Theories and Schools

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Lecture 11

• Theories and Schools
• in Modern Linguistics

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11.1 Saussure (1857-1913)
Saussure is often described as father of modern
linguistics and a master of a discipline which
he made modern. His 1916 book, Course in General
Linguistics, which was a collection of his
lecture notes, marked the beginning of modern
linguistics.
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Who influenced Saussure

• Saussures ideas were developed along three
  lines linguistics, sociology, and psychology. In
  linguistics, he was greatly influenced by the
  American linguist W. D. Whitney (1827-94), who
  insisted on the concept of arbitrariness of the
  sign. In sociology, he followed the French
  sociologist Durkheim. In psychology, Saussure was
  influenced by Freud.

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Saussures ideas on language

• Saussure believed that language is a system of
  signs. To communicate ideas, they must be part of
  a system of conventions, part of a system of
  signs. This sign is the union of a form and an
  idea, which Saussure called the signifier and the
  signified. Some important distinctions Saussure
  made in linguistics include langue vs. parole,
  syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic, and synchronic vs.
  diachronic.

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Saussures influence

• Saussure exerted two kinds of influence on modern
  linguistics. First, he provided a general
  orientation, a sense of the task of linguistics
  which has seldom been questioned. Second, he
  influenced modern linguistics in the specific
  concepts. Saussures fundamental perception is of
  revolutionary significance, and it is he that
  pushed linguistics into a brand new stage and all
  linguistics in the twentieth century are
  Saussurean linguistics.

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11.2 The Prague School

• The Prague School can be traced back to its first
  meeting under the leadership of V. Mathesius
  (18821946) in 1926. Its most important
  contribution to linguistics is that it sees
  language in terms of function.
• Three important points concerning the ideas of
  the Prague School First, it was stressed that
  the synchronic study of language is fully
  justified. Second, there was an emphasis on the
  systemic character of language. Elements are held
  to be in functional contrast or opposition.
  Third, language was looked on as functional in
  another sense, that is, as a tool performing a
  number of essential functions or tasks for the
  community using it.

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11.2.1 Phonology and phonological oppositions

• Trubetzkoy (19801938), Russian linguist
• Principles of Phonology (1939)
• Phonetics belonged to parole whereas phonology
  belonged to langue.
• Phoneme is an abstract unit of the sound system
  as distinct from the sounds actually produced.
• In classifying distinctive features, Trubetzkoy
  proposed three criteria (1) their relation to
  the whole contrastive system (2) relations
  between the opposing elements and (3) their
  power of discrimination.

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Trubetzkoys contribution

• Trubetzkoys contributions to phonological theory
  concern four aspects. First, he showed
  distinctive functions of speech sounds and gave
  an accurate definition for the phoneme. Second,
  by making distinctions between phonetics and
  phonology, and between stylistic phonology and
  phonology, he defined the sphere of phonological
  studies. Third, by studying the syntagmatic and
  paradigmatic relations between phonemes, he
  revealed the interdependent relations between
  phonemes. Finally, he put forward a set of
  methodologies for phonological studies, such as
  the method of extracting phonemes and the method
  of studying phonological combinations.

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11.2.2 Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) ?????

• Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory
  of linguistic analysis which refers to an
  analysis of utterances (or texts) in terms of the
  information they contain. The principle is that
  the role of each utterance part is evaluated for
  its semantic contribution to the whole.

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Important concepts

• Theme the point of departure of a sentence,
  which is equally present to the speaker and
  hearer
• Rheme -- the goal of discourse which presents the
  very information that is to be imparted to the
  hearer
• Known/ given information -- information that is
  not new to the reader or hearer
• New information -- what is to be transmitted to
  the reader or hearer.

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• Therefore the subject-predicate distinction is
  not always the same as theme-rheme distinction.
• Sally stands on the table.
• subject predicate
• theme rheme
• On the table stands Sally.
• predicate
  subject
• theme
  rheme

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Communicative Dynamism (CD)

• In research into the relation between structure
  and function, J. Firbas developed the notion of
  communicative dynamism (CD), which is meant to
  measure the amount of information an element
  carries in a sentence. The degree of CD is the
  effect contributed by a linguistic element, for
  it pushes the communication forward. Usually a
  context-dependent element carries a lower CD than
  a context-independent element. For example, in I
  have read a nice book, a nice book carries a
  higher CD than I and the finite verb.
• Firbas defined FSP as the distribution of
  various degrees of CD. This can be explained as
  the initial elements of a sequence carry the
  lowest degree of CD, and with each step forward,
  the degree of CD becomes incremental till the
  element that carries the highest.

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12.3 The London School

• The man who turned linguistics proper into a
  recognised distinct academic subject in Britain
  was J. R. Firth. Firth was influenced by the
  anthropologist B. Malinowski. In turn, he
  influenced his student, the well-known linguist
  M. A. K. Halliday. The three men all stressed the
  importance of context of situation and the system
  aspect of language. Thus, London School is also
  known as systemic linguistics and functional
  linguistics.

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12.3.1 Malinowskis theories
Malinowski regards language a mode of action,
rather than as a counterpart of thought.
According to him, the meaning of an utterance
does not come from the ideas of the words
comprising it but from its relation to the
situational context in which the utterance
occurs. He distinguished three types of context
of situation (1) situations in which speech
interrelates with bodily activity (2) narrative
situations and (3) situations in which speech is
used to fill a speech vacuum phatic communion.
18841942
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Two important points on Malinowskis theory of
meaning

• First, he prescribed the data for linguistic
  studies, holding that isolated words are only
  imagined linguistic facts, and they are the
  products of advanced analytical procedures of
  linguistics. According to him, the real
  linguistic data are the complete utterances in
  actual uses of language. The second point is that
  when a certain sound is used in two different
  situations, it cannot be called one word, but two
  words having the same sound, or homonyms. He said
  that in order to assign meaning to a sound, one
  has to study the situations in which it is used.

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Firth started the branch called linguistic
semantics. He put forward the idea that in
analysing a typical context of situation, one has
to take into consideration both the situational
context and the linguistic context of a
text  (1) The internal relations of the text
itself (a) the syntagmatic relations between the
elements in the structure (b) the paradigmatic
relations between units in the system. (2) The
internal relations of the context of
situation (a) the relations between text and
non-linguistic elements, and the general
effects (b) the analytical relations between
words, parts of words, phrases and the special
elements of the context of situation
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• Firth also listed a model in his Papers in
  Linguistics (1957) that covers both the
  situational context and the linguistic context of
  a text
•  (1) the relevant features of the participants
  persons, personalities
• (a)  the verbal action of the participants
• (b)  the non-verbal action of the participants
• (2) the relevant topics, including objects,
  events, and non-linguistic, non-human events
• (3) the effects of the verbal action.

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• Firths second important contribution to
  linguistics is his method of prosodic analysis
  (????), called prosodic phonology. Firth pointed
  out that in actual speech, it is not phonemes
  that make up the paradigmatic relations, but
  phonematic units. There are fewer features in
  phonematic units than in phonemes, because some
  features are common to phonemes of a syllable or
  a phrase (even a sentence). When these features
  are considered in syntagmatic relations, they are
  all called prosodic units.
• Firth did not define prosodic units. However, his
  discussion indicates that prosodic units include
  such features as stress, length, nasalisation,
  palatalisation, and aspiration. In any case,
  these features cannot be found in one phonematic
  unit alone.

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11.3.3 Halliday and Systemic-Functional Grammar
Systemic - Functional (SF) Grammar is a
sociologically oriented functional linguistic
approach and one of the most influential
linguistic theories in the twentieth century,
having great effect on various disciplines
related to language, such as language teaching,
sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, stylistics,
and machine translation.
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• Systemic-Functional Grammar has two components
  systemic grammar and functional grammar. Systemic
  grammar aims to explain the internal relations in
  language as a system network, or meaning
  potential. Functional grammar aims to reveal that
  language is a means of social interaction, based
  on the position that language system and the
  forms that make it up are inescapably determined
  by the uses or functions which they serve.

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• Systemic-Functional Grammar is based on two
  facts (1) language users are actually making
  choices in a system of systems and trying to
  realise different semantic functions in social
  interaction and (2) language is inseparable from
  social activities of man. Thus, it takes actual
  uses of language as the object of study, in
  opposition to Chomskys TG Grammar that takes the
  ideal speakers linguistic competence as the
  object of study.

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Systemic Grammar
The dimension along which the utterance sequence
occurs is the axis of chain the basic patterns
along the vertical line form the axis of choice.
The axis of chain represents syntagmatic
relations the axis of choice represents
paradigmatic relations.
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Transitivity choices
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(No Transcript)
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Functional Grammar

• Halliday views language development in children
  as the mastery of linguistic functions, and
  learning a language is learning how to mean. So
  he proposes seven functions in childrens model
  of language
• (1) the instrumental function
• (2) the regulatory function
• (3) the interactional function
• (4) the personal function
• (5) the heuristic function
• (6) the imaginative function and
• (7) the informative function.

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• According to Halliday, the adults language
  becomes much more complex and it has to serve
  many more functions, and the original functional
  range of the childs language is gradually
  reduced to a set of highly coded and abstract
  functions, which are metafunctions the
  ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual
  functions.

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11.4 American structuralism

• AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM is a branch of SYNCHRONIC
  LINGUISTICS that emerged independently in the
  United States at the beginning of the twentieth
  century. It developed in a very different style
  from that of Europe, under the leadership of the
  anthropologist F. Boas.

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11.4.1 Early period Boas and Sapir

• Boas, 1911, Handbook of American Indian
  Languages.
• His methodology in processing linguistic data of
  American Indian languages is analytical, without
  comparing them with such languages as English or
  Latin. Starting from an anthropological view,
  Boas regarded linguistics as part of anthropology
  and failed to establish linguistics as an
  independent branch of science. But his basic
  theory, his observation, and his descriptive
  methods paved the way for American descriptive
  linguistics and influenced generations of
  linguists.

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• Sapir, 1921, An Introduction of the Study of
  Language.
• Sapir undertook the description of American
  Indian languages after Boass method, using a
  native informant in his own cultural
  surroundings. In his book, he started from an
  anthropological viewpoint to describe the nature
  of language and its development, with his main
  focus on typology. Sapir is most famous for his
  ideas on language and thought, which were later
  developed by his student, B. L. Whorf
  (1897-1941), and is known as the Sapir-Whorf
  Hypothesis.

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11.4.2 Bloomfields theory

• Bloomfield, 1933, Language. This book started
  American structuralism as a school of thought.
• For Bloomfield, linguistics is a branch of
  psychology, and specifically of the positivistic
  brand of psychology known as behaviourism.
  Behaviourism is a principle of scientific method,
  based on the belief that human beings cannot know
  anything they have not experienced. Behaviourism
  in linguistics holds that children learn language
  through a chain of STIMULUS-RESPONSE
  reinforcement, and the adults use of language
  is also a process of stimulus-response.

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• Bloomfield exemplified the stimulus-response
  theory and developed the following principles 1)
  When one individual is stimulated, his speech can
  make another individual react accordingly. 2) The
  division of labour and all human activities based
  on the division of labour are dependent on
  language. 3) The distance between the speaker and
  the hearer, two separate nervous systems, is
  bridged up by sound waves.

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11.4.3 Post-Bloomfieldian linguistics

• Influenced by Bloomfields Language, American
  linguists such as Z. S. Harris (1909-1992), C.
  Hockett (1916-2000), G. Trager, H. L. Smith, A.
  Hill, and R. Hall further developed
  structuralism, characterised by a strict
  empiricism.
• The most significant figure in continuing the
  structuralist tradition may be K. Pike
  (1912-2000), who and his followers have a special
  name for their technique of linguistic analysis
  tagmemics.
• Last but not least, starting from the late 1950s,
  Sydney M. Lamb developed his theory in a model
  consisting of three levels, or strata phoneme,
  morpheme, and morphophoneme. This laid the
  foundation for his stratificational grammar. This
  later developed into neurocognitive linguistics.

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• To summarize, structuralism is based on the
  assumption that grammatical categories should be
  defined not in terms of meaning but in terms of
  distribution, and that the structure of each
  language should be described without reference to
  the alleged universality of such categories as
  tense, mood and parts of speech. Firstly,
  structural grammar describes everything that is
  found in a language instead of laying down rules.
  However, its aim is confined to the description
  of languages, without explaining why language
  operates the way it does. Secondly, structural
  grammar is empirical, aiming at objectivity in
  the sense that all definitions and statements
  should be verifiable or refutable. However, it
  has produced almost no complete grammars
  comparable to any comprehensive traditional
  grammars. Thirdly, structural grammar examines
  all languages, recognising and doing justice to
  the uniqueness of each language. But it does not
  give an adequate treatment of meaning. Lastly,
  structural grammar describes even the smallest
  contrasts that underlie any construction or use
  of a language, not only those discoverable in
  some particular use.

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11.5 Transformational-Generative Grammar

• In the late 1950s, A. N. Chomsky (1928-  ), a
  student of Hebrew with the structuralist
  methodology, Chomsky tried to open up a new route
  when he found that the classification of
  structural elements of language according to
  distribution and arrangement had its limitations.
  From this practice Chomsky gradually established
  the well-known Transformational-Generative (TG)
  grammar. The publication of his Syntactic
  Structures (1957) marked the beginning of the
  Chomskyan Revolution.

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• From its birth to the present day, TG Grammar has
  seen five stages of development.
•   The Classical Theory aims to make linguistics
  a science. Syntactic Structures. 1957.
•   The Standard Theory deals with how semantics
  should be studied in a linguistics theory.
  Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. 1965.
•    The Extended Standard Theory focuses
  discussion on language universals and universal
  grammar.
•    The Revised Extended Standard Theory (or GB)
  focuses discussion on government and binding.
• Major works in this period include Remarks on
  Nominalization (1970), Reflections on Language
  (1975), Rules and Representations (1980),
  Lectures on Government and Binding (1981).
•   The latest is the Minimalist Program, a
  further revision of the previous theory.
• The Minimalist Program (1995), Minimalist
  Inquiries The Framework (1998).

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• Chomskys TG Grammar differs from the structural
  grammar in a number of ways
• (1) rationalism
• (2) innateness
• (3) deductive methodology
• (4) emphasis on interpretation
• (5) formalization
• (6) emphasis on linguistic competence
• (7) strong generative powers
• (8) emphasis on linguistic universals.
•  

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• First, Chomsky defines language as a set of rules
  or principles. Second, Chomsky believes that the
  aim of linguistics is to produce a generative
  grammar which captures the tacit knowledge of the
  native speaker of his language. This concerns the
  question of learning theory and the question of
  linguistic universals. Third, Chomsky and his
  followers are interested in any data that can
  reveal the native speakers tacit knowledge. They
  seldom use what native speakers actually say
  they rely on their own intuition. Fourth,
  Chomskys methodology is hypothesis-deductive,
  which operates at two levels (a) the linguist
  formulates a hypothesis about language structure
  a general linguistic theory this is tested by
  grammars for particular languages, and (b) each
  such grammar is a hypothesis on the general
  linguistic theory. Finally, Chomsky follows
  rationalism in philosophy and mentalism in
  psychology.