The study of language

By Natalia Lisonski

  • Sir William Jones

    Read a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta pointing out that Sanskrit (the old Indian language), Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all had striking structured similarities.

  • Darwin

    published his famous "origin of species", putting forward the theory of evolution. (Mid 19th Century)

  • Leipzig

    nicknamed "the young grammarian". Claimed that language change is "regular". (Last Quarter of the Century)

  • Ferdinand De Saussure`s

    crucial contribution was his explicit and reiterated statement that all language items are essentially interlinked. He insisted that language is a carefully built structure interwoven elements initiated the era of "structured linguistics". (In the 20th Century)

  • The term "structural linguistics"

    is sometimes misunderstood it does not necessarily refer to a separate branch or school of linguistics. All linguistics since de Saussure is structural,as 'structural' in this broad sense merely means the recognition that language is a patterned system composed of interdependent elements, rather than a collection of unconnected individual items.

  • Leonard Bloomfield´s

    comprehensive work entitled simply "language". He considered that linguistics should deal objectively and systematically with observable data. So he was more interested in the way items were arranged than in the meaning.

  • "Bloomfieldian era"

    lasted more than 20 years, during this time large numbers of linguists concentrated on writing descriptive grammars of unwritten languages.

  • Linguistic

    have lost touch with other disciplines and become abstruse subject of tittle interest to anyone outside it.

  • Noam Chomsky

    published a book called "Syntactic Structure". He has shifted attention away from detailed description of actual utterances and started asking questions about the nature of the system which produces the output.

  • Chomsky

    pointed out that 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 is to
    discover these rules, which constitute the grammar of the
    language in question.

  • Chomsky

    not only initiated the era of generative grammars. He
    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.

  • According to Chomsky and Bloomfield

    linguistics was both far too ambitious and far too limited in scope.