Linguistics

A

General, Descriptive, and Structural Linguistics

General, or theoretical, linguistics looks at languages in general, while in descriptive linguistics the linguist gathers data from native speakers of a particular language and analyses the components of their speech, organizing the data into separate hierarchical levels of language, for example, phonology, morphology, and syntax (these types of category and concepts are outlined in general linguistic studies). Descriptive analysis was first developed by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas and the American anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir when they confronted the problem of describing hitherto unrecorded Native American languages. Challenging conventional methods and techniques of linguistic description that were based on written texts, they formulated methods for identifying the distinctive, or meaningful, sounds of a language and the minimal units of sound combination that carry meaning (for example, word roots and affixes).

Building on the work of descriptive linguists like Boas and Sapir, the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield proposed a behaviouristic analysis of language, avoiding semantic considerations as much as possible. He emphasized techniques to be used to discover the sounds and grammatical structure of unrecorded languages. Structuralism is the name given to systems of language analysis like Bloomfield's.

While American structuralism concentrated on the utterances of speech, in Europe structuralism emphasized an underlying, abstract system of language structure that was distinguishable from actual instances of speech. This approach began in 1916 with the posthumous publication of the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist known as the founder of structuralism. Saussure distinguished between the concepts of langue (French for “language”) and parole (“word”). By langue he meant the knowledge that speakers of a language share about what is grammatical in that language. Parole referred to the actual spoken utterances of an individual speaker of the language.

B

Prague School Linguistics

Proponents of another form of linguistics that flourished in Prague in the 1930s looked outside the structure of a language and attempted to explain the relation between what is spoken and the context. The Prague school linguists stressed the function of elements within a language and emphasized that the description of a language must include how messages are put across. In the area of phonology, the concept of distinctive features, which divides sounds into their component articulatory and acoustic elements, has been highly regarded and adopted by other schools of language analysis.

C

Transformational-Generative Grammar

In the mid-20th century the American linguist Noam Chomsky proposed that linguistics should go beyond describing the structure of languages; it should provide an explanation of how sentences in any language are interpreted and understood. The process, he believed, could be accounted for by a universal human grammar (that is, a model or theory of linguistic knowledge or competence). Linguistic competence refers to the innate, often unconscious, knowledge that allows people to produce and understand sentences, many of which they have never heard before. A system of language analysis that makes it possible to generate all the grammatically acceptable sentences of a language and eliminate ungrammatical constructions is called a generative grammar and was a concept first introduced by Chomsky in the 1950s, although the meaning of the term “generative” has broadened somewhat since then.

According to Chomsky, there are rules of universal grammar and other rules for particular languages. In specific languages, both universal and particular rules are utilized. These rules allow for sentence elements to be arranged in different ways (for example, “Mary hit the ball”, and “The ball was hit by Mary”). A grammar that takes basic, underlying semantic units and transforms them to produce sentences with recognizable and understandable order and units is called a transformational grammar. A transformational-generative grammar is, therefore, a grammar that generates all the acceptable sentences of a language and uses rules, called transformations, to transform, or change, the underlying elements into what a person actually says.

D

Modern Comparative Linguistics

Comparative linguistics in the 20th and 21st centuries has been concerned with establishing language families in areas such as North and South America, New Guinea, and Africa. In such regions it has only recently become possible to gather the vast amounts of data that are needed to reconstruct the former stages of current languages and thereby to trace family relationships. Modern comparative linguistics is also involved in a search for linguistic universals. Interest has been renewed in the typological characteristics of the world's languages, and linguists are now comparing languages with regard to their syntactic structures and grammatical categories (such as gender languages versus non-gender languages, and languages with subjects versus languages with topics). In the Language Universals Project at Stanford University, for example, the American linguist Joseph Greenberg and his colleagues have shown that languages that share a basic word order (such as subject-verb-object or object-verb-subject or object-subject-verb) also share other features of structure. Such comparative studies reflect an effort to discover the range of possibilities in the phonological, structural, and semantic systems of the languages of the world.

E

Psycholinguistics

The field of psycholinguistics merges overlapping interests from the studies of psychology and linguistics, and also pragmatics, neurolinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Psycholinguists study the psychological processes (such as memory) believed to affect linguistic behaviour. They are concerned with such topics as language acquisition in children, speech perception, brain disorders that affect language (including aphasia), speech disorders, and neurolinguistics (language and the brain).