Studium Generale

Section for linguistics students

Lecture 3: History of the science of language
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Outline
Your homework from last time
Overview of last 2 lectures
Why study it? Whats the use of the history of linguistics?
Prehistory of linguistics
Ancient linguistics
Middle ages in Europe
Rise of European colonialism and nation states
Modern linguistics

The Prague school
British structuralism
Danish structuralism
American structuralism
Rejection of structuralism

What are interesting and important issues and questions?







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Homework from last time
What is mathematical induction?
How if at all is it like scientific induction?
How do mathematicians and philosophers of
mathematics regard it?

Are they as cautious and critical of it as in science?
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So who?
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Overview of last 2 lectures
Lets hear it from you

What is science? What is a scientific approach?
Some remarks on the origin and history of science
Pseudo-science and hoaxes
The philosophy of science
Scientific reasoning

Deduction
Induction
Inference to best explanation
Explanation
Causality

Conclusion
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Because its there George Mallory, March
1923
Excitement

Excitement of doing linguistics excitement of
doing history

Like all cultural phenomena linguistics has a
history, which partly shapes it:

The questions it addresses
The methods it employs
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Why study it? Whats the use of the
history of linguistics?
Koerner 2002 concludes his Toward a history of
American linguistics saying that he feels impelled
to comment on the usefulness of the history of
linguistics
What he comes up with is somewhat
disappointing:

The need for a historical perspective in learning
linguistics introduction to the subject via history
Historical knowledge as part of a scientists education
the scientist is not a mechanic, and has more than
mechanical skills
Historical knowledge as means of evaluating new
hypotheses contributes to the development of skills
in judgement of new ideas, and safeguards against
uncritical acceptance of allegedly novel ideas
Historical knowledge as a means of moderating
exaggerated theoretical claims, and claims to novelty
Historical knowledge as furthering the unity of the the
complex subject

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All of Koerners suggestions seem to be
variants on one theme

Understanding what we do and why we do it
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Thomas, M. 2007. The evergreen story of
Psammetichus inquiry into the origin of
language. Historiographia Linguistica
XXXIV (1): 37-62 has a better suggestion,
which might be put crassly as:

To make linguists and students aware of
myths in the discipline, and to take a critical
line on them
She quotes Vivian Law, saying:

a key responsibility of students of the language
sciences is to learn to listen to [what texts from
other cultures and times] say with openness and
acceptance



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I think there is also another much more
important and compelling reason:

Contribution to language documentation and
description
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Prehistory of linguistics
People everywhere talk about language: they
have ideas about its nature, uses, origins,
acquisition, structure, and so on

Recall Hockett!

Some of these notions are enshrined in
mythology

Naming things by Adam remember?
Tower of Babel accounts for?
Others?
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Linguistics?

Represents a body of knowledge and beliefs
about language
But, there are differences from linguistics as
we understand the term, right?

Such as?

Ethnolinguistics as per ethnomathematics,
ethnohistory ( oral history), ethnowhatever
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Rise of linguistics as field of investigation with rise of
civilisations, agriculture and writing

In most cases these traditions arose in response to
language change and the resulting impact on religious and
legal domains





Babylonian clay tablets (cuneiform) emergence of
a grammatical tradition around 3000 BC, continuing
for 2500 years.

Preservation of Sumerian; translations into Akkadian
Comparative paradigms in the two languages
Ancient linguistics
The linguistic texts from the earliest parts
of the tradition were lists of nouns in
Sumerian
Over the centuries the lists became
standardised, and the Sumerian words
were provided with Akkadian translations.
Ultimately texts emerged that give
Akkadian equivalents for not just single
words, but for entire paradigms of varying
forms for words: one text, for instance, has
227 different forms of the verb gar to
place.
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Indian tradition, from about 500 BC

Mainly for religious purposes, motivated by
linguistic changes, and differences between
the spoken language and the written Sanskrit
Ritual required the exact verbal performance
of the religious texts, and a grammatical
tradition emerged that set out rules for the
ancient language

Panini most famous of the Indian grammarians
date unknown (600BC? 300BC?)
His grammar covered

Phonetics including differences between words
pronounced in isolation and in connected speech
Morphology, expressed largely in the form of rules of word
formation, sometimes of a high degree of abstraction.

The Hindu tradition of
linguistics far surpassed
anything done in Europe
for a very long time.
Panini introduced the
notion of zero into
linguistics



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Egyptian linguistics pharaoh
Psammaticus (c. 450 BC) famous for his
experiment on origins of human language

If that is what it was Thomas 2007 provides
a telling critique and analysis of the myth

Remember?
Linguistics in ancient Greece
Influence of Greek intellectual traditions in
modern European thought

Philosophy
Mathematics
Linguistics

Some notable differences from the earlier
intellectual traditions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc.
Bloomfield: The ancient Greeks had the gift of
wondering at things that other people take for
granted
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Influences on the development of linguistics as a
scholarly field:

Developed slightly later than the Hindu tradition, and also
initially in response to linguistic change necessitating
explanation of the language of Homers epics
No evident interest in other language
Interest in the dialect varieties of Greek

In the Hellenistic period (from c.300 BC) evidence of systematic
study of differences in dialectal varieties of Greek

Robins suggests that the first evidence of linguistic
scholarship was in the development of writing

2
nd
millennium BC Linear B, syllabic
Disappearance of writing with Dorian invasions
Reappearance of writing as alphabetic system, derived from
Phoenician script an abjad

Modified to an alphabet by reassigning values to some of the
consonant symbols
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Conscious linguistic thought emerged in the
classical age of Greek literature

Observations on language (=Greek) begin with
pre-Socratic philosophers
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle
Later the Stoics founded by Zeno (c.300 BC)

I guess not Zeno of Elea (ca. 490 - 430 BC), as in the
paradoxes

Platonic dialogues contain scattered
references to language

Cratylus is devoted to linguistic questions 23
As distinct from most other ancient
traditions, in Greek linguistics
philosophical and theoretical questions
about language were also investigated,
including:

The origin of language
The relation between language and thought
The relation between form and meaning
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Stoics developed linguistics

But their work is only known from later writers
their works do not survive

Notably, recognised distinction between
form and meaning, and the signifier and
signified in language
Gave separate treatment to grammar,
phonetics, and etymology
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Linguistic questions concentrated on Greek
Focussed on two controversies:

Nature vs. convention (earlier)
Regularity/analogy vs. irregularity/anomaly (later)

Cratylus debate on origin of language and relation of
words and meanings (nature vs. convention)

Does not reach a conclusion

Naturalist argument invoked sound symbolism and (folk,
speculative) etymology

Socrates stance: subsequent changes obscured the natural
connections

Conventionalists observed that vocabulary can be readily
changed, and language remains as efficient

The position explicitly adopted later by Aristotle 26
Epicurus (341-270BC) took a middle
position:

Word forms arose naturally, but were modified
by convention
Stoics favoured this position

Origins of language in imitation of things

Recall bow-wow and ding-dong theories
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Aristotle and Stoics also differed on the other
controversy:

Aristotle favoured analogy
Stoics favoured anomaly

Basically concerns the extent to which orderliness and
paradigmatic regularity is found in language (=Greek)
Analogical arguments were sometimes deployed to
argue for one word form over another

Some analogists attempted to reform irregular paradigms of
Greek

Anomalist position appeared particularly convincing
when derivational and inflectional morphology was not
distinguished
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Three main aspects of Greek linguistics:

Etymology stimulated by the nature-
convention controversy

Little of value was achieved

Fanciful etymologies proposed seriously, e.g. in Cratylus
And continued into Middle Ages
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Phonetics more impressive progress

Some articulatory classifications, and some understanding
of the production of sounds on egressive pulmonic
airstream
Syllable recognised as a structural unit
But problem in not distinguishing speech and writing
confusion appears to have been rife

Descriptive framework primarily concerned the pronunciation of
letters of the Greek alphabet

Phone/letter as a structural unit

Stoics recognised phonetics as a separate branch of linguistics

Three aspects of written letters:

Phonetic value
Written shape
Name of letter
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Stoics studied syllable structure, and
distinguished:

Sound sequences attested in actual words
(morphemes?)
Possible but not attested sequences
Impossible sequences

Classifications and descriptions of phones
was often impressionistic acoustic

Rather than articulatory as in the more
impressive treatment in the Indian tradition
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Grammar was the domain in which Greek
linguistics made its most significant
contribution

Influence on the development of modern
linguistics in shape of grammatical
descriptions, categories, terminology, and
theories

Framework the word-paradigm model

Word at the centre
Morpheme not recognised
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Word based grammar involves 3
procedures:

Identification of the word as a linguistic entity
Establishment of word classes parts of
speech
Establishment of grammatical categories to
describe the morphology of the words in the
paradigms, and their syntax of combination
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Lets look at the recognition of some
grammatical categories:

Nominal gender recognised by Protagoras (5
th

century BC, a Sophist)

Also distinguished sentence types according to
illocutionary force wish, question, statement,
command

Parts of speech: nominals vs. verbals
distinguished by Plato (not the first)

A third class embracing conjunctions, pronouns,
articles and possibly prepositions added by Aristotle
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Stoic grammarians increased the number of parts
of speech

Gave better definitions
Identified subclasses

Stoics also distinguished

Nominal cases

Which came to be taken as the fundamental criterion for
distinguishing nominals and verbs

Verbal categories

Active transitives
Passives
Neutral intransitives
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Temporal categories in the verb:

Tense past vs. present
Aspect completive vs. incompletive

Future and aorist (aspectually and formally
unmarked, reference to past time) were considered
to fall outside of this system
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Roman linguistics also arose in response to
perceived changes in the spoken language

Continued interest in the themes of concern to
Greek linguistics
Primary interest in morphology, particularly parts-
of-speech and the forms of nouns and verbs;
syntax largely ignored

Varro produced a multi-volume grammar of
Latin, only parts of which (6 of 25 books)
survive (c. 120 BC)
Later grammars of Donatus (C4 AD) and
Priscan (C6 AD) were highly influential in the
Middle Ages

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Arabic tradition had beginnings in C7 AD, with the
work of Abu al-Aswad ad-Dual (c. 607-688)
Also heavily influenced by the Greek grammatical
tradition

Focussed on morphology
Attention to accurate phonetic descriptions..

The Arabic tradition a major influence on the
Hebrew tradition, which began slightly later, in
about the ninth century.
Saadya ben Joseph al-Fayyum (882-942)
produced the first grammar and dictionary of
Hebrew (Afroasiatic, Israel).
Reached its peak in C13 with David Qimh is (c.
1160-1235) work, which subsequently had a
strong impact on European linguistics
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With expansion of writing in the vernacular
languages, problem of devising orthographies
Rise of descriptive grammars of Latin around
AD1000 for speakers of other languages
In about 1000 an abbot in Britain wrote a grammar
of Latin for Anglo-Saxon speaking children
Descriptive grammars of the vernaculars were also
written; these generally presented the languages in
the mould of Latin
Emergence of the notion of the universal nature of
grammar in C12

Later refined and developed by Roger Bacon (1214-1294)
and others
Bacon held that grammar was fundamentally the same in
all languages, differences being incidental and shallow
Middle Ages in Europe, 500-1400
Notable work is The First Grammatical Treatise,
a 12
th
century work on Icelandic phonology
not widely known for nearly 700 years!

Main concern was spelling reform, to correct
inadequacies of the Latin-based writing
system of Icelandic
Hinted at notions of phoneme and minimal
pairs

About same time, Arabic scholars began
tradition of accurate phonetic transcription of
words

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Rise of European colonialism (and
nation states)
From C15, colonization brought Europeans into contact with a
wide variety of languages in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the
Pacific
Information about them was gathered by explorers, colonial
administrators, travellers, missionaries, and others

Subsequently disseminated within Europe in the form of word lists,
grammars, and texts

Scholars compiled word lists in many languages and used them
in language comparisons
Became appreciated that certain languages were related to one
another

Techniques were developed and honed over time
Ultimately leading to the establishment of the comparative method and
the Neogrammarian tradition (beginning in C19)

Colonial period refers to the 400 or so years from late C15 to C20
when European states established colonies on other continents

The Americas
Asia
Africa
Australia and the Pacific

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Begins soon after the Renaissance (14th17th
centuries)

But lasted a couple of centuries longer

For linguistics the periods were characterised by
considerable flowering of research in

Europe not my concern
The colonies

The bit I am most interested in

Of course, there was significant interaction between them
Europe mostly professional academics; the colonies mainly
(educated) amateurs, but

I will talk about one piece of late colonial linguistic research in
Australia

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Interest in the diversity of language, and thus the origins

Leibniz (1646-1716) monogenesis of human languages
Reland writing in 1706, proposed languages from Madagascar to
islands of Indonesia were related
Sajnovics and Gyarmati proposed relatedness of Saami, Finnish,
and Hungarian, late 1700s
William Jones (1746-1794) famously proposed in late 1780s
the relatedness of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin

Not the first:

Andreas Jger (c.1660-1730) had previously proposed this in 1686, putting the
homeland of this ancient language in the Caucasus mountains, from which the
languages spread by waves of migrations into Europe and Asia

But Jones produced most systematic evidence
Began study of historical linguistics
Rasmus Rask (1787-1832) continued developing the tradition, and served
as a precursor to the neogrammarians of late C19.
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In 1776 Abb Lievain Proyart (c. 1743-1808)
observed the relatedness of the African
languages Kakongo, Laongo, and Kikongo;
In 1787 Jonathan Edwards (1745-1801)
argued that the Algonquian languages of
North America form a family

Also interests in other linguistic topics:
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Grammars of European languages were
written, as also were grammars of the
languages of the colonies

Missionaries played an important role in this, and
their grammars of non-European languages
dominated from the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries
Latin grammar formed the basis for the tradition
of missionary grammars

Although the best of the missionary grammarians were
aware of problems in applying Latin categories and
structures to other languages
They struggled with varying degrees of success to
understand and describe the unfamiliar categories
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Also notable in C19 was the Finnish academic
program of investigation of the non-Indo-European
languages of the Russian empire

Also involved Russian academics

This fieldwork-based research yielded grammars,
dictionaries, and text collections in Finno-Ugric,
Samoyedic, Turkic, Mongolian, Paleo-Siberian,
and Tungusic languages
Other colonial powers mounted similar academic
investigations, though not as ambitious

Often undertaken in conjunction with anthropological,
biological, and geological studies
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Modern linguistics
Emerged in late C19 and early C20
Focus changed from historical to descriptive
(synchronic) studies

Main idea is language can be viewed as a self-
contained and structured system situated at a
particular point in time
This is the basis for structuralist linguistics that
developed in the post-First World War period

1886 founding of IPA in Paris (Daniel Jones,
Paul Passy, Otto Jespersen and many others)
Most important figure was
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857-1913)

Saussure began as a neo-
grammarian

He wrote an important piece within
the tradition

On what?

But became increasingly dissatisfied

Published very little himself
Initiated modern linguistics with
posthumously published Course in
general linguistics
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Saussures influence extended beyond
linguistics, into neighbouring disciplines
including anthropology and semiotics

Championed the idea that language is a system
of arbitrary signs
His conceptualisation of the sign has been highly
influential
Remember?
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Form
Meaning
tree
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Early period of modern linguistics was
dominated by study of sound systems
(phonetics, and phonology):

Daniel Jones (1861-1967) rejection of
phonetics/phonology opposition
Nikolai Trubetzkoy features, phonology
Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) universals
Henry Sweet (1845-1912) was one
of the leading figures in phonetics
in the second half of the nineteenth
century
He and the Polish linguist Baudouin de
Courtenay (1845-1929) were independently
instrumental in development of the notion of
the phoneme or distinctive sound
de Courtenay drew the terminological
distinction between phoneme and phone

I seem to recall that there has been recent
evidence that someone else beat him to it but I
cant find it
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Diversification of linguistics in C20

The Prague school
British structuralism
Danish structuralism
American structuralism
Rejection of structuralism (?)
Modern bipartition of linguistics

The Prague school
Began as a group of Czech and other
linguists who formed the Linguistic Circle of
Prague in 1926
Primary interest of the Circle was
phonological theory

Led by Nicholai Trubetzkoy (1890-1838), a
professor in Vienna, whose Grundzge der
Phonologie [Principles of phonology] made
important contributions to the notion of the
phoneme
Prague school phonology succeed in placing the
notion of the phoneme in the centre of linguistic
theory, as one of the most fundamental units
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Most famous representative was Roman
Jakobson (1896-1982)

Did original research in a range of areas of
linguistics
Jakobson emigrated to the USA in 1942, and
subsequently had a significant impact on the
development of phonological theory there
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Began with J.R. Firth (1890-1960) who held the first chair in linguistics, in
the University of London, from 1944 to 1956.
Firth lived for some time in India and studied its languages
Brought a number of original and provocative perspectives to linguistics

He established the London School of linguistics

Questioned the assumption that speech can be divided into segments of
sound strung one after the other, regarding this as an artefact of alphabetic
scripts used by westerners

His theory of prosodic analysis focussed on phonetic elements larger than individual
sounds, and anticipated some developments in phonology by half a century

Firth was also deeply concerned with meaning

Influenced by the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)
Developed a contextual theory of meaning that accorded a crucial role to use in
context

Meaning is use in context
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British structuralism
One of his students, Michael A.K. Halliday (1925-)
elaborated Firths ideas and developed them into a
coherent theory

From the late 1950s, Halliday refined systemic
functional grammar;
Hallidays ideas have attracted a much attention,
especially in applied linguistics
The tradition he began is represented in Britain,
Australia, America, Spain, China, and Japan.

Firths ideas were developed in other ways as
well, including by other students, and their
students

Firths singular approach remains a source of
inspiration to many including myself and has
spawned a range of neo-Firthian theories.
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Luis Hjelmslev (1889-1965), famous Danish structuralist
linguist

One of the major proponents of structural linguistics after
Saussure
Major work Omkring Sprogteoriens Grundlggelse (1943),
English translation Prolegomena to a theory of language (1953)
From 1935, Hjelmslev called his theory glossematics.
Danish structuralism
Frans Boas (1858 1942)


Edward Sapir (1884 - 1939)


Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949)
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American structuralism
Boas main concern was to gather information on
the languages and cultures Native Americans
before they disappeared
Methods he and his students developed for the
description of these languages became the basis
of American structuralism
Boas and Sapir strongly upheld the notion that all
languages should be described in their own terms,
rather than being forced into the mould of
European languages
They maintained psychological and
anthropological orientations, seeing language as
intimately connected with the way of life and
thought of its speakers

Subsequently developed by Sapirs student Benjamin
Lee Whorf (1897-1941) into the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis
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Bloomfields primary concern was to
establish linguistics as a science

He opposed the mentalistic orientation of
Boas and Sapir
He was heavily influenced by the mechanistic
outlook of behaviourist psychology
His approach focussing on methodology was
the dominant force in American linguistics
from the 1930s until the mid-1950s
Meaning played little part in this enterprise,
The analytical methods discovery
procedures that were developed attempted
to exclude meaning as far as possible
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Charles Hockett (1916-2000) was
regarded as the most promising student of
Bloomfield
Lots of interesting ideas ...

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Associated with American linguistics,
beginning with Noam Chomskys 1957
Syntactic structures
Explicit rejection of behaviourism and
discovery procedures of the American
linguistics of 1930s-1950s
Rise of Generative Grammar

Still a powerful force in linguistics today
(Denmark is something of an exception), but
increasing number of competing models
Forms background for many of the competing
theories.

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Rejection of structuralism
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Increasingly linguistic historiographers are
questioning the alleged Chomskyan
revolution

And its rejection of structuralism

Koerner 2002 is one work that overviews the
history of Chomskyan construal of themselves and
the field

And takes issue with a number of major tenets, e.g. the
discontinuity with structuralism
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What are interesting issues and
questions?
Here are a few of the ones I consider interesting and
certainly not a complete list:

How has the conceptualisation of a grammatical
description evolved? Recall here the Boas comment
What has been the role of applications/applied linguistics
in the origins and development of the subject?
How can we understand old descriptions and
documentations of exotic languages?
Personal biographies and how people have engaged with
the subject and how have they shaped it?

What about the rank and file?

How have social and ethical consciousnesses emerged in
linguistics?
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How have our methodologies evolved?
How have our theories evolved, and how does
this relate to methodological evolution?
What has been the role of religion in the
development of linguistics?
How have local and/or non-mainstream traditions
in linguistics related to global and dominant
ones?
How have linguists struggled with understanding
unusual phenomena in the worlds languages,
and how has this contributed to the development
of theory and description?
How does linguistic thought correlate
diachronically with thought in other scientific
domains soft (anthropology, biology, sociology)
and hard (mathematics, physics)?
How does linguistic thought correlate
diachronically with broad culture-based
ideologies?

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