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Wendy Saussure.

The descriptivists

Franz Boas

Franz Boas (1858–1942) was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography. He applied the scientific method to the study of human cultures and societies; previously this discipline was based on the formulation of grand theories around anecdotal knowledge.

Although Boas was making a very specific contribution to the methods of descriptive linguistics, his ultimate point is far reaching: observer bias need not be personal, it can be cultural. In other words, the perceptual categories of Western researchers may systematically cause a Westerner to misperceive or to fail to perceive entirely a meaningful element in another culture.

Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics.[1] He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family.

Bloomfield's approach to linguistics was characterized by its emphasis on the scientific basis of linguistics, adherence to behaviorism especially in his later work, and emphasis on formal procedures for the analysis of linguistic data. The influence of Bloomfieldian structural linguistics declined in the late 1950s and 1960s as the theory of Generative Grammar developed by Noam Chomsky came to predominate.

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky (December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.
Chomsky is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy theorem, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.
Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his Syntactic Structures, a distillation of his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75), challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar.

His best-known work in phonology is The Sound Pattern of English (1968), written with Morris Halle (and often known as simply SPE). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including autosegmental phonology, lexical phonology and optimality theory. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology.

Descriptivism - (ethics) a doctrine holding that moral statements have a truth value doctrine, ism, philosophical system, philosophy, school of thought - a belief (or system of beliefs) accepted as authoritative by some group or school moral philosophy, ethics - the philosophical study of moral values and rules. The descriptivist camp, on the other hand, simply aims describe how the language is used today. This camp is perhaps best embodied by the Urban Dictionary, a lexicon open to input from anyone. Unfortunately, this purely descriptive approach to language implies that language doesn’t matter as long as intent can be communicated; generations of poets would beg to differ. Bloomfield linguistics is a branch of psychology known as “Behaviorism”. Behaviorism has a good side and a bad side. In its good aspect behaviorism is a principle of scientific method where the only things used to confirm or refute a theory are observable phenomena rather than people’s introspections (examining one’s thoughts and feelings) and intuitions.

Wendy Saussure.

Pragmatics

pragmatic/praɡˈmatɪk/
▶adjective
1 dealing with things in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.
2 relating to philosophical or political pragmatism.
3 Linguistics relating to pragmatics.
www.wordreference.com

prag·mat·ic
[prag-mat-ik] Show IPA
adjective Also, prag·mat·i·cal ( for defs. 1, 2, 5 ).
1. of or pertaining to a practical point of view or practical considerations.
2. Philosophy . of or pertaining to pragmatism ( def. 2 ).
3. of or pertaining to pragmatics ( defs. 1, 2 ).
4. treating historical phenomena with special reference to their causes, antecedent conditions, and results.
5. of or pertaining to the affairs of state or community.
dictionary.reference.com

Pragmatics is the study of the aspects of meaning and language use that are dependent on the speaker, the addressee and other features of the context of utterance, such as the following:

The effect that the following have on the speaker’s choice of expression and the addressee’s interpretation of an utterance:
Context of utterance
Generally observed principles of communication
The goals of the speaker

Programmatic concerns, such as
the treatment of given versus new information, including presupposition
deixis
speech acts, especially illocutionary acts
implicature, and
the relations of meaning or function between portions of discourse (see interpropositional relation) or turns of conversation (see conversation analysis)

Wendy Saussure.

The London School

Compared to other schools of modern linguistics, the London School, founded by J. R. Firth, is more interested in instrumentality of language and meaning or function in context. Influenced by Malinowski's theorizing, Firth and his followers stress the functioning of language and argue that language can't be disassociated from meaning and should be looked at from a sociological perspective.

The London School and the systemic functional grammar, which has developed out of the London approach to language, consider meaning and function as the basis of human language and communicative activity. The linguistic theorizing in the London style is of practical significance and therefore is more relevant to sociolinguistics, stylistics, literary criticism and language teaching. From the linguistic ideas of a few important figures of the London School, we may see the developmental stages this School has gone through and how the tradition has been established for the academic discipline of linguistics in Britain.

The London School of Harry Sweet (1845-1912) and David Jones (1881-1967) stressed the practical side of phonetics, and trained its students to perceive, transcribe and reproduce each minute sound distinction very precisely — far more than the American behaviourists, for example, and of course the Chomskians, who are extending models rather than testing them. And this phonetic competence was much needed when J.R. Firth (1891-1960) and others at the School of Oriental and African Studies helped to plan the national languages and their writing systems for the new Commonwealth countries. Overall, the School has been very far ranging — noting, for example how stress and tone co-occur with whole syllables, and developing a terminology to cope: a basis for poetic metre. Firthian analysis also finds a place for aesthetic considerations and develops a system of mutually exclusive options, somewhat like Saussure but more socially and purposively orientated.

Wendy Saussure.

The Copenhagen School

The Copenhagen School, officially the "Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen (Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague)", was a group of scholars dedicated to the study of structural linguistics founded by Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) and Viggo Brøndal (1887–1942). In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centres of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and the Prague School.

The principal ideas of the school are:
*A language consists of content and expression.
*A language consists of a succession and a system.
*Content and expression are interconnected by commutation.
*There are certain relations in the succession and the system.
*There are no one-to-one correspondents between content and expression, but the signs may be divided into smaller components.

Even more than Saussure, the Copenhagen School is interested in the langue rather than parole. It represented in a pure form the idea that language is a form and not a substance. It studied the relational system within the language on a higher level of abstraction.

Wendy Saussure.

The Prague School

Prague school, school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius. It included among its most prominent members the Russian linguist Nikolay Trubetskoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jakobson; the school was most active during the 1920s and ’30s. Linguists of the Prague school stress the function of elements within language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system formed by these contrasts, and they have distinguished themselves in the study of sound systems. They developed distinctive-feature analysis of sounds.

Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition:
*Distinctive function: The obvious function that of keeping different words or longer sequences apart.
*Delimitative function: It helps the hearer locate word-boundaries in the speech signal.
*Negative delimitative function: When we hear that sound we know that there can’t be a morpheme boundary immediately before it.
*Culminative function: Perception of stress tells the hearer how, any words he must segment the signal into, although it does not tell him where to make the cuts.
Each of the three phonological functions has to do with enabling the hearer to work out what sequence of words has been uttered by the speaker.
Karl distinguished another three functions:
*Representation function: Starting facts.
*Expressive function: Expressing temporary or permanent characteristics of the speaker.
*Conative function: Influencing the hearer.

Saussure contrasted two kinds of linguistics:
*Synchronic linguistics: The study of a system in which the various elements derive their values from their mutual relationship.
*Historical linguistics: The description of a sequence of isolated, unsystematic events.

The Prague School argues for system in diachrony and it claims that linguistics change is determined by synchronic état de langue.

Wendy Saussure.

Ferdinand de Saussure

This is a video about the main contribution Fredinand de Saussure gave to the linguistics theme.

Wendy Saussure.

Applied Linguistics and Linguistics

Modern linguistics begins with Ferdinand de aussure; the central continuing notion is that language is a closed sytem of structural relation.

The Prague School, begun in 1926, provided the founddations for most later phonological theory and created the now commonplace notion of distintive features in their analyses. The London School was primarily the product of J.R. Firth, who in 1944 became the first professor of linguistics in Grear Britain.
Firsr proposed a systematic linguistics which made major contibutions to phonetics and phonology as well as to the study use in its situational context.

The Chomsky's theories were:
Generative theory: Proposes that human are able to generate a potentially infinite number of sentences by means of a finite system of well-definable rules.
Universal Grammar: A possible set of underlying principles and constraints on language applicable to the learning of any natural language.

Generalized phrase-structure grammar elaborates the phrasestructure rules to take the place of transformations; the lexical-funtional grammar elaborates the lexical entries to take the place of transformation.

The Halliday's systematic functional theory sayd that each lenguage element chosen plays a meaningul role in furthering communication in that its choice represents a binary decision not to say something else.

Greenberg and Hawkins study how language differ from one another, what generalization may be made cross-linguistically based on the be derived from the patters of typological variation.

Hymess proposed that the real object of linguistics research should be the study of communicative competence (Linguistics should study how language is performed in different contexts, with different people, on different topics and differents purposes.

The traditional articularoty approach is still the basis for most discussion of pronunciation and oral language instruction generally in second-language contexts.

Applied-linguistics research on lexicography, terminology development, second-language acquisition, anf language teaching is still employing descriptive approaches that have been in use for some time.

The descriptive syntax texts have been used for grammar courses and for resourse references in language policity and planning.

The term speech acts refers directly either to sets of verbs that do things when uttered in the right context or to use of utterances in order to convey messages that are only inferrable from a combination of the context and the literal words.
Gricean maxims are typically presented as:

Quantity - say as much and not more than you need to
Quality - tell the truth
Relevance - stay on the topic
Manner - be clear and direct

Wendy Saussure.