The Study of Language

Linguistics in the past two centuries:

• Ninettenth Century: Historical Linguistics.

It is significant that the Greek philosophers Plato & Aristotle made major contributions to the history of language. Plato was the first one to distinguish between nouns and verbs.

Sir William Jones pointed out that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all had striking structural similarities.

A group of scholars centred around Leipzip, and nicknamed the "Young Grammarians", claimed that language change is 'regular'.

• Early- to mid-20th Century: Descriptive linguistics.

Ferdinand de Saussure is sometimes labelled "the father of modern linguistics".
His crucial contribution was that all language items are essentially interliked. Language is carefully built structure of interwoven elements initiated the era of structural linguistics.

Leonard Boomfield said "the weak point in language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far beyond its present state."
"Bloomfieldian era" lasted for more than twenty years. In this time linguistics concentrated on writting descriptive grammars of unwritten languages.

• Mid- to late-20th Century: Generative linguistics and the search for universal.

Noam Chomsky published a book called "Syntactic Structures", with this influential linguist of the century.
A grammar which consists of a set of statements or rules which sequences of language are possible, and which impossible, is a generative grammar.
Chomsky has not only initiated the era of generative grammars. He has also redirected attention towards language universals.


Wendy Saussure.