The Descriptivists

The Descriptivists

Pragmatics

Pragmatics

The London School

Henry Sweet

Was the greatest of the few historical linguistics whom Britain produced in the nineteenth century. He was actively concerned with systematizing phonetic  transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform.

Daniel Jones

Stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech-sound; he invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels.

J.R. Firth

He turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain

Bronislaw Malinowski

Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics from 1927 onward. He did fieldwork in the very primitive culture of the Trobriand Islands off eastern New Guinea. The most important aspect of Malinowski’s theorizing, as distinct from his purely ethnographic work, concerned the functioning of language.

London School

Functional Linguistcs: the Prague School

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy
Was one of the members of the Prague School.  He developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of phonemic, he distinguished between privative oppositions, in which two phonemes are identical except that one contains a phonetic “mark”.
















André Martinet

One of the key concept was the sound change is that of the functional        

yield of a phonological opposition.

Roman Osipovich Jakobson

His approach to phonology is the notion that there is a relatively simple, ordely, universal psychological system of sounds. 

William Labov

 His work is base in interviews of speakers in some speech community,

 being designed to elicit examples of some linguistics form, a variable,

 which is known to be realized in a variety of ways in that community.

The Prague School

Saussure: language as social fact

Mongin-Ferdinand de Saussure, to give him his full name, was born in Geneva in 1857, son of a Huguenot family which had emigrated from Lorraine during the French religious wars of the late sixteenth century. Although nowadays one thinks of Saussure first and foremost as the scholar who defined the notion of "synchronic linguistics -the study of languages as systems existing at a given point in time, as opposed to the historical linguistics 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.
http://www.educaplay.com/es/recursoseducativos/38818/school_of_linguistics.htm

Chomsky

Chomsky's theories represented, and still represent, both a strong break with American structural linguistics, at the same time, a basic continuity with ideas traceable back to de Saussure and beyond. Chomsky retained the structuralist notion of language as an internally defined system, as well as the basic phrase-structure approach to syntactic analyses and the categorization of language units in traditional parts-of-speech units. In his book Syntactic structures (1957), Chomsky first outlined his theory, which he later solidified in Aspects of the theory of syntax (1965). In this second work, which became known as the "standard theory", Chomsky first devoted considerable time to the notions of competence and performance, arguing that the appropiate goal of linguistic research lies in explaining linguistic competence. Chomsky quickly recognized the limitations of early semantic-based approaches, and from the late 1960´s to the late 1970s, he argued for a theory of grammar that was first known as the "extended standard theory", and later as the "revised extended standard theory". In 1979 Chomsky departed from the revised extended standard theory in a series of lectures known as the Pisa lectures. The general theory to emerge became known as "government-and-binding" (GB) theory and was first presented in book form in Lectures on government and binding  (1981). Chomsky retained the notion of deep structure and transformations, though the set of transformational rules was reduced to one generally applicable rule named "move alpha".

The major difference from previous versions of Chomsky's theory lies in the superposition of a set general systems of principles that operate at deep-and surface-structure levels to determine the grammaticality of every sentence generated by the system. Chomsky outlines seven such systems of principles: government theory, binding theory, bounding theory, theta theory, case theory, control theory, and X-bar theory.

Growth of American Linguistics

The growth of American linguistics began when European anthropological linguistics arrived in North America to study and recorded native-American languages before many of those languages disappeared. The leading figure in this migration was Franz Boas, who first came to North America in the 1880's. Boas established American descriptivist linguistics and trained the leading American structural linguists. It was Bloomfield, however, who has had the most immediate impact on American linguistics. He combined insights from anthropological linguitics with the then-pervasive views of behavioral psychology and with philosophical empiricism and positivism, to develop American Structural Linguistics. Psychological emphases appeared in the beliefs that the mind began language learning as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, that only what was observable could be used as evidence and that there could be developed a mechanical discovery procedure for doing linguistic research.

Applied Linguistics and Linguistics

The rapid growth of the field of applied linguistics over the last twenty years has led to a general observation that applied linguistics must be viewed as an interdisciplinary. Modern Linguistics necessarily begins with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and his General course on linguistics. Sausure introduced distinctions such as synchronic vs diachronic (historical) analyses of language, and language vs parole. These latter two influential notions evolved from the structural assumptions on the nature of language. de Saussure's work had a powerful impact on various structural-linguistics groups that emerged across Europe, including the London School of Linguistics, the Geneva School of Linguistics, the Copenhagen School of Linguistics, and the Prague School of Linguistics. They also explored functional uses of language in sentences and discourse and had a significant impact on Chomsky's later theories through Roman Jakobson.  

 

Nineteenth century: historical linguistics

Before the nineteenth century, language in the western world was of interest mainly to philosophers. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made major contributions to the study of language. 1786 is the year which many people regard as the birthdate of linguistics. On the 27th 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.