Modern Linguist schools of linguistics-WPS Office.pptx

Modern Linguistics
(A Presentation in Schools of Grammar)
Prepared by : Zahraa Bahaa Mohammed-Jawad
Supervised by : Prof. Hussein Hameed Ma'youf
(2023-2024)

CONTENTS
1- Introduction
2-European Modern schools of Linguistics
2.1-Sir William Jones (1786) and the 19th C
2.2-Junggrammatiker-( Neo grammarians)
2.3-Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)
2.3.1-Contribution of Ferdinand de Saussure
2.3.2- De Saussure's Dichotomies
2.3.2.1- Significant Vs. Signifie
2.3.2.2- Langue vs. Parole
2.3.2.3- Synchrony vs. Diachrony
2.3.2.4- Syntagmatic relation vs. Paradigmatic relation
2.4- Prague school
2.5- The Copenhagen School
2.6- London School of Linguistics
3- American Modern linguistics
3.1- Franz Boas
3.2- Edward Sapir
3.3- Benjamin Whorf
3.4- Leonard Bloomfield
3.5- Other linguists
4- Generativism
4.1- Examples of Generative Grammar
4.2- Case Grammar
4.3- Generative Semantics
5- Functionalism

Since its birth in early 20th century, linguistics has witnessed a big number of
changes in its trends, orientations, subjects of study, and hence theories of
language and language acquisition. Also the emphasis shifted from language
change to language description. Instead of looking at how a selection of items
changed in a number of different languages, linguists began to concentrate
on describing single languages at one particular point in time.

02
European
Modern
schools of
linguistics

1-Sir William Jones (1786) and the 19th C
1786 was one of the most important dates in the history of
linguistics. An Englishman called Sir William Jones pointed
out that sanskrit (the old Indian Language),Greek,Germanic,
Latin and Celtic all had structural similarities. He concluded
that all these languages sprang from one common source.
In the 19th C., linguists concentrated on writing detailed
comparative grammars comparing the different grammatical
forms of the various members of the IndoEuropean language family.
They focused on written records. The interest was in historical analysis and
interpretation. (Hikmat, 1998 :23)

2-Junggrammatiker-( Neo grammarians)
In the last quarter of the century, a group of
scholars known as Junggrammatiker (or Young
grammarians / Neo grammarians) centered near
Leipzing. They investigated the sound change
of many IndoEuropean languages.(Hikmat, 1998:23)
The influence of the nineteenth-century scholars was
strong. Even today, one still meets members of the
general public who expect the
cataloging of linguistic changes and the reconstruction of
Proto-Indo-European to
be the central concern of modern linguistics.
(Aitchison,2010:32)
Sampson (1980) pointed out that the scientific study of
language did not begin in
this century; but the years around 1900 happen to have
marked an important
turning point in the history of modern linguistics. Roughly
that time
independently in Europe and America, linguistics shifted
its orientation in such a
way that much nineteenth century work in the subject.

3-Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 1913)
Mongin-Ferdinand deSaussure, to give him his full name,
was born in Geneva in (1857) , amazingly, he died without
having written any major work on general linguistics. But
his students collected together his lecture notes after his
death and published them under the title Course in General
Linguistics (1915), which exerted a major influence on the
course of linguistics, particularly in Europe.
(Atchison, 2010).
For Saussure, words define themselves against each other, Saussure treated words
as SIGNS. Signs have no natural relationship to the things they represent. The
word dog, for instance, has no intrinsic connection with the animal it symbolizes:
any other word would do equally well to represent it.
For Saussure the relationship is essentially arbitrary: it's a consequence of
the way in which the language has evolved but it could equally well have
evolved differently. Since Saussure, the principle of arbitrariness has been
much discussed and various refinements have been made to it, but it
remains a foundation idea of modern linguistics.

Contribution of Ferdinand de Saussure
pairs of concepts(dichotomies)
Significant Vs. Signifie
Langue vs. Parole
Synchrony vs. Diachrony
Syntagmatic relation vs.
Paradigmatic relation

Significant Vs. Signifie
De Saussure recognized two
sides to the study of
meaning, but emphasized
that the relationship
between the two is arbitrary.
His labels for the two
sides are significant (= the
thing that signifies / sound
image) and signifie (= the
thing signified / concept).
( Aronoff and Millar,2003:95)

Langue vs. Parole
Parole (n.) Refers to the concrete utterances
produced by individual speakers in
actual situations, and is distinguished from Langue
which refers to the language
system shared by a community of speakers.
(Crystal,2008:350)
Languge is the faculty of speech present in all
normal human beings due to
heredity-our ability to talk to each other. This faculty
is composed of two aspects:
langue (language system) and parole (language
behavior) the act of speaking.
Langue refers to the abstract knowledge of language
(the totality of language).
It represents the generalized system of rules and
word images stored in the
minds of individuals or native speakers.

Synchrony vs. Diachrony
A synchronic description takes a fixed instant
(usually, but not necessarily, the present) as its point
of observation. Most grammars are of this kind.
-A Diachronic linguistics is the study of a language
through the course of its history.
Diachronic linguistics an approach to linguistics
which studies how languages change over time so as
to trace back the ancestor of languages. Synchronic linguistics, on the other hand,
studies languages at a theoretical point in time: one describes a ‘state’ of the
language, disregarding whatever changes might be taking place (Crystal, 2008)

Syntagmatic relation vs. Paradigmatic relation
A sentence is a sequence of sings, and each
sign contributing something to the meaning of
whole. When the signs are seen as a linear
sequence, the relationship between them is
called syntagmatic. It indicates the horizontal
relationship between linguistic elements
forming linear sequences in the sentence.
When a sign is seen as contrasting with other
signs in the language, the relationship is called paradigmatic
or associative. It
refers to the vertical relationship between linguistic signs
that might occupy the
same particular place in a given structure. (Hikmat, 1998:26)

Prague school
Prague Linguistic Circle, founded in 1926 by Vilém
Mathesius. Two of its most influential members were Roman
Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetskoy. The school first made its
impact in phonology through the introduction of such terms
as distinctive features and binary opposition.
The first refers to a feature distinguishing one phoneme from
another, for example voiced /b/ is different from voiceless /p/. The second refers
to a feature of a phoneme with two values: either positive or negative, for
example [± voice], where /d/ is [+voice], while /t/ is [−voice].
In contrast to other branches of structuralism with their emphasis on form, the
Prague School began a functionalist approach to structural linguistics. It regarded
language primarily as a functional means of communication, where linguistic
utterances stand for speakers’ intentions. This is seen in the use of the term
functional sentence perspective, which deals with the distribution of given
information (known as theme) and new information (known as rheme) in
sentence. (Zeki Hamound, 2020:19,20)

The Copenhagen School
A group of linguists constituted the Copenhagen linguistic
Circle in the mid1930s and developed an approach to
linguistics known as ‘Glossematics’.The leading theoretician
of this school was Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965). Through the
work of Hjelmslev, the school developed a philosophical and
logical basis for linguistic theory. (Hikmet,1998:53)
Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen, an association for Danish-speaking linguists
founded in 1931 by the internationally renowned linguists Louise Hjelmslev and
Viggo Brøndal. Their main inspiration was the Prague Linguistic Circle. The
intention of the Danish association was to create a study circle of active members
who would develop a new kind of linguistic research, called glossematics by
Hjelmslev.
Glossematics is a structural theory of language characterized by a high degree of
formalism. It is interested only in describing the formal characteristics of
language.
Like Saussure, Hjelmslev believed that language is arbitrary in relation to the real
world. Nothing in the word tree, for example, necessitates it being applied to an
actual, real tree. This is proven by the existence of different words used by
different languages for the same object.
Also, not all languages name things in the same way. The Welsh word glass
covers a spectrum of colors that in English would be shared between green, blue,
and gray. Hjelmslev’s conclusion, which has much in common with Saussure,
was that words are signs and as such do not refer to the real world, but rather
express our sense of it.( Zeki Hamound, 2020:20)

London School of Linguistics
This school can quite fairly be called the creation of one man,
John Rupert Firth, and its date of origin can be given as 1944,
the year in which Firth acceded to the Chair of General
Linguistics at the University of London. He held this position
until his retirement in 1956, and his death in 1960 marked “the
end of an era in the study of linguistics in Great Britain” .
(Terence,1968:1)
London School was an opposition to Bloomfieldian linguistics in America. It
shares the basic insights of structuralism as originated by de Saussure. Firth
devoted much of his attention to phonology. He based his work on that of the
anthropologist B. Malinowski. He developed this theory of 'context of situation'
in semantics. Little of Firth's teaching was published, but many of his ideas have
been developed by the Neo-Firthian group of scholars, whose main theoretician
is M. A. K. Halliday, a professor of General Linguistics at the University of
London from 1965 to 1970.
Firth's ideas on meaning and context now find echoes, sometimes with citation,
in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics.
The London School made two contributions to linguistics:
-Prosodic analysis in phonology, where the distinctive function is considered to
be the primary function of a phoneme and the selection of one phoneme instead
of another alters the meaning conveyed.
-And the situational theory of meaning in semantics, which accorded a crucial
role to context in the communication of meaning. The meaning of a linguistic

American Modern
linguistics
03

Franz Boas
the most important contributions of structural linguists were in
the areas of phonology (sound structure) and morphology (word
structure). The pioneer in this field was Franz Boas (1858 1942)
who published the first volume of the Handbook of American
Indian Languages in 1911.He was a German-born anthropologist
who spent most of his life studying American-Indian cultures.
For many years,he dominated the discipline in America. He was a very active and
productive field worker. He was spoken of by his colleagues in terms of 'genius'.
undertook the work of recording rapidly dying languages of native American
tribes. He argued that each language had to be described in its own terms and
alongside the culture of which it was a part, something he called linguistic

Edward Sapir
One of the foremost American linguists and
anthropologists of
his time, most widely known for his
contributions to the study
of North American Indian languages. A founder
of ethnolinguistics, which considers the
relationship of culture to
language, he was also a principal developer of
the American
(descriptive) school of structural linguistics.
Sapir suggested that man perceives the world
principally through language. He
wrote many articles on the relationship of
language to culture. A thorough
description of a linguistic structure and its
function in speech might, he wrote in
1931, provide insight into man's perceptive and
cognitive faculties and help
explain the diverse behaviour among peoples of
different cultural backgrounds.

Benjamin Whorf
This idea was developed by his
student Benjamin Whorf into
the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which
holds that a language
determines the way the speakers
perceive the world, not the
other way around. The particular
language an individual
speaks determines his or her
thoughts and actions.

Leonard Bloomfield
Leaonard Bloomfield was the major developer of the 20th C.
structuralism in America. He published his Introduction to the
Study of Language in 1914 and later his famous book Language
in 1933. This book dominated the linguistic thinking for over
twenty years, in which he presented many descriptive
studies of grammar and phonology. His theory is based on
"rigorous discovery procedures." He and his followers based their descriptions of
the facts of English on actual utterances which could be empirically verified.
Ignoring references to semantics, they concentrated on presenting accurate descriptions of
the sound, word and sentence structure of English. They considered
the study of meaning as the weak point in language study and Bloomfield himself
maintained that it is too early for this generation to deal with semantics. Thus, according
to them, the linguistic levels begin like this: phonology, morphology and
syntax. Bloomfield presented a detailed outline of the principles of structural
language analysis. He stressed the importance of using empirical data. To
him, the grammarian's task was only to collect as much as language data
as possible. Then, he analysed and classified the data on the basis of
objective evidence to reach a conclusion. He maintained that a grammar
could be defined as a perfect, objective description of language and the
ultimate goal of a linguist was to find rules that led to such grammar.
The Bloomfieldian approach came to be called 'structuralist', because of the
various kinds of technique it employed to identify and classify features of
sentence structure (the analysis of sentences into their constituent parts). It also
represented the behaviourists' view in psychology, that consists of the theory of
stimulus and response; trial and error, reward and punishment. To them, language
was considered as a human behavior and this theory was associated with
language acquisition notably in the study of meaning.

Noam Chomsky
In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. mainly in the
work of Avram Noam Chomsky , a former pupil of
Z. S. Harris. His work is animated by interests in the
history of culture, psychology philosophy and scientific methodology . Noam Chomsky, published a
book called Syntactic Structures.
Although containing fewer than 120 pages, this little book started a revolution in
linguistics. Chomsky is, arguably, the most influential linguist of the twentieth
century.
A grammar, Chomsky claimed, should be more than a description of old
utterances. It should also take into account possible future utterances. In short,
the traditional viewpoint that the main task of linguists was simply to describe a
corpus of actual utterances cannot account for the characteristic of productivity,
or creativity, as Chomsky preferred to call it.
Chomsky pointed out that his theory is based on the idea that all humans have an
innate language capacity. Anyone who knows a language must have internalized
a set of rules which specify the sequences permitted in their language. In his
opinion, a linguist’s task was to discover these rules, and uncover the
foundational principals that guide all language production. A grammar consisting
of a set of statements or rules that specify which sequences of a languages are
possible, and which impossible, is a generative grammar.
Grammar refers to the set of rules that structure a language, including syntax (the
arrangement of words to form phrases and sentences) and morphology (the study
of words and how they are formed) while Generative grammar is a theory of
grammar that holds that human language is shaped by a set of basic principles
that are part of the human brain (and even present in the brains of small children).

This "universal grammar," according to linguists like Chomsky, comes from our
innate language faculty. It means that generative grammar is a kind of unconscious
knowledge that allows a person, no matter what language they speak, to
form "correct" sentences.
Note: Chomsky used the word grammar to mean not only the ‘rules’ which a
person has inside their head which specify the sequences of their language, but
also a linguist’ s attempt to express these rules, which he labeled a generative
grammar. The particular type of generative grammar proposed by Chomsky was
a so-called transformational one.
As well as initiating the era of generative grammars, Chomsky also redirected attention
towards language universals. He pointed out that as all humans are rather
similar, their internalized language mechanisms are likely to have important common
properties. He argued that linguists should concentrate on finding elements
and constructions that are available to all languages, whether or not they actually
occur. Above all, they should seek to specify the universal bounds or constraints
within which human language operates.
The constraints on human language are, he suggested, inherited ones.
Human beings may be preprogrammed with a basic knowledge of what
languages are like, and how they work. Chomsky has given the label
Universal Grammar (UG) to this inherited core. He regards it as a major
task of linguistics to explore its make-up.
Chomsky’ s later work, his so-called Minimalist Program, became more and
more abstract. Increasingly, he turned to specifying broad general principles, the
bare bones of human language, taking less interest in the nitty-gritty details of
individual tongues (Atchison, 2010).

As generative grammar is a "theory of competence," one way to test its validity is
with what is called a grammatical judgment task. This involves presenting a
native speaker with a series of sentences and having them decide whether the
sentences are grammatical (acceptable) or ungrammatical (unacceptable).
For example:
 The man is happy.
 Happy man is the.
A native speaker would judge the first sentence to be acceptable and the second
to be unacceptable. From this, we can make certain assumptions about the rules
governing how parts of speech should be ordered in English sentences.
for instance, a " be" verb linking a noun and an adjective must follow the noun and
precede the adjective.

Since the 1960s, several fresh theoretical approaches to grammatical analysis
have emerged, in addition to some modifications to the transformational theory
like Case Grammar, Relational Grammar, X-bar Theory, Montague Grammar,
Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Functional Grammar, Realistic
Grammar and Network Grammar.
Most of which can be seen as a development of Chomsky's proposals or as a
reaction against them

Case Grammar
t refers to an approach to grammatical
analysis devised by the American
linguist Charles Fillmore (1929 -) in the
late 1960s, within the general orientation
of generative grammar. It focuses on the
semantic roles and relationships (or
'cases') played by elements of sentences
structure. It is primarily a reaction
against the standard-Theory analysis of
sentences where notions such as (S, O, V and
C)are neglected in favor of analysis
in terms of NP, VP, etc.

Generative Semantics Generative semantics is a school of
thought within the generative linguistic
theory produced by several American linguists,
primarily by George Lakoff, James
McCawley, Paul Postal and John Ross in
the early 1970s. It views the semantic
component of a grammar as being the
generative base from which syntactic
structure can be derived.
This puts the approach in contrast with Chomsky
in the standard theory. Thus,
according to them if you want to give a talk, you
first arrange the idea
semantically in the mind. Then you need syntax to
organize the idea according to
the rules of grammar (so it is interpretative). The
final stage is to apply the
phonological rules of a language to be able to
speak (as it is interpretative too).

Numerous theories have been successful in
accounting for aspects of language. One of the
most substantial theories is Halliday's Systemic
Functional Linguistics (often SFL), which has
been employed in the literature on linguistics
and applied linguistics.
Nowadays, the SFL approach is used world-wide, especially in language
education, and for a number of purposes like discourse analysis. It has continued
to be closely associated with sociology even when a good number of linguistic
theories deal with language in the form of mental practice. The Halliday's
tradition, as an illustration, is more interested in the manner by which language is
utilized in social settings so as to attain a specific target (O’Donnell, 2012, p. 2).
Functional linguistics is an approach to linguistics which is concerned with
language as an instrument of social interaction rather than as a system of formal
rules that is viewed in isolation from their uses in communication. It considers
the individual as a social being and investigates the way in which he or she
acquires language and uses it in order to communicate with others in his or her
social environment (Richards and Schmidt, 2012).

As opposed to the essentially 'formalist' approach of
Chomsky, Halliday's is more
'functional'. He sees language as existing to fulfil
certain human needs, such as
our need to make sense of the world and to relate
to others. The formal categories
of language, he argues, derive as much from these
as from any pre-programming.
What Halliday draws our attention to is the
importance of the 'world' and our
relationship to it in the formation of the linguistic
system.

The three principal functions which he
identifies, and uses as the basis of his
grammar, are:
• Ideational - the use of language to
conceptualize the world.
• Interpersonal - the use of
language as a personal medium.
• Textual-the use of language to form
texts.

In many respects Halliday's approach which sees language as a symbolic
signaling system, or, in his words, a social semiotic, reflects the influence
of Saussure rather than Chomsky. Like Saussure he sees language as a social and
cultural phenomenon as opposed to a biological one, like Chomsky, Functional
approaches are part of a general shift in some branches of linguistics towards a
more socially situated account of language.

in SFL, a text is analyzed in four ways. They
are as follows: Context, Semantics,
Lexicogrammar, and Phonology .
SFL can be characterized as an "applicable"
linguistics theory, which means it is designed to
have the potential to be applied to solve
problems that arise in communities around the
world (Matthiessen & Halliday 1997).

Halliday (2008, p.189) states that his aim is to make a coherent tradition of
language which is 'applicable,' in the sense that it can be beneficial to large
numbers of people who are somehow engaging with language in the course of
their work. SFL is well-known for its application in different fields such as
healthcare, computational linguistics, translation, multimodal studies, education,
and scholars are always discovering new areas of application (Matthiessen 2010).
Additionally, it is renowned especially for the work on genre, cohesion,
discourse analysis, register, appraisal, and so on, which have been taken up by
scholars working in the humanities and social sciences.

In the recent years, SFL has been useful and helpful in fields such as linguistics
language education (Christie & Martin 1997), child language development
(painter 1999), media discourse (Iedema 2003), history (Iedema 2003),
educational linguistics (Christie & Martin 1997), critical discourse analysis
(Bloor & Bloor 2007), and administrative language (Iedema 2003). Furthermore,
SFL has also been applied to interpret the grammar of other semiotic modes, such
as art (Ballantyre 1996) and visuals (Kress & Leeuwen 2001).
Consequently, SFL tradition is considered as a sensational international one,
since it can be seen by the number of publications and conferences in SFL around
the world. Briefly, it is clear that SFL can be applicable in unlimited fields.

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Blackwell Publishers Ltd: UK, USA
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London: Edward Arnold.
• Crystal, David. (2008). A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics 6th ed.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd: UK.
• Christie, F., & Martin, J. (1997). Genre and institutions: social processes
in the workplace and school. London & New York: Continuum.
• Halliday, M., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar
(2nd ed.). London: Arnold.
• Hikmet, Yasmin Abdulhameed. (1998). An Introductory Course in General
Linguistic. Baghdad: University of Baghdad.
• Iedema, R. (2003). Discourses of post-bureaucratic organization (1st ed.).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub.
• Matthiessen, C. (2010). Systemic functional linguistics developing. Annual
Review of Functional Linguistics, 2, 8-63.
• Matthiessen, C., & Halliday, M. (1997). Systemic functional grammar (1st ed.).
• O’Donnell, M. (2012). Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics
for Discourse Analysis. Language, Function and Cognition, pp. 1-8. Painter
• Sampson, G. (1980). Schools of linguistics. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University

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