The Study Of Language

Plato and Aristotle made major contributions to the study of language. Plato said to have the first person to distinguish between nouns and verbs.

The 19th-century concern wirh reconstructing Proto-Indo-European, and making hypotheses about the way it split into the various modern languages, was encouraged by the general intellectual climate of the times. In the mid-19th century, Darwin published his famous Origin of Species, puting forward the theory of evolution.

A group of scholars centred around Leipzing, and nicknamed the "Young Grammarians" claimed that language change is "regular".

The Swiss scholar Ferninand de Saussure (1857-1913), who is the father of modern linguistic. After his death, he published them under the title Course in General Linguistic (1915).

De Saussures crucial contributions was that all language items are essentially interlinked.

His insistence that language is a carefully built structure of interwoven elements initiated the era od ftructural linguistics.

That language is a patterned system composed of interdependent elements.

Bloomfield considered that linguistics should deal objectively and systematically with observable data.

The study of meaning was not amenable to rigorous methods of analysis and was therefore, he concluded, the weak point in language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far beyond its present state.

Noam Chomsky, then aged twenty-nine, a teacher at the Massachusettd Institute of Technology, published a book called Syntactic Structures. This book started a revolution in linguistics. Chomsky is, arguably, the most influential linguistic of the century. He is the linguistic whose reputation has spread furthest outside linguistics. He transformed linguistic from a relatively obscure discipline of interest mainly to PhD students.

Chomsky in his opinion, a linguistics task is to discover these rules, which constitude the grammar of the language in question. Chomsky uses the word grammar interchangeably to mean, on the hand a persons internalized rules, and on the other hand, a linguistics guess as to these rules.

A grammar which consists of a set of statements or rules which specify which sequences of a language are possible, and which impossible, is a generative grammar.

The Basic characteristics of Transformational-generative grammar (TGG).

The constraints on human language are, he suggests, inheruted ones. Human beings may well pre-programmed with a basic knowledge of what languages in general are like, and how they work. 

Chomsky has given the label Universal Grammar (UG) to this inherited core, and he regards it as a major task of linguistic to specify what it consists of. 

Historical linguistics

In the 18th century James Burnett, Lord Monboddo analyzed numerous primitive languages and deduced logical elements of the evolution of human language. His thinking was interleaved with his precursive concepts of biological evolution. Some of his early concepts have been validated and are considered correct today. In his The Sanscrit Language (1786), Sir William Jones proposed that Sanskrit and Persian had resemblances to classical Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Celtic languages. From this idea sprung the field of comparative linguistics and historical linguistics. Through the 19th century, European linguistics centered on the comparative history of the Indo-European languages, with a concern for finding their common roots and tracing their development.

In the 1820s, Wilhelm von Humboldt observed that human language was a rule-governed system, anticipating a theme that was to become central in the formal work on syntax and semantics of language in the 20th century, of this observation he said that it allowed language to make "infinite use of finite means" (Über den Dualis 1827).

It was only in the late 19th century that the Neogrammarian approach of Karl Brugmann and others introduced a rigid notion of sound law.

                                                             Descriptive linguistics

In Europe there was a parallel development of structural linguistics, influenced most strongly by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss professor of Indo-European and general linguistics whose lectures on general linguistics, published posthumously by his students, set the direction of European linguistic analysis from the 1920s on; his approach has been widely adopted in other fields under the broad term "Structuralism".

During the second World War, Leonard Bloomfield and several of his students and colleagues developed teaching materials for a variety of languages whose knowledge was needed for the war effort. This work led to an increasing prominence of the field of linguistics, which became a recognized discipline in most American universities only after the war.

In 1965, William Stokoe, a linguist from Gallaudet University published an analysis which proved that American Sign Language fits the criteria for a natural language.

Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping, meanings.

Formally, a generative grammar is defined as one that is fully explicit. It is a finite set of rules that can be applied to generate all those and only those sentences (often, but not necessarily, infinite in number) that are grammatical in a given language. This is the definition that is offered by Noam Chomsky, who invented the term, and by most dictionaries of linguistics. Generate is being used as a technical term with a particular sense. To say that a grammar generates a sentence means that the grammar "assigns a structural description" to the sentence.

The term generative grammar is also used to label the approach to linguistics taken by Chomsky and his followers. Chomsky's approach is characterised by the use oftransformational grammar – a theory that has changed greatly since it was first promulgated by Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures – and by the assertion of a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the same). The term "ge(ne)rative linguistics" is often applied to the earliest version of Chomsky's transformational grammar, which was associated with a distinction between the "deep structure" and "surface structure" of sentences.