XI Theories and Schools of Modern Linguistics

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XI Theories and Schools of Modern Linguistics
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Saussure (1857-1913)

• The Swiss linguist father of modern linguistics
  a master of a discipline which he made modern

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• Lg is an extremely complex and heterogeneous
  phenomenon. Among the various aspects and
  different perspectives, linguists need to ask
  what he is trying to describe.
• Lg is one of social facts, which are the ideas in
  the collective mind of a society and radically
  distinct from individual psychological acts.
• Saussure believes lg is a system of signs.
• Sound (signifier)ideas(signified)sign (a system
  of convention)
• Dichotomy langue-parole syntagmatic-paratagmatic
  synchronic-diachronic
• langue the structure of a system that gives the
  potential for the words or utterances to exist
• Parole what people actually say or what appears
  on the page

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Saussures contribution

• 1. Saussure provided a general orientation, a
  sense of the task of linguistics which had seldom
  been questioned.
• 2. He influenced modern linguistics in the
  specific concepts. Many of the developments of
  modern linguistics can be described as his
  concepts his ideas of the arbitrart nature of
  the sign, langue-parole synchrony-diachrony
  syntagmatic-aradigmatic relations. Saussures
  fundamental perception is of revolutionary
  significance, and it is he that pushed
  linguistics into a brand new stage and all
  linguistics in the twentieth century are
  Saussurean linguistics.

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The Prague School

• Mathesius (1882-1946)
• A special style of synchronic linguistics
• Most important contribution sees lg in terms of
  function
• 1. It was stressed that the synchronic study of
  lg is fully justified as it can draw on complete
  and controllable material for investigation.
• 2. Emphasis on the systemic character of lg. No
  element can be satisfactorily analysed or
  evaluated if viewed in isolation. Assessment can
  only be made if its relationship is established
  with co-existing elements in the same lg system.
  Eleents are held to be in functional contrast or
  opposition.
• 3. Lg was looked on as functional as it is a tool
  performing a number of essential functions or
  tasks for the community using it.

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Phonology and phonological opposition

• Prague School Contribution phonology and the
  distinction between phonetics and phonology
• Trubetzkoy Principle of Phonology (1939)

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Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP)

• A theory of linguistic analysis which refers to
  an analysis of utterances in terms of the
  information they contain. The principle is that
  the roles of each utterance part is evaluated for
  its semantic contribution to the whole.
• Czech linguists a sentence contains a point of
  departure and a goal of discourse.
• The point of departure is equally present to the
  speaker and to the hearerit is the ground on
  which they meet ( THEME).
• The goal of discourse presents the very
  information that is to be imparted to the hearer
  (RHEME)

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• FSP is used to describe how information is
  distributed in sentences. It particularly deal
  with the effect of the distribution of known
  information and new information in discourse.
• ---Sally stands on the table
• Subject predicate
• Theme rheme
• --On the table stands Sally.
• predicate subject
• Theme rheme

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• J. Firbas Communicative Dynamism
• Linguistic communication is not a static
  phenomenon, but a dynamic one. CD is meant to
  measure the amount of information an element
  carries in a sentence. The degree of CD is the
  effect contributed by a linguistic element, for
  it pushes the communication forward.
• He was mad.

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The London School

• B. Malinowski (1884-1942)
• J. R. Firth (1890-1960)
• M. A. K. Halliday
• The importance of context of situation
• The system aspect of language

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Malinowski theory
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• By context of situation, Firth meant a series of
  contexts of situations, each smaller one being
  embedded into a larger, to the extent that all
  the contexts of situation play essential parts in
  the whole of the context of culture.

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• The integration of situational context and the
  linguistic context of a text
• 1. The relevant features of the participants
  persons, personalities
• (a) the verbal action of the participants
• (b) the non-verbal action of the participants
• 2. The relevant topics, including objects,
  events, and non-linguistic, non-human events.
• 3. The effect of the verbal action

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Halliday and Systemic-Functional Grammar

• Sociologically oriented functional linguistic
  appraoch.
• Effect on lg teaching, sociolinguistics,
  discourse analysis, stylistics, and machine
  translation.
• Two components systemic grammar and functional
  grammar.
• Adults lg become more complex, and is reduced to
  a set of highly coded and abstract functions,
  which are meta-functions the ideational, the
  interpersonal, and the textual functions.

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Ideational function

• The ideational function is to convey new
  information, to communicate a content that is
  unknown to the hearer. It is a meaning potential,
  for whatever specific use one is making of lg he
  has to refer to categories of his experience of
  the world.
• Transitivity material processes, mental
  processes, relational processes, verbal
  processes, behavioral processes, existential
  processes.

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The Interpersonal Function

• It embodies all uses of lg to express social and
  personal relations. This includes various ways
  the speaker enters a speech situation and perform
  a speech act.
• Interpersonal function is realised by MOOD(??)
  and MODALITY(??).
• Mood shows what role the speaker selects in the
  speech situation and what role he assigns to the
  addressee.
• Modality specifies whether the speaker is
  expressing his judgment or making a prediction.

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The textual function

• It refers to the fact that lg has mechanisms to
  make any stretch of spoken or written discourse
  into a coherent and unified text and make a
  living passage different from a random list of
  sentences. (p. 315)
• Biding devices which help make a discourse into a
  coherent and unified text is called collectively
  as the Cohesion of a text.

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Realization of three functions

• Because lg serves as a generalised ideational
  function, we are able to use it for all the
  specific purposes an dtypes of context which
  involve the communication of expereince.
• Because it serves a generalised interpersonal
  function, we are able to use it for the specific
  forms of personal expression and social
  interaction.
• A prerequisite to its effective operation under
  both these headings is what we have referred to
  as the textual function, whereby lg becomes text,
  is related to itself and to its context of use.
  Without the textual component of meaning, we
  should not be able to make any use of lg at all.

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American Structuralism

• A branch of synchronic linguistics that emerged
  independently in the United States at the
  beginning of the twentieth century.

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Early period Boas and Sapir

• BOAS Handbook of American Indian Languages
  (1911) an important introduction which is a good
  summery of the descriptive approach to lg.
• 1. There is no ideal type or form of lg, for
  human lgs were endlessly diverse.
• 2. Opposed to the view that lg is the soul of a
  race.
• There were only differences in lg structure,
  while there is no difference between lgs in terms
  of being more or less reasonable or advanced.

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• The framework of descriptive linguistics it
  consists of three parts.
• 1. The sound of lgs.
• 2. The semantic categories of linguistic
  expression
• 3. Th eprocess of grammatical combination in
  semantic expression.
• The important task for linguists is to discover a
  lgs particular grammatical structure and to
  develop descriptive categories appropriate to it.
• His methodology is analytical , without comparing
  it with European lgs.
• Although he failed to establish linguistics as an
  independent branch of science, his basic theory,
  his observation, and his descriptive methods
  paved way fro American descriptive linguistics
  and influenced generation of linguists.

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• Sapir Language An introduction to the Study of
  Speech (1921)
• Focus on typology
• Lg is the means and thought is the end product
  without lg, thought is impossible.
• The universal feature of lg distinct phonetic
  systems, concrete combinations of sound and
  meaning, various means of representing all kinds
  of relations.

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Bloomfields theory

• The principal representative of American
  descriptive linguistics.
• 1933-1950 the Bloomfieldian Era, in which the
  American descriptive linguistics formally came
  into being and reached its prime development.
• Language (1933) the model of scientific
  methodology and the greatest work in linguistics.
• Linguistics is a branch of psychology, esp.
  Behaviourism.
• Behaviourism holds that human beings cannot know
  anything that they have not experienced.

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• Behaviourism holds that children learn lg through
  a chain of Stimulus-Response reinforcement., and
  adult use of lg is also a process of
  stimulus-response.
• It is believed that a linguistic description was
  reliable when based on observation of unstudied
  utterance by speakers. Therefore, the popular
  practice in linguistic study was to accept what a
  native speaker says in his lg and to discard what
  he says about his lg.

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• Sr-------------------sR
• When one individual is stimulated, his speech can
  make another individual react accordingly.
• The division of labour and all human activities
  based on the division of labour are dependent on
  language.
• The distance between the speaker and hearer, two
  separate nervous systems, is bridged up by sound
  waves.
• Bloomfield touched upon the application of
  linguistics to lg teaching and criticised
  traditional grammar which are prescriptive.

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Post-Bloomfieldian Linguistics

• Characterised by a strict empiricism.
• The appropriate goal for general linguistics was
  to devise explicit discovery procedures to enable
  the computer to process linguistic raw data about
  any lg and form a complete grammar without the
  intervention by the human linguists.
• They focus on direct observation.
• They also took a interest in the discourse level
  in order to develop discovery procedures for
  structure above the sentence level.

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Some works

• Harris Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951)
  marking the maturity of American descriptive
  linguistics.
• Hockett A Course in Modern Linguistics (1958) a
  well-known textbook in the American descriptive
  tradition. It contains and develops many of the
  insights gained from the work carried out within
  the structuralist paradigm from 1930s onwards.
• K. Pike (1912-2000) Tagmemics (???)
• Sydney M. Lamb stratificational grammar (????).

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• Structuralism is based on the assumption that
  grammatical categories should be defined not in
  terms of meaning but in terms of distribution,
  and that the structure of each lg should be
  described without reference to the alleged
  universitality of such categories as tense, mood,
  and parts of speech.

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• Structural grammar describes everything that is
  found in a lg instead of laying down rules. --The
  aim is confined to the description of lgs,
  without explaining why lg operates the way it
  does.
• Structural grammar is empirical, aiming at
  objectivity in the sense that all definition and
  statements should be verifiable or refutable.no
  complete grammar.
• Structural grammar examines all lgs, recognizing
  and doing justice to uniqueness of each lg.no
  adequate treatment of meaning.
• Structural grammar describes even the smallest
  contrast that underlies any construction or use
  of a lg, not only discoverable in some particular
  use.

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Transformational-Generative Grammar

• Noam Chomsky (1928-) Syntactic Structure 91957)
  marked the beginning of the Chomskyan Revolution.
• Five stages
• 1. The Classical Theory aims to make linguistics
  a science.
• 2. The Standard Theory deals with how semantics
  should be studied in a linguistic theory.
• 3. The Extended Standard Theory focused
  discussion on language universals and universal
  grammar.
• 4. The Revised Extended Standard Theory focuses
  discussion on government and binding.
• 5. The Minimalist Program is a further revision
  of the previous theory.

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The innateness Hypothesis

• Children are born with Language Acquisition
  Device (LAD), which is a unique kind of knowledge
  that fits them for lg learning.
• Children are born with knowledge of the basic
  grammatical relations and categories, and this
  knowledge is universal.
• The study of lg can throw some light on the
  nature of the human mind.
• A reaction against behaviourism in psychology and
  empiricism in philosophy.

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• What children learn seems to be a set of rules
  rather than individual sentences, although
  children are not born knowing a lg, they are born
  with a predisposition to develop a lg in much the
  same way as they are born with the predisposition
  to learn to walk.
• LAD three elements
• 1. A hypothesis maker (look for regularity, make
  hypothesis)
• 2. Linguistic universals
• 3. An evaluation procedure (more than one
  version of grammar)

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What is generative grammar?

• A system of rules that in some explicit and
  well-defined way assigns structural descriptions
  to sentences.
• Every speaker of a lg has mastered and
  internalised a generative grammar that expresses
  his knowledge of his lg.
• It is not limited to particular lgs, but the
  reveal the unity of particular grammars and
  universal grammars.

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Three levels to evaluate a grammar

• Observational adequacygrammar are able to
  produce correct explanations for raw linguistic
  data
• Descriptive adequacy grammars should not only
  produce correct explanations for raw linguistic
  data, but also produce correct explanation for
  the linguistic competence of the speaker and
  hearer.
• Explanatory adequacy grammars that are
  sufficiently described should reveal linguistic
  competence and then relate it with universal
  grammar in order to be related to the initial
  state of the human mind for the purpose of
  revealing human cognitive systems.
• It is after successful descriptions of many lgs
  and subsequent generalizations of universal
  features of human lg that it is possible to
  explore the initial state of the human mind that
  contains universal grammars.

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Hypothesis deduction

• Immediate Constituents analysis cannot deal with
  the following sentences
• John is easy to please.
• John is eager to please.
• Visiting relatives can be tiresome.
• Flying plane is dangerous.

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The classical theory

• Features 1. Emphasis on generative ability of
  lg. 2. Introduction of transformational rules. 3.
  Grammatical descriptions regardless of meaning.
• Three grammars
• 1. Finite state grammar the simplest type of
  grammar which, with a finite amount of apparatus,
  can generate an infinite number of sentence.
  However, it is impossible to construct an
  observationally adequate English grammar which is
  a finite-state grammar.

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• Therefore it is necessary to work out a grammar
  that, with a finite set of rules, can generate
  all the grammatical sentences in a lg without
  generating a single non-grammatical sentence.
  Then a grammar is seen as a system of finite
  rules generating an infinite number of sentences.
• The rules should meet certain requirements.
• 1. Generative
• 2. Simple
• 3. Explicit phrase structure
  grammar
• 4. Exhaustive (p. 330)
• 5. Recursive

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The Standard Theory

• Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965)
• Problems with the Classical Theory
• 1. The transformational rules are too powerful.
• --John has a book.
• --A book was had by John.
• 2. Rules may generate ill-formed sentences as
  well as well-formed sentences.
• --John hit the tree.
• --The tree hit John.
• 3. Transformational rules for the passive voice
  cannot be used at will.
• This shows that transformational rules are not
  universally applicable.(p.333)

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• Therefore, Chomsky included a semantic component
  in his grammatical model. (Aspects of the Theory
  of Syntax)
• The generative grammar consists of three
  components syntax, phonological and semantic.
• The improvement that has been made

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The Extended Standard Theory

• Extended Standard Theory and
• 1. Transformational rules still too powerful
• 2. Derived nouns have the same semantic
  properties with their corresponding verbs, which
  are actually not.
• 3. Transformational process will not change the
  meaning of the sentence, while actually any kind
  of transformation will change the sentence
  meaning.
• 4. Cannot explain gapped structures
• Many transformational rules must have complex
  constraints.
• Revised Extended Standard Theory semantic
  interpretation was put in the surface structure.

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Later theories

• 1. Government and Binding
• 2. Minimalist Program
• The initial state of human lgs are the same while
  the states of acquiring different lgs are not. A
  universal grammar is a theory of studying
  theinitial states and particular grammars are
  theories of studying the states of acquisition.
  While the faculty of lg consists of a cognitive
  system that stores information such as sound,
  meaning, and structure, the performance system
  retrieves and uses the information.

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Main features of TG grammar

• Rationalism
• Innateness
• Deductive methodology
• Emphasis on interpretation
• Formalism
• Emphasis on linguistic competence
• Strong generative powers
• Emphasis on linguistic universals

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Case grammar
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Generative semantics
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