XI Theories and Schools of

Modern Linguistics

Saussure (1857-1913)

The Swiss linguist father of modern

linguistics a master of a discipline which he
made modern

Lg is an extremely complex and heterogeneous phenomenon.

Among the various aspects and different perspectives,
linguists need to ask what he is trying to describe.
Lg is one of social facts, which are the ideas in the
collective mind of a society and radically distinct from
individual psychological acts.
Saussure believes lg is a system of signs.
Sound (signifier)+ideas(signified)=sign (a system of
convention)
Dichotomy: langue-parole; syntagmatic-paratagmatic;
synchronic-diachronic
langue: the structure of a system that gives the potential for
the words or utterances to exist
Parole: what people actually say or what appears on the page

Saussures contribution

1. Saussure provided a general orientation, a sense of

the task of linguistics which had seldom been
questioned.
2. He influenced modern linguistics in the specific
concepts. Many of the developments of modern
linguistics can be described as his concepts: his ideas
of the arbitrart nature of the sign, langue-parole;
synchrony-diachrony; syntagmatic-aradigmatic
relations. Saussures fundamental perception is of
revolutionary significance, and it is he that pushed
linguistics into a brand new stage and all linguistics in
the twentieth century are Saussurean linguistics.

The
Prague
School
Mathesius (1882-1946)
A special style of synchronic linguistics
Most important contribution: sees lg in terms of function
1. It was stressed that the synchronic study of lg is fully
justified as it can draw on complete and controllable
material for investigation.
2. Emphasis on the systemic character of lg. No element can
be satisfactorily analysed or evaluated if viewed in
isolation. Assessment can only be made if its relationship is
established with co-existing elements in the same lg system.
Eleents are held to be in functional contrast or opposition.
3. Lg was looked on as functional as it is a tool performing
a number of essential functions or tasks for the community
using it.

Phonology and phonological opposition

Prague School Contribution: phonology and the

distinction between phonetics and phonology
Trubetzkoy: Principle of Phonology (1939)

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP)

A theory of linguistic analysis which refers to an

analysis of utterances in terms of the information they
contain. The principle is that the roles of each utterance
part is evaluated for its semantic contribution to the
whole.
Czech linguists: a sentence contains a point of
departure and a goal of discourse.
The point of departure is equally present to the speaker
and to the hearerit is the ground on which they meet (
THEME).
The goal of discourse presents the very information that
is to be imparted to the hearer (RHEME)

FSP is used to describe how information is

distributed in sentences. It particularly deal
with the effect of the distribution of known
information and new information in discourse.
---Sally
stands on the table
Subject
predicate
Theme
rheme
--On the table stands
Sally.
predicate
subject
Theme
rheme

J. Firbas: Communicative Dynamism

Linguistic communication is not a static
phenomenon, but a dynamic one. CD is meant
to measure the amount of information an
element carries in a sentence. The degree of CD
is the effect contributed by a linguistic element,
for it pushes the communication forward.
He was mad.

The London School

B. Malinowski (1884-1942)
J. R. Firth (1890-1960)
M. A. K. Halliday
The importance of context of situation
The system aspect of language

Malinowski theory

By context of situation, Firth meant a series of

contexts of situations, each smaller one being
embedded into a larger, to the extent that all the
contexts of situation play essential parts in the
whole of the context of culture.

The integration of situational context and the

linguistic context of a text
1. The relevant features of the participants:
persons, personalities
(a) the verbal action of the participants
(b) the non-verbal action of the participants
2. The relevant topics, including objects, events,
and non-linguistic, non-human events.
3. The effect of the verbal action

Halliday and SystemicFunctional Grammar

Sociologically oriented functional linguistic appraoch.

Effect on lg teaching, sociolinguistics, discourse
analysis, stylistics, and machine translation.
Two components: systemic grammar and functional
grammar.
Adults lg become more complex, and is reduced to a
set of highly coded and abstract functions, which are
meta-functions: the ideational, the interpersonal, and
the textual functions.

Ideational function

The ideational function is to convey new

information, to communicate a content that is
unknown to the hearer. It is a meaning
potential, for whatever specific use one is
making of lg he has to refer to categories of his
experience of the world.
Transitivity: material processes, mental
processes, relational processes, verbal
processes, behavioral processes, existential
processes.

The Interpersonal Function

It embodies all uses of lg to express social and personal

relations. This includes various ways the speaker enters
a speech situation and perform a speech act.
Interpersonal function is realised by MOOD( )
and MODALITY( ).
Mood shows what role the speaker selects in the
speech situation and what role he assigns to the
addressee.
Modality specifies whether the speaker is expressing
his judgment or making a prediction.

The textual function

It refers to the fact that lg has mechanisms to

make any stretch of spoken or written
discourse into a coherent and unified text and
make a living passage different from a random
list of sentences. (p. 315)
Biding devices which help make a discourse
into a coherent and unified text is called
collectively as the Cohesion of a text.

Realization of three functions

Because lg serves as a generalised ideational function,

we are able to use it for all the specific purposes an
dtypes of context which involve the communication of
expereince.
Because it serves a generalised interpersonal function,
we are able to use it for the specific forms of personal
expression and social interaction.
A prerequisite to its effective operation under both
these headings is what we have referred to as the
textual function, whereby lg becomes text, is related to
itself and to its context of use. Without the textual
component of meaning, we should not be able to make
any use of lg at all.

American Structuralism

A branch of synchronic linguistics that emerged

independently in the United States at the
beginning of the twentieth century.

Early period: Boas and Sapir

BOAS: Handbook of American Indian
Languages (1911): an important introduction
which is a good summery of the descriptive
approach to lg.
1. There is no ideal type or form of lg, for human
lgs were endlessly diverse.
2. Opposed to the view that lg is the soul of a race.
There were only differences in lg structure,
while there is no difference between lgs in terms
of being more or less reasonable or advanced.

The framework of descriptive linguistics: it consists of three

parts.
1. The sound of lgs.
2. The semantic categories of linguistic expression
3. Th eprocess of grammatical combination in semantic
expression.
The important task for linguists is to discover a lgs
particular grammatical structure and to develop descriptive
categories appropriate to it.
His methodology is analytical , without comparing it with
European lgs.
Although he failed to establish linguistics as an independent
branch of science, his basic theory, his observation, and his
descriptive methods paved way fro American descriptive
linguistics and influenced generation of linguists.

Sapir: Language: An introduction to the Study

of Speech (1921)
Focus on typology
Lg is the means and thought is the end product;
without lg, thought is impossible.
The universal feature of lg: distinct phonetic
systems, concrete combinations of sound and
meaning, various means of representing all
kinds of relations.

Bloomfields theory

The principal representative of American descriptive

linguistics.
1933-1950 the Bloomfieldian Era, in which the
American descriptive linguistics formally came into
being and reached its prime development.
Language (1933) the model of scientific methodology
and the greatest work in linguistics.
Linguistics is a branch of psychology, esp.
Behaviourism.
Behaviourism holds that human beings cannot know
anything that they have not experienced.

Behaviourism holds that children learn lg

through a chain of Stimulus-Response
reinforcement., and adult use of lg is also a
process of stimulus-response.
It is believed that a linguistic description was
reliable when based on observation of unstudied
utterance by speakers. Therefore, the popular
practice in linguistic study was to accept what a
native speaker says in his lg and to discard what
he says about his lg.

Sr-------------------sR
When one individual is stimulated, his speech
can make another individual react accordingly.
The division of labour and all human activities
based on the division of labour are dependent
on language.
The distance between the speaker and hearer,
two separate nervous systems, is bridged up by
sound waves.
Bloomfield touched upon the application of
linguistics to lg teaching and criticised
traditional grammar which are prescriptive.

Post-Bloomfieldian Linguistics

Characterised by a strict empiricism.

The appropriate goal for general linguistics was
to devise explicit discovery procedures to enable
the computer to process linguistic raw data
about any lg and form a complete grammar
without the intervention by the human linguists.
They focus on direct observation.
They also took a interest in the discourse level
in order to develop discovery procedures for
structure above the sentence level.

Some works

Harris: Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951):

marking the maturity of American descriptive
linguistics.
Hockett: A Course in Modern Linguistics (1958): a
well-known textbook in the American descriptive
tradition. It contains and develops many of the insights
gained from the work carried out within the
structuralist paradigm from 1930s onwards.
K. Pike (1912-2000) Tagmemics ( )
Sydney M. Lamb: stratificational grammar (
).

Structuralism is based on the assumption that

grammatical categories should be defined not
in terms of meaning but in terms of
distribution, and that the structure of each lg
should be described without reference to the
alleged universitality of such categories as
tense, mood, and parts of speech.

Structural grammar describes everything that is found in

a lg instead of laying down rules. --The aim is confined
to the description of lgs, without explaining why lg
operates the way it does.
Structural grammar is empirical, aiming at objectivity in
the sense that all definition and statements should be
verifiable or refutable.no complete grammar.
Structural grammar examines all lgs, recognizing and
doing justice to uniqueness of each lg.no adequate
treatment of meaning.
Structural grammar describes even the smallest contrast
that underlies any construction or use of a lg, not only
discoverable in some particular use.

Transformational-Generative Grammar

Noam Chomsky (1928-) Syntactic Structure 91957)

marked the beginning of the Chomskyan Revolution.
Five stages:
1. The Classical Theory aims to make linguistics a
science.
2. The Standard Theory deals with how semantics
should be studied in a linguistic theory.
3. The Extended Standard Theory focused discussion on
language universals and universal grammar.
4. The Revised Extended Standard Theory focuses
discussion on government and binding.
5. The Minimalist Program is a further revision of the
previous theory.

The innateness Hypothesis

Children are born with Language Acquisition

Device (LAD), which is a unique kind of
knowledge that fits them for lg learning.
Children are born with knowledge of the basic
grammatical relations and categories, and this
knowledge is universal.
The study of lg can throw some light on the
nature of the human mind.
A reaction against behaviourism in psychology
and empiricism in philosophy.

What children learn seems to be a set of rules

rather than individual sentences, although
children are not born knowing a lg, they are
born with a predisposition to develop a lg in
much the same way as they are born with the
predisposition to learn to walk.
LAD: three elements:
1. A hypothesis maker (look for regularity, make
hypothesis)
2. Linguistic universals
3. An evaluation procedure (more than one
version of grammar)

What is generative grammar?

A system of rules that in some explicit and

well-defined way assigns structural
descriptions to sentences.
Every speaker of a lg has mastered and
internalised a generative grammar that
expresses his knowledge of his lg.
It is not limited to particular lgs, but the reveal
the unity of particular grammars and universal
grammars.

Three
levels
to
evaluate
a
grammar
Observational adequacy:grammar are able to produce correct

explanations for raw linguistic data

Descriptive adequacy: grammars should not only produce
correct explanations for raw linguistic data, but also produce
correct explanation for the linguistic competence of the speaker
and hearer.
Explanatory adequacy: grammars that are sufficiently described
should reveal linguistic competence and then relate it with
universal grammar in order to be related to the initial state of the
human mind for the purpose of revealing human cognitive
systems.
It is after successful descriptions of many lgs and subsequent
generalizations of universal features of human lg that it is
possible to explore the initial state of the human mind that
contains universal grammars.

Hypothesis deduction

Immediate Constituents analysis cannot deal

with the following sentences:
John is easy to please.
John is eager to please.
Visiting relatives can be tiresome.
Flying plane is dangerous.

The classical theory

Features: 1. Emphasis on generative ability of

lg. 2. Introduction of transformational rules. 3.
Grammatical descriptions regardless of
meaning.
Three grammars:
1. Finite state grammar: the simplest type of
grammar which, with a finite amount of
apparatus, can generate an infinite number of
sentence. However, it is impossible to construct
an observationally adequate English grammar
which is a finite-state grammar.

Therefore it is necessary to work out a grammar

that, with a finite set of rules, can generate all
the grammatical sentences in a lg without
generating a single non-grammatical sentence.
Then a grammar is seen as a system of finite
rules generating an infinite number of sentences.
The rules should meet certain requirements.
1. Generative
2. Simple
3. Explicit
phrase structure grammar
4. Exhaustive
(p. 330)
5. Recursive

The Standard Theory

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965)
Problems with the Classical Theory
1. The transformational rules are too powerful.
--John has a book.
--A book was had by John.
2. Rules may generate ill-formed sentences as well as wellformed sentences.
--John hit the tree.
--The tree hit John.
3. Transformational rules for the passive voice cannot be used
at will.
This shows that transformational rules are not universally
applicable.(p.333)

Therefore, Chomsky included a semantic

component in his grammatical model.
(Aspects of the Theory of Syntax)
The generative grammar consists of three
components: syntax, phonological and
semantic.
The improvement that has been made

The Extended Standard Theory

Extended Standard Theory and

1. Transformational rules still too powerful
2. Derived nouns have the same semantic properties
with their corresponding verbs, which are actually not.
3. Transformational process will not change the
meaning of the sentence, while actually any kind of
transformation will change the sentence meaning.
4. Cannot explain gapped structures
Many transformational rules must have complex
constraints.
Revised Extended Standard Theory: semantic
interpretation was put in the surface structure.

Later theories

1. Government and Binding

2. Minimalist Program
The initial state of human lgs are the same
while the states of acquiring different lgs are
not. A universal grammar is a theory of studying
theinitial states and particular grammars are
theories of studying the states of acquisition.
While the faculty of lg consists of a cognitive
system that stores information such as sound,
meaning, and structure, the performance system
retrieves and uses the information.

Main features of TG grammar

Rationalism
Innateness
Deductive methodology
Emphasis on interpretation
Formalism
Emphasis on linguistic competence
Strong generative powers
Emphasis on linguistic universals

Case grammar

Generative semantics