Introduction to the History of Linguistics(Part 1)

November 27, 2006 16:00-18:00

From this week on, we are going to learn something about the history of linguistics. As we all possess little knowledge about linguistics, let alone history of linguistics, Prof. Gibbon gave us a brief introduction on the braches, from Philology to Computational Linguistics. Therefore, we could get a sense of what we're interested in and make some reports in the later classes.

1.Comparative Philology:

Comparative Philology started in the mid 19th century, mainly studying the history of linguistics. The linguists compared differing language families and their relationship. The early linguists in this area were Brothers Grimm, who composed the "Grimm's Fairy Tales" and other folk tales in order to study the collection of dialects. This is considered as the beginning of modern linguistic methodology. Grimm's law enunciated by the brother Jacob was the first non-trivial systematic sound change ever to be discovered.

2.Functional Linguistics:(my topic)

From the 20th Century, the linguists shifted their focus from the history and develpment of languages to their functions and structures. This is to say, they began to deal with syncronic study instead of diachronic research. In 1924, a Polish linguist named Branislav Molinovski published the first article about Functional Linguistics. And then, in 1930, Prague School was founded, which focused on the different functions of language. In 1960s, a Russian linguist, Roman Jacobson published "Language and Poetics" in America. Later, during the 1960s and 1970s, Halliday, who's recognized as father of Functional Linguistics, founded System Functional Linguistics.

3.Structural Linguistics:

Structural Linguistics focuses on the forms of language. The Swiss linguist Saussure worked in this area. He first raised the statement that language should be studied as science. There're 3 pairs of core-terms in Saussure's theory: sound and meaning, langue and parole, syntactic form and semantic meaning.

4.Generative Linguistics:

Generative Linguistics, with Noam Chomsky as its presentative, studies the principles behind the structures, known as generative grammar. Chomsky believed that man is born with language competence.

5.Computational Linguistics:

Computational Linguistics studies the structure of language. It focuses on how to make a computer analyze and understand language, discourse and text. The practical examples are Google and MS Word.