. Signs: Anything that tells us about something other than itself is a sign. For example, the red light at an intersectin is not there to tell you about redness, it is there to make to stop. When we speak or write, the sounds we make or the words on the page arent just sounds or ink marks. They bring ideas to our minds. The linguistic sign does not link a name and a thing, but a concept and an acoustic image (the mental image of a name that allows a language user to say the name). Once Saussure had the sign defined as an entity with 2 parts he decided to change their names from concept and acoustic image to signified (signifi) and signifier (significant) respectively. Signs have no natural relationships to the things they represent. For Saussure the relationship is essentially arbitrary (determined by choice/ randomly chosen).

The proof of arbitrariness is that when different languages came into existence, they developed different lines between signifiers ands signifieds. If the linguistics sign were not arbitrary, there would be only one language in the world. Even though the sign is arbitrary as far as the connection between its signifier and signified goes, it is not arbitrary for language users. If it were, everybody would come up with whatever signs they wanted and communication would break down. There is then a paradox: Language is free to set up a link between any sound or sequence of sounds and any idea, but once the link is made , neither an individual speaker nor, the whole speech community is free to undo it. They are not free to replace that link by another one either. How and why the linguistic sign is changeable: - Overtime, language and its sign change. New signifier signified links may replace the old ones or add to their number (cf. tide and mouse). The signifier- signified link is arbitrary, the new meanings of tide and mouse could never have developed. - Saussure introduced two ways of analyzing language: synchronic and diachronic. - A synchronic study examining the relation among the co - existing elements of a language and therefore is independent of any time factor by definition. It gives an account of the state of the language system. A diachronic study describes an evolution in which only fragments of states of a language at different times are relevant to the account. - Synchronic analysis must be confined to one point of view in order to show the whole language system. Diachronic analysis traces the evolution of language, looking not at the whole system but at individual elements of it at different times. The word chronic has been derived from Greek word chronos which means time. Synchronic linguistics sees language as a living whole, existing as a state at a particular point in time, and Greek syn which means with). Diachronic linguistic concerns language in its historical development ( Greek dia- through, chronos time). - Thus descriptive linguistics is known as synchronic linguistics and studies a language at one particular period of time. Historical linguistics is known as diachronic or temporal linguistic and deals with the development of language through time. For example, the way in which French/ Italian have evolved from Latin and Hindu from Sanskrit. It also investigates language change. - A study of the change from old to Middle English is a diachronic . Old English Middle English Chint knight Stant ston A Saussure says: Synchronic linguistics will concern the logical and psychological relations that bind together co existing terms and from a system in the collective mind of speakers. Diachronic linguistics, on the contrary, will study relations that bind together successive terms, not perceived by the collective mind but substituted for each other without forming a system. Thus synchronic linguistics deals with systems whereas diachronic with units. MID 20TH CENTURY DEVELOPMENT - Its America that many of the most important development in mid-20th century took place. - In 1933, Leonard Bloomfield published a book, Language, in which he outlined the methodology for the description of any language. Bloomfields approach is sometimes referred to as descriptive linguistics and occasionally as structuralist. 2

- For Bloomfield, the task of linguistics was to collect data from native speakers of a language and then to analyze it by studying the phonological and syntactic patterns. He argued that one of the principal ways in which items are ordered in a language is in terms of their constituency (thnh t). - Any sentence can be analyzed in terms of its immediate constituents. There, in turn, can be analyzed into further constituents and so on, down to those at the ground level of words, which are the smallest constituents. A sentence is thus composed of a hierarchy of constituents. - The important thing for the linguist to discover were the individual units, or constituents of the language being observed. This was achieved through discovery procedures, a set of principles which covered the ordering, distribution and substitutability of items. Noam Chomsky - Syntactic structures (1957) his 1st important volume. - It was not enough for a grammar simply to take account of existing sentences. It must be able to account for sentences which had not yet been written or uttered. Language is characterized by creativity. - Creativity refers to the capacity to generate completely novel sentences endlessly. This could only be possible if speakers had an internalized set of rules or grammar, which specified which sequences of the language were possible, and this grammatical and which were not. - The task of a linguist was to understand this mental grammar and in doing so penetrate the mysteries of the human mind. However, the mind is not open to immediate inspection. The language had to proceed indirectly, by examining the actual language use and working backwards to the mental system responsible for this production. Observation of pairs of sentences like John is eager to please and John is easy to please led Chomsky to postulate 2 levels of structure: Deep structure, the propositional core of the sentence and surface structure, the way it appeared as an actual utterance. - The deep structure is the syntactic base of language which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite rules, i.e, a series of (possibly universal) rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure of a sentence, and a series of rules (collected transformation) that act upon the phrase-structure to form more complex sentence. - The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface structure that, after the addition of words and pronunciation, is identical to an actual sentence of a language. All languages have the same deep structure, but they differ from each other in surface structure because the application of different rules for transformation pronunciation, and word insertion. - Another important distinction made in transformation generative grammar is the difference between language competence (the subconscious control of a linguistic system) and language performance (the speakers actual use of language). - Competence refers to the knowledge of a language possessed by native speakers of a language which enables them to speak and understand their language fluently. - This knowledge is internalized within speakers and not necessarily something they are aware of possessing. Performance, on the other hand, refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations. It is the physical execution of the linguistic system in terms of actual utterances and pieces of writing. Being able to perform an utterance correctly is important to communicate successful; however, performance errors do not necessarily reflect any lack of linguistic competence. Everyone makes slips of the tongue occasionally; sometimes these reflect grammatical uncertainty, but usually they are due to a variety of performance factors like tiredness, boredom, drunkenness, drugs, external distraction and so on. - Phrase structure rules S NP VP NP (Det) (Adj) N (PP) NP That S VP V (NP) (PP) (Adv) PP P NP 3

Part 2: MID 20TH CENTURY DEVELOPMENT - Its America that many of the most important development in mid-20th century took place. - In 1933, Leonard Bloomfield published a book, Language, in which he outlined the methodology for the description of any language. Bloomfields approach is sometimes referred to as descriptive linguistics and occasionally as structuralist. - For Bloomfield, the task of linguistics was to collect data from native speakers of a language and then to analyze it by studying the phonological and syntactic patterns. He argued that one of the principal ways in which items are ordered in a language is in terms of their constituency (thnh t). - Any sentence can be analyzed in terms of its immediate constituents. There, in turn, can be analyzed into further constituents and so on, down to those at the ground level of words, which are the smallest constituents. A sentence is thus composed of a hierarchy of constituents. - The important thing for the linguist to discover were the individual units, or constituents of the language being observed. This was achieved through discovery procedures, a set of principles which covered the ordering, distribution and substitutability of items. Noam Chomsky - Syntactic structures (1957) his 1st important volume. - It was not enough for a grammar simply to take account of existing sentences. It must be able to account for sentences which had not yet been written or uttered. Language is characterized by creativity. - Creativity refers to the capacity to generate completely novel sentences endlessly. This could only be possible if speakers had an internalized set of rules or grammar, which specified which sequences of the language were possible, and this grammatical and which were not. - The task of a linguist was to understand this mental grammar and in doing so penetrate the mysteries of the human mind. However, the mind is not open to immediate inspection. The language had to proceed indirectly, by examining the actual language use and working backwards to the mental system responsible for this production. Observation of pairs of sentences like John is eager to please and John is easy to please led Chomsky to postulate 2 levels of structure: Deep structure, the propositional core of the sentence and surface structure, the way it appeared as an actual utterance. - The deep structure is the syntactic base of language which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite rules, i.e, a series of (possibly universal) rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure of a sentence, and a series of rules (collected transformation) that act upon the phrase-structure to form more complex sentence. - The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface structure that, after the addition of words and pronunciation, is identical to an actual sentence of a language. All languages have the same deep structure, but they

differ from each other in surface structure because the application of different rules for transformation pronunciation, and word insertion. - Another important distinction made in transformation generative grammar is the difference between language competence (the subconscious control of a linguistic system) and language performance (the speakers actual use of language). - Competence refers to the knowledge of a language possessed by native speakers of a language which enables them to speak and understand their language fluently. - This knowledge is internalized within speakers and not necessarily something they are aware of possessing. Performance, on the other hand, refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations. It is the physical execution of the linguistic system in terms of actual utterances and pieces of writing. Being able to perform an utterance correctly is important to communicate successful; however, performance errors do not necessarily reflect any lack of linguistic competence. Everyone makes slips of the tongue occasionally; sometimes these reflect grammatical uncertainty, but usually they are due to a variety of performance factors like tiredness, boredom, drunkenness, drugs, external distraction and so on. - Phrase structure rules S NP VP NP (Det) (Adj) N (PP) NP That S VP V (NP) (PP) (Adv) PP P NP