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Ferdinand de Saussure
A core task of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics is to define the subject matter of general linguistics. To do this, a definition of 'language' is required. Saussure distinguishes between language (la langue) and speech (la parole) introducing his concept of the 'speech circuit' (le circuit de la parole). -
Franz Boas
Boas saw language as an inseparable part of culture, and he was among the first to require of ethnographers to learn the native language of the culture under study and to document verbal culture such as myths and legends in the original language. -
Louis Hjelmslev
Following Saussure, Hjelmslev considers language as a system of signs: the essence of language is to define a system of correspondences between sound and meaning. The analysis of language involves, then, describing each of these two planes and their interconnections. The Saussurean dichotomy of signifier/signified is called by Hjemslev expression/content. Each of these planes, in a certain language, has its own structure. -
Leonard Bloomfield
Bloomfield was one of the founding members of the Linguistic Society of America, in 1924.
Bloomfield's work on Algonquian languages had both descriptive and comparative components. He published extensively on four Algonquian languages: Fox, Cree, Menominee, and Ojibwe, publishing grammars, lexicons, and text collections. Bloomfield used the materials collected in his descriptive work to undertake comparative studies. -
Morris Swadesh
In the 1930s, Swadesh conducted extensive fieldwork on more than twenty indigenous languages of the Americas, with travels in Canada, Mexico, and the US. He worked most prominently on the Chitimacha language, a now-extinct language isolate found among indigenous people of Louisiana. Swadesh is best known for his work in historical linguistics. Any language changes over centuries (consider, for example, the changes in English since the Middle Ages). -
Lev Vygotsky
Vygotsky posits the existence of lower and higher mental functions. The latter have social origins and complex system structure, mediated by cultural tools, and controlled by an individual. Vygotsky came to the conclusion that conscious is possible because of the mediated nature of higher psychological functions. -
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language. -
Dell Hymes
Dell Hymes proposed the ethnography of communication as an approach towards analyzing patterns of language use within speech communities, in order to provide support for his idea of communicative competence, which itself was a reaction to Noam Chomsky's distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. -
Noam Chomsky
The so-called standard theory corresponds to the original model of generative grammar laid out by Chomsky in 1965. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in each language and involves the use of defined operations (called transformations) to produce new sentences from existing ones. -
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay
They studied color terminology formation and showed clear universal trends in color naming. For example, they found that even though languages have assorted color terminologies, they recognize certain hues as more focal than others. They showed that in languages with few color terms, it is predictable from the number of terms which hues are chosen as focal colors, for example, languages with only three-color terms always have the focal colors black, white and red. -
Joshua Fishman
In 1970 he published Sociolinguistics: a brief introduction. The founder and general editor of the leading refereed publication International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Fishman created an intellectual platform that has facilitated the introduction and dissemination of novel models and revolutionary theories that have led to numerous academic debates, syntheses, and cross-fertilizations. He has often acted as an epistemological bridge between, and antidote for, parallel discourses. -
William Labov
Labov is regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics, which is a discipline dedicated to understanding and researching language in relation to social factors that include region, race, class, and gender. The impact of Labov’s work is far-reaching and extends through the practice of language science around the world -
Basil Bernstein
In 1973, he published "Applied Studies Towards a Sociology of Language". Bernstein made a significant contribution to the study of communication with his sociolinguistic theory of language codes, which was developed to explain inequalities based on social class as found in language use. The theory holds that there are elaborated and restricted codes within the broader category of language codes. -
John J. Gumperz
Gumperz built on Hymes's work by looking at differential power between speech communities. In particular, Gumperz noted that the "standard" form of any given language (the form that is expected in formal situations, such as on the news) is the dialect of those who are already powerful. He called that the "prestige dialect," and he noted that those who did not speak that dialect natively but instead a stigmatized or less powerful native dialect were "diglossic". -
Penelope Brown & Stephen Levinson
Brown was the co-developer of the theory of politeness, a key topic in 20th century sociolinguistics. With her research collaborator and husband, linguist Stephen Levinson, she is co-author of the seminal work, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage -
Gillian Sankoff
En 1978, She Sankoff wrote "The Social Life of Language", where she stablishes in her approach a holistic view of language and society. Her contributions to the development of the variationist approach to sociolinguistics are documented in her works of Montréal French & creole languages -
Michael Halliday
Halliday proposes a model that regroups the already known sociolinguistic concepts and adds new ones: interpersonal (relationship between interlocutors), ideational (verbal representation of reality), heuristic (access to knowledge through language) and textual (reference of the language to its own mechanisms and structures). -
Richard A. Hudson
For Hudson, sociolinguistics deals with the study of language in relation to the individuals who use it. This approach has already shed light on numerous practical problems, for example the difficulties of the underprivileged, and also on theoretical questions, such as the causes and mechanisms of language change. -
Steven Pinker
By calling language an instinct, Pinker means that it is not a human invention in the sense that metalworking and even writing are. While only some human cultures possess these technologies, all cultures possess language. -
Jenny Cheshire
According to Cheshire the use of English in such a diverse range of social contexts around the world provides us with a unique opportunity to analyse and document the linguistic variation and change that is occurring within a single language, on a far greater scale-as far as we know-than has ever happened in the world's linguistic history before. -
Francisco Moreno Fernández
He is the greatest exponent of sociolinguistics in the Spanish language. His studies focus on the teaching of Spanish and idialectological varieties. -
References
Corredor, J., & NIETO RUIZ, L. F. (2007). Un vistazo a los pilares de la Lingüística Moderna: Saussure, Chomsky Y Van Dijk. Del Estructuralismo a la Lingüística textual. Cuadernos de Lingüística Hispánica, (9), 83-96.
López Morales, Humberto. (2004). Sociolingüística (3a edición muy corregida y aumentada). Madrid
Moreno Fernández, F. (1998). Principios de sociolingüística y sociología del lenguaje. Ariel
