Introduction to

Linguistics
History of linguistics
Mgr. Miroslav Ježek, Ph.D.
Brno, 27th November 2023
 Contents
• ancient times
• the Middle Ages
• Renaissance and humanism
• discovery of Sanskrit
• comparative philology
• the Neogrammarians
• F. de Saussure and structuralist schools
• generativism
• interdisciplinary linguistics
 India
• 1600-900 BC: the Vedas (religious texts in Sanskrit)
• About 500 BC: Sanskrit replaced by other languages->need to
preserve it (describe its phonology, grammar and vocabulary)
• Panini (5-4thC BC): the first grammar of a language surviving till
the present day (but 68 other grammarians are mentioned by
him)
• The discovery of Sanskrit at the end of the 18thC sparked
comparative (historical) linguistics
 Greece
• the Sophists (5thC BC): rhetoric (the art of speech),
synonymy/antonymy
• Plato: etymology, the relationship between the form and meaning
• Aristotle: vowels/semivowels/consonants, no difference between
written and spoken language (letter refers to sounds as well),
form/meaning relationship purely conventional
• From the 3rdC: desire to preserve archaic literary masterpieces
(Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey)
• Aristarchus of Samothrace, Appolonius Dyscolus (vocabulary, syntax)
• Dionysios Thrax (170-90 BC): Techné grammatiké, word categories,
inflectional and conjugational categories
 Rome
• Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC): etymology, morphology,
syntax, perfective and imperfective aspect of verbs
• Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35-95 AD): rhetoric
• Aelius Donatus (4thC AD) and Priscianus (5th-6thC AD): Latin
grammar books (e.g. Institutiones grammaticae)
• largely influenced by the Greeks (sometimes the terminology
applied too mechanically)
• of great importance for the following eras (Middle Ages/Early
Modern period, cf. 18th and 19thC prescriptivists: double
negation, spelling (doubt), meaning (aggravate).
 Middle Ages
• profound influence of Christianity upon formerly pagan nations
and their languages
• translations of the Holy Script (or parts thereof) into other
languages (most notably Ulfilas into Gothic and St Jerome into
Latin (known as the Vulgate) in 4thC AD, later St Cyril and
Methodius in 9thC)
• Gradually, Latin became by far the dominant language of
scholarly disciplines because of its close link to the Catholic
Church.
• Immense interest in Latin grammar led to questions of a more
general linguistic character: especially the problem of
universals.
 Renaissance
• Theology no longer the dominant discipline.
• Upsurge of interest in vernacular languages->need to analyse
and describe their spelling + pronunciation, grammar and
vocabulary (many dictionaries).
• Overseas exploration and discoveries unearthed more exotic
languages (e.g. the Aztecs, the Incas, Asian languages).
• Interest in living languages propelled by the invention of
printing.
 17th century
• Carried on with the impetus from the Renaissance period.
• Two main philosophical methods:
• Empiricism: only reliable method is experience -> inductive
reasoning (arguing from specific to general); Francis Bacon, John
Locke, David Hume
• Rationalism: only reliable method is reason -> deductive reasoning
(arguing from general to specific); Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza,
Gottfried Leibniz
• Descartes’ influence: philosophical grammars, e.g. Port-Royal Grammar
(1660), grammar is nothing but mental processes which are universal,
hence grammar is universal (and not language-specific).
• P-R Grammar later influenced de Saussure and, above all, Noam Chomsky
(generativism).
 18th century
• More descriptions of exotic languages.
• First studies of what would later be labelled comparative philology
(comparing related languages)
• Predominantly, “linguists” tried to answer the question of the origin of
language. As in the previous centuries, most of them argued the first
language was Hebrew.
• Cf. Leibniz (1710)-the first language must be much older than any known
language.
• Condillac (1746)- there is no link between linguistic signs and our
mental processes -> Saussure’s arbitrariness of linguistic signs.
• Emergence of a great number of orthoepists and orthographists.
• The discovery of Sanskrit, William Jones, 1786, Calcutta.
 The discovery of Sanskrit
• Jones demonstrated the historical kinship of Sanskrit with Latin,
Greek, and the Germanic languages.
• Sanskrit became the dominant topic (plentiful grammars), its
study became an academic ‘obsession’.
• Study of Sanskrit at the turn of the 19thC still far from linguistic,
though:
• hunt for the first language (Ursprache) and the superiority of some
languages compared to others.
 Comparative (historical) philology
• Founding fathers:
• Rasmus Rask (1787-1832)
• Danish; studied old Scandivanian languages, later Slavonic and Oriental
ones; grammar (esp. morphology and phonology) more reliable than
lexis.
• Franz Bopp (1791-1867)
• German; tried to find the first language but unsuccessful; language
development=decadence; studied and compared conjugation in
Sanskrit, Greek, Persian, and German.
• Jacob Grimm (1785-1863)
• German; studied Germanic languages only; sound laws, especially the
so-called Grimm’s law.
 Grimm’s law (1822)
• Also called the First Germanic Sound Shift
• The first discovery of a systematic sound shift -> historical
phonology.
• Three parts (phases) of a chain shift:
• 1/ IE voiceless stops /p, t, k, kw/ -> voiceless fricatives /f, ɵ, h, hw/
• Lat pes -> Eng foot, Lat tertius -> Eng three, Lat canis -> Eng hound; Lat quod -
> Old Eng hwat;
• 2/ IE voiced stops /b, d, g, gw/ -> voiceless stops /p, t, k, kw/
• Serbian jabuka -> Eng apple, Lat decem -> Eng ten, Lat gelu -> Eng cold,
Lithuanina ghywas -> Eng quick;
• 3/ IE aspirated voiced stops /bh, dh, gh/ -> unaspirated ones /b, d, g/
• Sanskrit bhrathar -> Eng brother, Sanskrit madhu -> Eng mead, Sanskrit
stighnoti -> Old Eng stigan (ModE ascend, climb).
Other 19thC philologists- Wilhelm von Humboldt
• Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835)
• In many ways was not part of the main trend of comparative philology
(unlike his contemporaries, he was mainly interested in living
languages).
• Inspired by nationalist romanticism, his main focus was on the
relationship between language and thinking -> the better the
language, the better the nation.
• Each language creates the individual’s worldview through its lexical and
grammatical categories and its conceptual organisation.
• Innere Sprachform (inner speech form)- latent psychic processes that
are manifested by the outer form (i.e. the structure of the language)
• Cf. the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the 1920’s)
 Other 19thC philologists- August Schleicher
• August Schleicher (1821-1868)
• professor at Prague University in the 1850’s (apart from the usual
languages, he got a lot of evidence for his theories from the Lithuanian
language).
• originally a botanist hugely influenced by darwinism -> saw language
as a living organism and linguistics was one of natural sciences.
• Stages in the life of a language: isolating -> agglutinative ->
inflectional, then decadence and language death.
• Stammbaumtheorie: a genealogical tree for languages (the trunk being
the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language).
 The Neogrammarians
• 1875 Karl Verner (Danish) defined the so-called Verner’s law: it
described a historical sound shift that explained the apparent
exceptions to the Grimm’s law.
• According to Grimm’s law: IE /p, t, k/ -> voiceless /f, ɵ, h/, but:
only in stressed syllables. In unstressed ones, as Verner
demonstrated, they turned into voiced fricatives /β, ð ,ɣ/, which
later turned into /b, d, g/. Example: IE *septm -> German
sieben (not siefen).
• This success sparked a number of new studies and a journal,
published by Karl Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff, in which the
new generation of linguists called themselves the
Junggrammatiker (the Neogrammarians).
 The Neogrammarian hypothesis
• ‘ausnahmlose Lautgesetze’ (laws that admit no exceptions)
• A diachronic sound change affects simultaneously all words in
which its environment is met, without exception.
• Historical development of a language and the description of the
sound changes is the only scientific method in linguistics (any
interest in the current languages pure amateurism).
• Criticism: language is a social fact (not natural), the theory of
lexical diffusion shows that some words are affected first,
others follow (or not).
 Towards the ‘Copernican turn’ in linguistics
• Dialectology (dialect geography)
• Georg Wenker (Germany) and Jules Gillieron (France)
• from the 1870’s- hitherto rejected dialects (‘degenerate’ varieties of
the standard languages) in the centre of attention because they
resist foreign influence.
• initially supported by the neogrammarians (great interest in sound
changes and the aim was to track ancient forms as back as
possible).
• later refuted because it disproved their hypothesis (many, many
exceptions…).
• from universal sound laws (changes) to individual word histories.
 Towards the ‘Copernican turn’ in linguistics
• Aesthetic idealism
• Benedetto Croce (Italy), Karl Vossler (Germany)
• Influenced by W. von Humboldt
• from 1900
• Language as a means of individualistic intuitive expression =>
linguistics part of aesthetics and must be studied in close relation to
culture, religion, art, history, etc.
• No meaning but in the individual’s mind and his/her imagination.
• Language mirrors the individual’s mind, his/her aesthetic ideal.
• Linguistic change is thus only triggered by the individual.
 Towards the ‘Copernican turn’ in linguistics
• Kazan School of Linguistics
• Founded in the 1870’s
• Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (d. 1929), Mikolaj Kruszewski (d. 1887)
• In many ways the school anticipates the 20thC turn towards
synchronic linguistics (language of a community v. language of an
individual; language development v. current state; division of
physiophonetics and psychophonetics).
• The School only lasted for about 10 years => not enough time to
properly analyse and discuss the notions; unknown for many years
before de Saussure brought their teaching to light.
• De Courtenay later worked in St Petersburg, e.g. came up with a
new definition of phoneme (very close to that of Trubetzkoy).
 The ‘Copernican turn’ in linguistics- structuralism
• Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
• Founder of structuralism in Geneva.
• Studied in Leipzig (trained in comparative philology), later worked
in Paris and Geneva.
• 1907-11 lectures—later (1916) posthumously published by two of
his students =>
• Cours de linguistique générale, Course in General Linguistics
• How much of it is actually Saussure?
• He tried to strip away all that is accidental to language (history,
psychology, society, etc.)—speakers are perfectly capable of using
their language even if they know nothing about its history.
• Linguistics is thus a fully autonomous discipline.
 Structuralism- key concepts
• Synchronic v. diachronic approach to linguistic studies
• Langue v. parole
• Language as a system- units defined by their function
• Syntagmatic v. paradigmatic analysis of the language
system
• Linguistics part of semiology->revolutionary claim that
linguistics belongs to the realm of social studies
• Linguistic sign- signifiant (signifier) v. signifié (signified)
• arbitrary relationship between the two
 Langue v. parole
• Language-system v. language behaviour.
• Parole is the ‘external “raw” manifestation of the linguistic data in their
actual communicative context’, while langue ‘denotes the basic underlying
system of structured oppositions which makes it possible to produce and
understand such contextualised instances of parole’ (Mair 2015: 209).
• Chess analogy.
• Linguists should only focus on langue.
• Language-systems are unique and there are thus no universal properties
of language (apart from the very general semiotic ones like arbitrariness,
productivity, discontinuity), cf. Chomsky’s firm rejection of this.
 Linguistic sign
• A conventional pairing of sound (the signifier, in French signifiant) and
meaning (which is signified, in French signifié).
• Like other conventional form-meaning pairs (e.g. road-signs), the
relationship between the two components is purely abritrary.
 Other structuralist schools
• Prague Linguistic Circle
• Founded in 1926
• Vilém Mathesius, Nikolay Trubetskoy, Roman Jakobson, Bohumil Trnka,
Bohuslav Havránek, Jan Mukařovský, Vladimír Skalička, Josef Vachek,
Jan Firbas…
• Functional-structuralist school
• Discussed in great detail in lecture next week (6/12)
 Other structuralist schools
• Copenhagen School- glossematics
• Founded in 1934 by Viggo Brondal and Luis Hjelmslev.
• Closely linked with language philosophy, especially with logic.
• Language study calls for unique methods completely unrelated to other
disciplines (physiological, sociological, functional, etc.) =>
• highly abstract (formalist or mathematical) approach called
glossematics (glossa=language in Greek), an algebra of language in
Hjelmslev‘s words.
• Redefined and renamed many structuralist dichotomies (e.g. phoneme
is ceneme, from Greek keinos=empty)
 Other structuralist schools
• American school- descriptivism
• Founded in 1924 (Linguistic Society of America), Language journal.
• Franz Boas (d. 1942), Edward Sapir (d. 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (d. 1949)
• Unique in its earlier focus on linguistic anthropology and ethnography (languages of
native Americans)
• As in the teachings of the Copenhagen school, form is given prominence over
meaning (mathematical methods, esp. later in Bloomfield).
• Special interest in phonology and morphology
• Sapir’s Language (1921): language as a cultural phenomenon that is acquired (not
innately given)
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: mutual determination of language, culture and thought
-> the structure of the language that we speak determines what we can think and
express in our culture (originally von Humboldt’s idea, cf. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
(5.6) ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’).
 Other structuralist schools
• American school- descriptivism
• Bloomfield’s Language (1933): influenced by behaviourism (S -> r…s -> R,
S=stimulus, R=reaction, linguistics is only interested in the r…s part)
• Descriptivism dominated American linguistics for a number of decades, finished in the
late 1950s with the arrival of generativism (Noam Chomsky).
 Generativism
• Started in the 1950’s by Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
• Grammatical structures have nothing to do with function (i.e. communicative
needs)
• If children can produce and understand previously never heard-of utterances,
then language acquisition cannot develop in response to environmental stimuli -
>
• this creativity (i.e. the capacity for unlimited creativity through the application
of a limited number of productive (generative) rules on an equally limited
number of linguistic forms; Mair 2015: 212) is then a rule-governed activity.
• These rules have the formal properties determined by the human mind
(linguistics is a mentalist discipline) and are judged by the criterion of well-
formedness. Are utterances grammatical or not?
• competence v. performance (roughly the same as langue v. parole)
 Generativism
• Unlike structuralism (linguistic diversity), generativism is deeply convinced
there are linguistic universals—exactly what linguistics should deal
with.
• Language-faculty in generativism is innate and species-specific -> humans
are born with a Universal Grammar, which is latently present and
activated in such a way as to produce a particular language.
• UG is a highly complex set of rules based on mathematics and
philosophical logic.
• Criticism: grammatical systems are not mathematical algorithms (they are
not so neat and well-defined) as there are many hazy points that are
based on one’s communicative needs as well as the contextual setting.
• More about generativism in dr. Pelclová’s lecture.
 British contextualism
• Started by J R Firth (d. 1960) and then M A K Halliday (d. 2018)
• Does not divide langue and parole so sharply and calls for an approach
that reflects both -> language must be studied in both its social and
communicative contexts
• Lexis and grammar are not sharply divided either, it is a continuum.
• Great impact on lexicography—esp. in the non-native world (ELT).
 Interdisciplinary linguistics
Sociolinguistics (since the 1960’s)
• William Labov (b. 1927)
• Quantitative (more or less rather than either…or) methods to study
language variation and change
• Aim is to document statistically significant correlations between
independent social variables (such as gender, age, social class, regional
background, etc.)
• Key notion: the linguistic variable (e.g. the glottal stop, /h/-dropping).
• Move from rural to urban dialectology
 Interdisciplinary linguistics
Corpus linguistics
• Enabled by rapid development of technology and its data storage capacity
• Real-world samples of speech/texts stored in corpora are studied and
analysed.
• Advantage: no influence from the observer, all data gathered in a
completely natural context
 Interdisciplinary linguistics
Psycholinguistics (since 1951)
• American psychologists and linguists set up this discipline to address the
issue of foreign language acquisition.
• Initially a mixture of American descriptivism plus behaviourism plus theory
of information, later challenged by Chomsky’s generativism (innate
language capacity).
• Today, the focus is on cognitive processes (how information is perceived,
analysed, stored in memory, then activated and reshaped).
 Interdisciplinary linguistics
Neurolinguistics (since the 1950s)
• Studies neural mechanisms in the human brain that affect how language is
acquired, produced and understood.
• Special focus on aphasias (i.e. inability to produce and understand
language due to damage to certain brain regions)
• Speech centres
 Interdisciplinary linguistics
Philosophy of language (from time immemorial)
• Like in any other interdisciplinary field that contains philosophy, philosophy
of language aims to generalise the linguistic findings about language and
answer the very basic questions of its nature.
• Special focus on the relationships between language and thought and
language and extralinguistic reality.
• Bertrand Russell: logical atomism:
• world consists of unrelated facts, any relationship between such atomic facts is due
to the fact that humans interpret facts by means of language.
 Interdisciplinary linguistics
Philosophy of language (from time immemorial)
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921):
• 4.002: Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one
cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is
constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.
The tacit conventions on which everyday language depends are
enormously complicated.
• 4.0031: All philosophy is a ‘critique of language’.
• 5.6: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
• 7: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
 References
• Lyons, John. 1981. Language and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge.
• Mair, Christian. 2015. English Linguistics. Narr Francke Attempto:
Tubingen.