FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS The Copenhagen School

The Copenhagen School, officially the "Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen (Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague)", was a group of scholars dedicated to the study of structural linguistics founded by Louis Hjelmslev (18991965) and Viggo Brndal (18871942). In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centres of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and the Prague School. The basic theoretical framework, called Glossematics was laid out in Hjelmslevs two main works: "Prolegomena to a theory of Language" and "rsum of a theory of Language". In 1989 a group of members of the Copenhagen Linguistic circle inspired by the advances in cognitive linguistics and the functionalist theories of Simon C. Dik founded the School of Danish Functional Grammar aiming to combine the ideas of Hjelmslev and Brndal. The principal ideas of the school are: A language consists of content and expression.

A language consists of a succession and a system. Content and expression are interconnected by commutation. There are certain relations in the succession and the system.

There are no one-to-one correspondents between content and expression, but the signs may be divided into smaller components. Even more than Saussure, the Copenhagen School is interested in the langue rather than parole. It represented in a pure form the idea that language is a form and not a substance. It studied the relational system within the language on a higher level of abstraction.

Louis Hjelmslev (October 3, 1899, Copenhagen May 30, 1965) His most well-known book, Omkring sprogteoriens grundlggelse, or in English translation, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, first published in 1943, critiques the then-prevailing methodologies in linguistics as being descriptive, even anecdotal, and not systematising. He proposed a linguistic theory intended to form the basis of a more rational linguistics and a contribution to general epistemology. Hjelmslev introduced the terms glosseme, ceneme, prosodeme and plereme as linguistic units, analogous to phoneme, morpheme etc.

Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield

It starts with the term scientific Language interests everyone. a) Outside speakers b) Inside speakers c) Speech relating the two Sapir concluded that a minimum for human language is formation and expression of concrete and relational ideas. Language can be seen as the totality of mutually effective substitute responses. Mentalism differs from materialism by distinguishing langue from parole. It opposes wholes or parts to material and formal principles; mind to brain; understanding to experiencing.

Mentalism is dualistic because it recognizes mental and material. Behaviorism is monistic admits only a single kind of data (material) When one speaks a sentence, the form it takes is due to the utterances which the speaker, since infancy has heard from other members of his community. -It is dualistic because it considers both mental and material kinds of data -It is monoistic because only considers a single kind of data(material) The study, use and spread of language. Bloomfield proposes that the empirical science of language should study a real rather than a fancied object. Language conceived as a normative ideal does not constitute an empirical object; language as a universal phenomenon can only be established inductively; one can observe actual speech----and its actual effects on hearers---without preconceptions, so the Behaviorist approach provides a model Speech communities are best observed behavioristically. Density of communication can be empirically observed, quantified, and correlated with geography, social stratification, occupation, success in cooperation, and consequences in describable speech differences. There are behavioral correlates for determining traditional concerns about language: The literary standard The colloquial standard The provincial standard Sub-standard Local dialect The phoneme. Sound-production can be described empirically. Phonetics is the branch of science that deals with it. What phonetics provides is an objective record of gross acoustic features, only part of which are distinctive for particular languages, while phonology, or practical phonetics, determines which features are the distinctive ones. Phonetic basis. This predominantly phonetic account may be viewed as a kind of basis which may be modified in various ways. Modification, presumes some standard from which a departure is made, and the criteria for establishing the base can vary, legitimately or inconsistently. For instance, it might be inconsistent to shift, in phonology, from subjective, or objective production to subjective reception or objective disturbance of the air, or from objective measurement to subjective standards. Grammatical Forms. Descriptive Structuralism is frequently referred to as Binarist. This orientation is its strength and weakness. The strength resides in elementary calculability, an impersonal, objective, exhausting of possibilities. The meaning of a morpheme is a sememe (the meaning of a morpheme), constant, definite, discrete from all other sememes: the linguist can only analyze the signals, not the signalled, so that is why linguistics must start from the phonetics, not the semantics, of a language. The total stocks of morphemes is a languages lexicon. A simple feature of grammatical arrangement is a taxeme; meaningful units of grammatical form are tagnemes and their meanings are called episememes. Tagmemes can consist of several taxemes. Statements of its lexical and grammatical forms completely describe an utterance

FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS The Prague School

FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS: THE PRAGUE SCHOOL Prague school, school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilm Mathesius. It included among its most prominent members the Russian linguist Nikolay Trubetskoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jakobson; the school was most active during the 1920s and 30s.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (Russian; Moscow, April 16, 1890 - Vienna, June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology. A manifestation of Prague attitude that language is a tool which has a job to do the fact that members of that School were much preoccupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use. Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology. Functions of language determined for six factors: 1. REFERENTIAL Focus on context. We Use it when we intend to convey information without making judgments about it or pretend reactions of the addresser. Context: Referent, about what? 2. EMOTIVE -Produce an impression of certain emotion. -Expressive. Addresser: Speaker, narrator, author. 3. CONATIVE -It finds its purest grammatical expression in the vocative and imperative. - Appellative, ordering, begging Addressee: Hearer, reader, viewer, user 4. PHATIC - Emphasis on contact. Ex/Hello, are you angry? - A profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication. Contact: Channel of communication, physical connection 5. METALINGUAL - Focus on code. - Whenever the addresser an/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code. Code: System. 6. POETIC - Focus on the message for its own sake. - As literature Message: Text, discourse, what is being said

The descriptivists

Franz Boas Franz Boas (18581942) was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography. He applied the scientific method to the study of human cultures and societies; previously this discipline was based on the formulation of grand theories around anecdotal knowledge. Although Boas was making a very specific contribution to the methods of descriptive linguistics, his ultimate point is far reaching: observer bias need not be personal, it can be cultural. In other words, the perceptual categories of Western researchers may systematically cause a Westerner to misperceive or to fail to perceive entirely a meaningful element in another culture.

Leonard Bloomfield Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics.[1] He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family. Bloomfield's approach to linguistics was characterized by its emphasis on the scientific basis of linguistics, adherence to behaviorism especially in his later work, and emphasis on formal procedures

for the analysis of linguistic data. The influence of Bloomfieldian structural linguistics declined in the late 1950s and 1960s as the theory of Generative Grammar developed by Noam Chomsky came to predominate.

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology. Chomsky is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy theorem, the universal grammar theory, and the ChomskySchtzenberger theorem. Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his Syntactic Structures, a distillation of his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75), challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar. His best-known work in phonology is The Sound Pattern of English (1968), written with Morris Halle (and often known as simply SPE). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including autosegmental phonology, lexical phonology and optimality theory. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology. Descriptivism - (ethics) a doctrine holding that moral statements have a truth value doctrine, ism, philosophical system, philosophy, school of thought - a belief (or system of beliefs) accepted as authoritative by some group or school moral philosophy, ethics - the philosophical study of moral values and rules. The descriptivist camp, on the other hand, simply aims describe how the language is used today. This camp is perhaps best embodied by the Urban Dictionary, a lexicon open to input from anyone. Unfortunately, this purely descriptive approach to language implies that language doesnt matter as long as intent can be communicated; generations of poets would beg to differ. Bloomfield linguistics is a branch of psychology known as Behaviorism. Behaviorism has a good side and a bad side. In its good aspect behaviorism is a principle of scientific method where the only things used to confirm or refute a theory are observable phenomena rather than peoples introspections (examining ones thoughts and feelings) and intuitions.

The London School

Compared to other schools of modern linguistics, the London School, founded by J. R. Firth, is more interested in instrumentality of language and meaning or function in context. Influenced by Malinowski's theorizing, Firth and his followers stress the functioning of language and argue that language can't be disassociated from meaning and should be looked at from a sociological perspective. The London School and the systemic functional grammar, which has developed out of the London approach to language, consider meaning and function as the basis of human language and communicative activity. The linguistic theorizing in the London style is of practical significance and therefore is more relevant to sociolinguistics, stylistics, literary criticism and language teaching. From the linguistic ideas of a few important figures of the London School, we may see the developmental stages this School has gone through and how the tradition has been established for the academic discipline of linguistics in Britain. The London School of Harry Sweet (1845-1912) and David Jones (1881-1967) stressed the practical side of phonetics, and trained its students to perceive, transcribe and reproduce each minute sound distinction very precisely far more than the American behaviourists, for example, and of course the Chomskians, who are extending models rather than testing them. And this phonetic competence was much needed when J.R. Firth (1891-1960) and others at the School of Oriental and African Studies helped to plan the national languages and their writing systems for the new Commonwealth countries. Overall, the School has been very far ranging noting, for example how stress and tone co-occur with whole syllables, and developing a terminology to cope: a basis for poetic metre. Firthian analysis also finds a place for aesthetic considerations and develops a system of mutually exclusive options, somewhat like Saussure but more socially and purposively orientated.

GENERATIVE LINGUISTICS and ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS (Act)

Publicado por wylweni en 10:50 PM 0 comentarios Etiquetas: activity, anthropological linguistics, generative linguistics, topic 4, topic 8

GENERATIVE LINGUISTICS

Semantics is the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning, The meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text. Generative semantics is a description of a language emphasizing a semantic deep structure that is logical in form, that provides syntactic structure, and that is related to surface structure by transformations. (Merriam Webster) Generative semantics is the name of a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of various early students of Noam Chomsky: John R. Ross

Paul Postal and later James McCawley. George Lakoff was also instrumental in developing and advocating the theory

The approach developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid 1960s, but stood largely in opposition to work by Noam Chomsky and his later students. Generative semanticists took Chomsky's concept of Deep Structure and ran with it, assuming that deep structures were the sole input to semantic interpretation. This assumption, combined with a tendency to consider a wider range of empirical evidence than Chomskian linguists, led generative semanticists to develop considerably more abstract and complex theories of deep structure than those advocated by Chomsky and his students and indeed to abandon altogether the notion of deep structure as a locus of lexical insertion. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, there were heated debates between generative semanticists and more orthodox Chomskians. The generative semanticists lost the debate, insofar as their research program ground to a halt by the 1980s. However, this was in part because the interests of key generative semanticists such as George Lakoff had gradually shifted away from the narrow study of syntax and semantics. A number of ideas from later work in generative semantics have been incorporated into: Cognitive linguistics

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)

Construction Grammar and indeed into Mainstream Chomskian linguistics

Transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific transformational grammars. In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of grammatical theories. The first was the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors. He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences). The second idea related directly to the evaluation of theories of grammar. Chomsky distinguished between grammars that achieve descriptive adequacy and those that go further and achieved explanatory adequacy. A descriptively adequate grammar for a particular language defines the (infinite) set of grammatical sentences in that language; that is, it describes the language in its entirety. A grammar that achieves explanatory adequacy has the additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human mind; that is, it does not merely describe the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented. A transformational grammar has 3 major kinds of rules: Syntactic rules: which specify the deep structure into a surface structure of the sentence and then transform that deep structure into a surface structure.

Semantic rules: which provide an interpretation for the sentence. Phonological rules: which specify information necessary in pronouncing the sentence.

The syntactic component. Phrase structure rules and lexicon If we wanted to divide the sentence the sentence the astronaut can walk into its constituent parts, it would be:

Transformations and the structure of the auxiliary The structure of the auxiliary: (someone has eaten the garlic toast) the auxiliary word is a form of the verb to have. AUX -> T + (M) + (HAVE + EN) + (BE + ING) Should have been walking Publicado por wylweni en 10:19 PM 0 comentarios Etiquetas: generative linguistics, topic 8

COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS

Charles J. Fillmore (born 1929) is an American linguist, and an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Fillmore has been extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics. He was a proponent of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar during its earliest transformational grammar phase. He was one of the founders of cognitive linguistics, and developed the theories of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), and Frame Semantics (1976). He was one of the first linguists to introduce a representation of linguistic knowledge that blurred this strong distinction between syntactic and semantic knowledge of a language. He introduced what was termed case structure grammar and this representation subsequently had considerable influence on psychologists as well as computational linguists. Grammar Case is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the valence, or number of subjects, objects, etc., of a verb and the grammatical context it requires.

The system was created by the American linguist Charles J. Fillmore in (1968), in the context of Transformational Grammar. This theory analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the combination of deep cases (i.e. semantic roles) -- Agent, Object, Benefactor, Location or Instrument -- which are required by a specific verb. For instance, the verb "give" in English requires an Agent (A) and Object (O), and a Beneficiary (B); e.g. "Jones (A) gave money (O) to the school (B). According to Fillmore, each verb selects a certain number of deep cases which form its case frame. Thus, a case frame describes important aspects of semantic valency, of verbs, adjectives and nouns. Case frames are subject to certain constraints, such as that a deep case can occur only once per sentence. Some of the cases are obligatory and others are optional. Obligatory cases may not be deleted, at the risk of producing ungrammatical sentences. A fundamental hypothesis of case grammar is that grammatical functions, such as subject or object, are determined by the deep, semantic valence of the verb, which finds its syntactic correlate in such grammatical categories as Subject and Object, and in grammatical cases such as Nominative, Accusative, etc. Fillmore puts forwards the following hierarchy for a universal subject selection rule: Agent < Instrumental < Objective That means that if the case frame of a verb contains an agent, this one is realized as the subject of an active sentence. Case grammar is an attempt to establish a semantic grammar. (Most grammars by linguists take syntax as the starting-point). Using a modified form of valency theory Fillmore suggests that the verb establishes a set of cases in a sentence: these are like slots, which usually need not all be filled. For example, consider these sentences: 1. 2. 3. 4. In In In In In Mary opened the door with a key. Mary opened the door. A key opened the door. The door opened. (1) the semantic cases are: Mary - agent; the door - object; a key - instrument. (2) they are as in (1), except that there is no instrument. (3) the cases are: a key - instrument; the door - object. (4) the only case is the door - object. other words, to open requires at the minimum that the object be specified in a sentence.

Copenhagen School (linguistics)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Copenhagen School, officially the "Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen (Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague)", is a group of scholars dedicated to the study of linguistics. It was founded by Louis Hjelmslev (18991965) and Viggo Brndal (18871942). In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centees of linguistic structuralism together with theGeneva School and the Prague School. In the late 20th and early 21st century the Copenhagen school has turned from a purely structural approach to linguistics to a functionalist one, Danish functional grammar, which nonetheless incorporates many insights from the founders.

Contents
[hide]

1 History 2 The glossematic school 3 Danish functional school 4 Notes 5 Bibliography

[edit]History
The Copenhagen School of Linguistics evolved around Louis Hjelmslev and his developing theory of language, glossematics. Together with Viggo Brdal he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague a group of linguists based on the model of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Within the circle the ideas of Brndal and Hjelmslev were not always compatible. Hjelmslevs more formalist approach attracted a group of followers, principal among them Hans Jrgen Uldall and Eli Fischer Jrgensen, who would strive to apply his abstract ideas of the nature of language to analyses of actual linguistic data. Hjelmslevs objective was to establish a framework for understanding communication as a formal system, and an important part of this was the development of precise terminology to describe the different parts of linguistic systems and their interrelatedness. The basic theoretical framework, called Glossematics was laid out in Hjelmslevs two main works: Prolegomena to a theory of Language and Rsum of a theory of Language. However, since Hjelmslev's death in 1965 left his theories mostly on the programmatic level, the group that had formed around Hjelmslev and his glossematic theory dispersedwhile the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle continued to exist, it was not really a "school" united by a common theoretical perspectives. In 1989, a group of members of the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle, inspired by the advances in cognitive linguistics and the functionalist theories of Simon C. Dik founded the School of Danish Functional Grammar aiming to combine the ideas of Hjelmslev and Brndal, and other important Danish linguists such as Paul Diderichsen and Otto Jespersen with modern functional linguistics. Among the prominent members of this new generation of the Copenhagen School of Linguistics were Peter Harder, Elisabeth Engberg Petersen, Frans Gregersen and Michael Fortescue. The basic work of the school is Dansk Funktionel Grammatik (Danish Functional Grammar) by Harder (2006). Recent developments in the school include Ole Nedergaard Thomsens Functional Discourse Pragmatics. In the following the two stages of the Copenhagen School will be described as 1. The glossematic school and 2. The Danish Functional School.

[edit]The

glossematic school

Brndal emphasised that formal properties of a system should be kept apart from its substance. Accordingly, Hjelmslev presented, as the key figure of Copenhagen School in the 1930s, a formal linguistic fundament, which was later known as glossematics (the double duality of the linguistic sign). He formulated his linguistic theory together with Hans Jrgen Uldall as an attempt to analyse the expression (phonetics and grammar) and the meaning of a language on a coherent basis. He assumed that language wasn't the only instrument of communication (cf. the communication of deaf-mutes), and he was interested in a general theory of the signs of communication, semiotics or semiology. More than the other schools, the Glossematic School referred to the teachings of Saussure, even though it was in many aspects connected with older traditions. Thus, it tried once more to combine logics and grammar. At any rate, Hjelmslev has taken over the psychological interpretation of the linguistic sign and thereby extended his study of the sign further than language as such. The principal ideas of the school are:

A language consists of content and expression. A language consists of a succession and a system. Content and expression are interconnected by commutation. There are certain relations in the succession and the system. There are no one-to-one correspondents between content and expression, but the signs may be divided into smaller components.

Even more than Saussure, the Copenhagen School is interested in the langue rather than parole. It represented in a pure form the idea that language is a form and not a substance. It studied the relational system within the language on a higher level of abstraction. Critics [who?] accuse the somewhat one-sided formalism of the school with words like "antihumanism" or "linguistics in an empty space".

[edit]Danish

functional school

For the architectural style of the same name, see Danish Functionalism (architecture). The Danish school of functional linguistics was developed in an attempt to combine modern functional grammar and cognitive linguisticswith the best ideas and concepts of the earlier structuralist school. Like Hjelmslev and Saussure the school insist in the basic structural division of communication in planes of content and expression.[1] Like Simon Dik and functionalist grammarians Danish functionalists also insist that language is fundamentally a means of communication between humans and is best understood and analysed through its communicative function. When analysing linguistic utterances the content and expression planes are analysed separately, with the expression plane being analysed through traditional structural methods and the content

plane being analysed mostly through methods from semantics and pragmatics. However it is assumed that structures on the expression plane mirrors structures on the content plane. This can be seen in the parallelism between the structure of Danish sentences as described by the structural syntactic model of Paul Diderichsen dividing utterances into three basic fields a foundation field, a nexus field and a content field, and the pragmatic structure of utterances that often use the foundation field for discourse pragmatic functions, the nexus field for illocutionary functions and the content field for the linguistic message. Danish functionalists assume that an utterance is not to be analysed from the minimal units and up, but rather from the maximal units and down, because speakers begin the construction of utterances by choosing what to say in a given situation, then by choosing the words to use and finally by building the sentence by means of sounds. An example of a two planed analysis is given below in the analysis of the utterance "The book hasn't been read by anyone for a while". The Expression plane consists of "the book" which is a noun phrase with a determiner, a finite verb with a negational adverb "hasn't", and a passive verbal phrase "been read" with an agent "by anyone" and a time adverb "for a while". On the content plane "the book" has the function of topic of the utterance, that which the sentence is about and which links it to the larger discourse, the function of "hasn't" is to state the illocutionary force of the declarative utterance, and the predicate is the message "hasn't been read by anyone for a while" which is intended to be communicated.

Utterance:

The book

hasn't

been read by anyone for a while.

Expression Determiner/Noun

Nexus: Intransitive Verb/Present Passive verb/Agent/Time adverb tense/negation

Content

Topic - known information

Declarative illocutionary force

Predicate: to be read/Specifier: by anyone/Time frame: for a while

[edit]Notes