The Descriptivists

During the years at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries when Saussure was working out his ideas in Europe, synchronic linguistics was emerging independently, and in a very different style, in America under the leadership of the anthopologist Franz Boas set a direction for American linguistics which turned out to be enormously fruitful, and which was never seriously disputed until Noam Chomsky appeared on the scene in the late 1950's.

The Descriptivist tended to think of abstract linguistic theorizing as a means to the end of successful practical description of particular languages, rather than thinking of individual languages as sources of data for the construction of a general theory of language. It is true, of course, that the most eminent of the Descriptivists are well known because, they did theorize about language in general; but in all cases their general theories were backed up by intensive research on the detailed structure of various exotic languages, and many of their less famous colleagues and followers preferred to take the theories for granted and concentrate on the data.

The fact that Boas was a purely self-thaught linguist was an advantage rather than a hindrance in dealing with American Indian languages, since it was necessary in approaching them to discard any presuppositions about the nature of language inherited from a European background. A characteristic of the school founded by Boas was its relativism. There was no ideal type of language, to which actual languages approximated more or less closely; human languages were endlessly diverse, and although the structure of a language spoken by some primitive tribe might strike us as very 'arbitrary' and irrational, there was no basis of truth in such a judgement: our European languages would appear just as irrational to a member of that tribe.

Pragmatics

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The London School

• England is a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an unusually long history.
• Linguistic description becomes a matter of practical importance to a nation when it evolves a standard or 'official' language for itself out of the welter of diverse and conflicting local usages normally found in any territory that has been settled for a considerable time, and it happens that in this respect England was, briefly, far in advance of Europe.
• Sweet´s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones, who took the subject up as a hobby, suggested to the authorities of University College, London, that they ought to consider teaching the phonetics of french, was taken on as a lecturer there in 1907 and built up what became the first university department of phonetics in Britain.
• Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech-sound; he invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels.

• Thanks to the traditions established by sweet and Jones, the 'ear-training' aspect of phonetics plays a large part in University courses in linguistics in Britain, and British linguistic research tends to be informed by meticulous attention to phonetic detail.
• The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain was J. R. Firth.
• Firth argues, that phonemicists are led into error by the nature of European writing systems.
• Another respect in which Firth felt that phonemic analysis was unduly influenced by alphabetic writing was with respect to the segmental principle.
• A Firthian phonological analysis a number of 'systems' of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units that represent whatever information is left when all the co-occurrence restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as prosodies.
• The final point worth mentioning about Firthian phonology, however, is much less easy to defend. firth insisted that sound and meaning in language were more directly related than they are usually taken to be.
• He seemed reluctant even to regard expression and content as distinct sides of the same coin, in the Saussurean way, and he was wholly unwilling to acknowledge the indirectness of the expression/content relationship suggested by Martinet´s slogan about 'double articulation'.
• For Firth, a phonology was a structure of systems of choices, and systems of choices were systems of meaning.

Functional linguistics: the Prague School

The Prague school practised a special style of synchronic linguistics, and although most of the scholars whom one thinks of as members of the school worked in Prague or at least in Czechoslovakia, the term is used also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consciously adhered to the Prague style.

Prague linguists looked at languages as one might look at a motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.

According to Mathesius, the need of continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts (which may be very unequal in length): the theme, which refers to something about which the hearer already knows (often because it has been discussed in immediately preceding sentences), and the rheme, which states some new fact about that given topic.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the “Prage School” not based in Czechoslovakia.

Trubetzkoyan phonology, like that of the American Descriptivists, gives a central role to the phoneme; but Trubetzkoy, and the Prage School in general were interested primarly in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes.

The language has of course compensated for this loss of phonological distinctions. What has happened is that monomorphemic words have to a very large extent been replaced by compounds of a type, very unusual in European languages, consisting of two synonyms or near-synonyms.

Jakobson was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He represents one of the very few personal links between European and American traditions of linguistics; and his ideas have had much to do with the radical change of direction that has occurred in American linguistics over the last twenty years. He is interested in the analysis of phonemes into their component features rather than in the distribution of phonemes.

The essence of Jakobson’s approach to phonology is the notion that there is a relatively simple, orderly, universal ‘psychological system’ of sounds underlying the chaotic wealth of different kinds of sounds observed by the phonetician.

The Descriptivists emphasized that language differ unpredictably in the particular phonetic parameters which they utilize distinctively, and in the number of values which they distinguish on parameters which are physically continuous.

For Jakobson, only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role; despite surface appearances each of these parameters is of the rigidly two-valued type, and the system of parameters forms a fixed hierarchy of precedence. Differences between the phonologies of languages are for Jakobson superficial variations on a fixed underlying theme.

For Bloomfield, voicing (say) was distinctive in English and non-distinctive in Mandarin, but the question ‘Is voicing distinctive in language in general?’ would have been wholly meaningless, since any phonetic parameter could be and probably was used distinctively in at least a few languages. For Jakobson and his collaborators, on the other hand, ‘distinctive’ means ‘able to be used distinctively in a human language.

Labov’s work is based on recorded interviews with sizable samples of speakers of various categories in some speech-community, the interviews being designed to elicit examples of some linguistic form- a variable-which is known to be realized in a variety of ways in that community.


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Saussure: language as social fact

• Nowadays one thinks of Saussure first and foremost as the scholar who defined the notion of 'synchronic linguistics'-the study of languages as systems existing at a given point in time, as opposed to the historical linguistics wich had seemed to his contemporaries the only possible approach to the subject-in his own lifetime this was far from his main claim to fame.
• Saussure worked out his ideas on general linguistic theory as early as the 1890s, he seems to have been very diffident about passing them on to others, and the story of how these ideas entered the public domain is a rather odd one.

Social fact

• Émile Durkheim, the founder of sociology as a recognized empirical discipline: to understand what Saussure means by calling languages 'social facts', we must spend some time examining Durkheim´s use of the term. durkheim propounded the notio of 'social fact' in his Rules of Sociological Method. According to Durkheim, the task of sociology was to study and describe a realm of phenomena quiet distinct in kind of both from the phenomena of the physical world and from the phenomena dealt with by psychology, although just as real as these other categories of phenomena.
• the physical facts which can be tangibly observed-what Saussure calls parole, 'speaking'-and the general system of langue, 'language', which those physical phenomena exemplify but which is not itself a physical phenomenon. the concrete data of parole are produced by individual speakers, but 'language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity'.
• Saussure described language as 'a product of the collective mind of linguistic groups'.

Chomsky

• One of the most widely influential features of Chomsky´s approach to language is the distinction he draws between competence and performance.
• Chomsky´s 'competence', as the name suggests, is an attribute of the individual, a psychological matter; he often defines competence as 'the speaker-hearer´s knowledge of his language'

Hilary Putnam

• She has recently developed an argument which seems to show that issue is more than a question of taste and that at least one important aspect of language, namely semantic structure, must be regarded as a social rather than as a psychological fact.

There is a further problem about the langue/parole distinction, and here Saussure´s position is harder to defend.

Saussure´s assignment of syntax to parole rather than to langue is linked in another way with the question of linguistic structure as social rather than psychological fact.

The Study of Language

19th Century: historical linguistics

• Plato and aristotle made major contributions to the study of language.
• Plato was the first person to distinguish between nouns and verbs.
• 1786 is the year which many people regard as the birthdate of linguistics.

Early-to mid-20th century: descriptive linguistics

• The emphasis shifted from language change to language description.
• Ferdinand de Saussure is responsible for this change of emphasis, he is sometimes labelled 'the father of modern linguistics'.
• De Saussure´s crucial contribution was his explicit and reiterated statement that all language items are essentially interlinked.

Mid-to late-20th century: generative linguistics and the search for universals

• In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. Noam Chomsky
• Chomsky has shifted attention away from detailed descriptions of actual utterances, and started asking questions about the nature of the system which produces the output.
• Anyone who knows a language must have internalized a set of rules which specify the sequences permitted in their language.
• Generative grammar consists of a set of statements or rules which specify which sequences of a language are possible, and wich impossible.
• Chomsky has redirected attention towards language universals. He points out that as all humans are rather similar, their internalized language mechanisms are likely to have important common properties.

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