Saussure and Chomsky´s Song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5WuCMmG1Uw

A Brief History About language as Social Fact.

SAUSSURE: LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL FACT

Although nowdays one thinks of Saussure first and foremost as the scholar who defined the notion of ‘synchronic linguistics’ –the study of languages as the system existing at a given point of time, as opposed to the historical linguistics (‘diachronic’ linguistics, as Saussure called it to clarify the contrast) which had seemed to his contemporaries the only possible approach to the subject- in his own lifetime this was far from his main claim to fame.

Saussure was trained as a linguist of the conventional, historical variety, and became outstandingly successful as such at a very early age: his Mémoire sur le systeme primitive des voyelles aans les langues indo-européennes (1878), published a few weeks after his 21^st birthday while he was a student in Germany, remains one of the landmarks in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European.

Two of his colleagues, however, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, who had been prevented by their own teaching duties for hearing Saussure’s lectures on general linguistics, decided to reconstruct them from notes taken by students together with such lecture-notes as Saussure had left had left behind: the book they produced, the Cours de linguistique générale, was the vehicle by which Saussure’s thought became known to the scholarly world, and it is in virtue of this one document that Saussure is recognized as the father of 20^th century linguistics.

Consider, for instance, the fairly standard controversy in the description of English as to wheter the affricate spelled ch should be analysed as a unit or as a combination of /t/ followed by /∫/. There are arguments on both sides: the second solution is in a sense more plausible, since it suggests that an Englishman has fewer different sounds to learn, but on the other hand it implies a consonant cluster quiet different in kind from the other clusters found in English (e.g. we have no / K∫ /, / P∫ / ). What cannot be relevant, if phonological analysis is supposed to represent some truth about English as a vehicle of communication between contemporary English-speakers, is the fact that, historically, ch descends from a single sound, / k /, and never had anything to do with / t / + /∫/.

In an analogy that keeps recurring throughout the Cours, Saussure compares a language with a game of chess: what has gone before is quite irrelevant to the current state of play at any point.

According to Saussure there is an essentially systematic character to the synchronic facts of language which he claims to be lacking in diachrony.

A language comprises a set of ‘’signs’’ (represented by the divisions marked off by dotted lines), each sign being the union of a signifiant (a ‘’signifier’’, or portion of speech-sound) with a signifié (a ‘signified’, or portion of meaning); but individual signs cannot be considered in isolation, since both their pronunciation and their meaning are defined by their contrasts with the other signs of the system –without the system provided by a given language, we have no basis for individuating sounds or concepts.

Why does Saussure say that diachronic linguistics lacks this ‘systematic’ character? In the first place, he is making a simple factual comment on the descriptive technique of historical linguistics as he knew it. A typical historical statement would be. Say, that the sound [ a ] changed to [ e ] in such-and-such a language at some particular period; and a historical linguist would not, typically, have laid much stress on the question whether or not the language already had an [ e ] sound before the change occurred. But for Saussure this question is all-important. If there was no [ e ] previously, then all that has happened is that one of the phonemes of the language has modified its pronunciation, and from Saussure’s point of view this hardly counts as a change at all.

A state of play in chess is not affected in the slightest if we substitute a knight made of ivory for a wooden knight: similarly, in language, what matters is the form of the system not the substance (in this case, speech-sound) by which the elements of that system are realized. (After all, English is still English whether we realize it as spoken sounds or as ink on paper.) If, on the other hand, the language already had an [ e ] identical to the new form [ e ] from [ a ], then a change in the system has taken place. Two phonemes have merged into one; pairs of words that previously contrasted in pronunciation have become homophones, and this change in one part of the system will have repercussions throughout the system as a whole.

Saussure felt that historical sound-changes are in a sense intrinsically independent of systems.

According to Saussure, the changes which actually occur in the story of a language are in no way dependent on the effect they will have on the system: the dropping of final / s z / is no less (and no more) likely in English than the dropping of final / f v /.

A language, according to Saussure, is an example of the kind of entity which certain sociologists call ‘social facts’.

Durkheim propounded the notion of ‘social fact’ in his Rules of Sociological Method. According to Durkheim, the talk of sociology was to study and describe a realm of phenomena quite distinct in kind both from the phenomena of the physical world and from the phenomena dealt with by psychology, although just as real as these other categories of phenomena.

This give Saussure the answer to the ontological problem posed above. ‘French’ is not a thing in the same sense as a chair or a table; but, if there is a category of ‘things’ which includes legal systems and structures of convention, then languages surely fit squarely into that category too. The data which a linguist can actually observe are of course perfectly physical phenomena –sequences of vocal sounds, printed texts and the like. But we must draw a distinction between the physical facts which can be tangibly observed –what Saussure call parole, ‘speaking’ –and the general system of langue, ‘language’, which those physical phenomena exemplify but which is not itself a physical phenomenon. The concrete data of parole are produced by individual speakers, but ‘language’ is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a colectivity’.

FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE

Mind Map

Timeline

Historical linguistcs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AJADwYhDdI

vocabulary

Linguistics: Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.



Sociolinguistics: Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society.



competence, being an ideal, is located as a psychological or mental property or function.



Performance, which refers to an actual event.



Phonetics: is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or languages, the equivalent aspects of sign.



phonology: is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with "the sounds of language is.


The first is the study of language structure, or grammar.



This focuses on the system of rules followed by the speakers (or hearers) of a language. It encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words),


syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words),

.

The study of language meaning is concerned with how languages employ logical structures and real-world references to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to manage and resolve ambiguity.



This subfield encompasses semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).



Language in its broader context includes evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language.


historical linguistics: which explores language change.


psycholinguistics: which explores the representation and function of language in the mind.


neurolinguistics: which looks at language processing in the brain.


language acquisition: how children or adults acquire language.


discourse analysis: which involves the structure of texts and conversations.


Semiotics: is the general study of signs and symbols both within language and without.


Literary theorists: study the use of language in literature.



Linguistics additionally draws on and informs work from such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology.

The Descriptivists

·        Descriptive linguistics is the study and analysis of spoken languages.

·        Descriptive linguists:

a)   Begin by listening to native speakers.

b)  Gather a body of data. Research on the detailed structure of exotic languages.

c)   Analyze to identify distinctive sounds (phonemes).

d)  Knowing the function of the morphemes in the sentence enables the linguist to describe the grammar of the language being analyzed (scientific structuralism).

Ex. Individual phonemes /p/ & /b/ substitution of one or the other changes the meaning of the word. After identifying the entire inventory of sounds in a language the linguist looks at how these sounds combine to create morphemes or units of sounds that carry meaning such as: PUSH & BUSH. This is the scientific procedure of phonemics, morphology & syntax.

The linguist’s next step is to see how morphemes combine into sentences obeying both the dictionary meaning of the morpheme & the grammatical rules of the sentence such as in the sentence:

                “She pushed the bush”

          Pronoun   Transitive   Article          Noun

      (Subject)      (Verb)     (Determiner)  (Object)

·       Franz Boas:

-      The founder of the “Descriptive Linguistics” school.

-      He challenged the application of conventional methods of language study of native North American languages with no written records. He was an anthropologist.

-      He said that descriptive should describe the relationships of speech elements of words and sentences.

-      He saw grammar as a description of how human speech in a language is organized.

-      He studied the Kwakiutl (Present Canadians). 

-      One of his conclusions was that no pure race exists and no race is innately superior to any other, since idiolects of a language within one culture depends on the individual’s background.

-      Relativism i.e. no ideal language because human languages are diverse (European vs. African languages).

-      Boas saw language as the most interesting aspect of culture to study. He says in every language there are certain logical categories which must be expressed whether relevant to a particular message or not. The categories are symmetrical in different languages that are in comparison (Number, gender, tense). Now an individual learn to ignore the differences between allophones of the same phoneme in ones own language, Ex. /t/ aspirated non-aspirated. But we notice them in an alien language because they seem to change the meaning.

                                          

·       Leonard Bloomfield:

-   He worked on grouping Native American languages.

-   He was committed to the point that linguistics in an independent science.

-   He insisted on using scientific procedures in analyzing a language.

-   He based his work, especially his approach to meaning, on behavioristic principles.

-   He promoted structuralism (Language as a system with a highly organized structure).

By Mr. Tory Cantú

We are Linguists

Language
Is the most important way to express your
Needs and feelings. We as linguists consider it as a
Gift of God, is
Unique among all other
Issues that exist in the world.
So, we are proud of
Teaching Good Languages
In the same way that
Chomsky did.
So, we hope linguistics results interesting for you.

Functional Linguistics: the Prague School

Generative Linguistics and Generative Theory

Generative linguistics includes a set of explanatory theories developed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s.  It opposes the behaviourist theory and structuralism. Generative theory is distinguished from others taditions by distinguishing competence and performance, which distinguishes in the act of speech of its linguistic capacity. Thus, under this approach each speaker has a linguistic organ specialized in the analysis and production of complex structures  forming the speech. In other words, every language from an observable structure result an innate system and universally shared.

American Linguistics

The history of linguistics in the United States begins with William Dwight Witney, the first US-taught academic linguistic, who founded the American Philological Association in 1869. Leonard Bloomfield professor at University of Chicago from 1921, founded the Linguistic Society of American in 1924. Other linguistist active in the half of 20th century include Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. From the 1950s, American Linguistic tradition began to diverge from the Saussurian structuralism taught in European academia, notably Noam Chomsky's nativist transformational grammar and successor theories, which during the 1970s Linguistics Wars  and Postmodernism gave rise to bewildering variety of competing grammar frameworks. The growth of American Linguistics began when European anthropologil linguists arrived in North America to study and record native-american languages before many of those languages disappeared.

Historical Background

Modern linguistics began to develop in 18th century, reaching the golden age in the 19th century. The first half of the 20th century was marked by the structuralist school based on the Ferdinand de Sassure in Europe and Edwar Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield in the United States. The 1960s saw the rise  of many new field of linguistics such as Noam Chomsky's Generative Grammar, William Labov's Sociolinguistics, Michael Halliday's systematic functional linguistic and also modern psycholinguistics.

Applied Linguistics

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary  field of studies that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some the academic fields related to applied linguistics are: education, linguistics, psychology, science, anthropology and sociology. Major branches of applied linguistics include bilingualisim and multilingualisim, pragmatics, translation, etc.

Linguistics don't seem to know where they've come from, so how can they know where they're going.

Chomsky's universal grammar.

Mid-to late-20th century: generative linguistics and the search for universals.

In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. Noam Chomsky published a book called Syntactic Structures, this little book started a revolution in linguistics.

Chomsky trasformed linguistics from a relative discipline for interest mainly to PhD students (Doctor of Philosophy) and future missionaries into a major social science or direct relevance to psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and others. Chomsky has shifted attention waya from detailed descriptions of actual utterances, and started asking questions about the nature of the system which produces the output.

Chomsky points out that anyone who knows a language must have internalized a set of rules which specify the sequences permitted in their language. A linguist's task is to discover these rules, which constitute  the grammar of the language in question.

A grammar which consists of a set of statements or rules which specify wich sequences of a language are possible, and which impossible, is a generative grammar. A grammar will be a 'device which generates all the grammatical sequences of a language and none of the ungrammatical ones'.

Humans beings may well be 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 linguistics to specify what it consists of.

Leonard Bloomfield.

In 1933 Leonard Bloomfield publicated a comprehensive work entitled simply Language, which attempeted to lay down rigorous procedures for the description of any language.

Bloomfield cosidered that linguistics should deal objectively and systematically with observable data. Bloomfield had immense influence - far more than European linguists working during this period - and the so-called 'Bloomfield era' lasted for more than twenty years. During this time, large number of linguistics concentrated on writing descriptive grammars of unwritten languages. This involved first finding native speakers of the language concerned collecting sets of utterances from them. Second, it involved analysing the corpus of collected utterances by studying the phonological and syntactic patterns of the language concerned, as far as possible without recourse to meaning

Dicovery procedures are a set of principles which would enable a linguist to 'discover' in a foolproof way the linguistic units of an unwritten language. 

Early-to mid-20th century: descriptive linguistics.

In the 20th century, the emphasis shifted from language change to language description. Instead of looking at how a selection of items changed in a number of different languages, linguists began to concentrate on describing single languages at one particular point of time.

Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913) is sometimes labelled 'the father of modern linguistics'. He died without having written any major work on general linguistics. Course in General Linguistics is a compilation about the Saussure's lecture notes his students collected together after his death.

Saussure first suggested that language was like a game of chess, a systemin which each item is defined by its relationship to all others. His insistence  that language is a carefully built structure of interwoven elements initiated  the era of structural linguistics.

Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species' and the Scholars from Leipzig.

In the mid-19th century, Darwin published his famous Origin of Species, putting forward the theory of evolution. It seemed natural to attempt to chart the evolution of language alongside the evolution of species.

This emphasis on language change eventually led to a major theorical advance. In the last quarter of the century, a group of scholars centred around Leipzig, and nicknamed the 'Young Grammarians', claimed that language change is 'regular'. They argued that if, in any of a given dialect, one sound changes into another, the change will also affect all other occurrences of the same sound in similar phonetic surroundings.
The influence of the 19th-century scholars was strong. Even today, one still meets members of the general  public who expect the cataloguing of linguistic changes and the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European to be the central concern of modern linguistics.

Sir William Jones

1786 is the year wich many people regard as the birthdate of linguistics. On the 27th of September, 1786, an Englishman, Sir William Jones, read a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta pointing out that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all had striking structural similarities. So impressive were these likenesses that these languages must spring from one common source, he concluded.
Sir William Jones' discovery fired the imagination of scholars. For the next hundred years, all other linguistic work was eclipsed by the general preoccupation with writing comparative grammars, grammars which first compared the different linguistic forms he found in the various members of the Indo-European language family, and second, attempted to set up a hypothetical  ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, from which all these languages were descended.

Nineteenth century: historical linguistics.

It is important to know that before the 19th century, language was of interest mainly to philosophers. Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle did make major contributions to the study of language. Plato is said to have been the first person who distinguish between nouns and verbs. This kind of information really complement our knowledge as future linguists because it is important to take a look back in history and check who were the pioneers in the subject we are studying. The paint we are showing is called "Plato and Aristotle in the School of Athens" imagined by Raphael.

THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE

Linguistics can be likened to a footway that starts a mysterious forest of language. Talking metaphorically, different parts of the forest (linguistics) have been explored at different times, so we can despict the path as a winding one.

Linguists don't seem to know where they've come from, so how can they know where they're going. -An anonymous rethorician.

Welcome everybody!

We hope this blog results interesting for you. The information that we will share with you will help you to understand in a deeper way some topics about Linguistics Theory subject. Bless you all!