8/6/2019 Mindoro State College of Agriculture and Technology
LING FINAL-OUTLINE
1/5
Mindoro State College Of Agriculture and Technology
Main Campus
Alcate, Victoria, Oriental Mindoro
Topic: History of Linguistics
Objectives:
*To be ableto discover and scrutinize the historicalfoundation
of linguistics.
*To become familiar about the pioneers, scopes andbenifits of
lerning and studying linguistics.
*To obtain relevant and indispensable information thatwill
facilitate the learning of linguistics.
Evaluation:*What is the significance of studying the history
of
linguistics?*As a linguist, how are you going to maximize
and
utilize the use of your language?*Knowing the history of
linguistics, the persons behind
this discipline, would you consider this discipline abenificial
one and worth it to study?
Values:Each student learns to value and appreciate the
impacts
of the history of linguistics to his or her academicstudies.
HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS
Overview
A brief history of twentieth-century linguistics. An
introduction tothe different ways that language can be studied, and
thecontributions of Saussure and Jakobson in context.
Introduction
Linguistics is the study of language, sometimes called the
scienceof language. {1} The subject has become a very technical,
splittinginto separate fields: sound (phonetics and phonology),
sentencestructure (syntax, structuralism, deep grammar),
meaning(semantics), practical psychology (psycholinguistics) and
contexts
of language choice (pragmatics). {2} But originally, as
practised inthe nineteenth century, linguistics was philology: the
history ofwords. {3} Philologists tried to understand how words had
changedand by what principle. Why had the proto-European
consonantschanged in the Germanic branch: Grimm's Law? Voiceless
stopswent to voiceless fricatives, voiced stops to voiceless stops,
andvoiced aspirates to voiced stops. What social phenomenon
wasresponsible? None could be found. Worse, such changes were
notgeneral. Lines of descent could be constructed, but words did
not
evolve in any Darwinian sense of simple to elaborate. One
couldgroup languages as isolating (words had a single,
unchangingroot), agglutinizing (root adds affixes but remains
clear) andinflecting (word cannot be split into recurring units),
but attemptsto show how one group developed into another broke down
inhopeless disagreement.
