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 con

vention) Dichotomy: langue-parole; syntagmatic-paratagmatic; sy

nchronic-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

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Saussure’s 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. Saussure’s 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 ju

stified 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 hearer—it 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 pheno

menon, 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 Systemic-Functional Grammar

Sociologically oriented functional linguistic appraoch. Effect on lg teaching, sociolinguistics, discourse analy

sis, stylistics, and machine translation. Two components: systemic grammar and functional gr

ammar. Adult’s 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 infor

mation, 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 persona

l relations. This includes various ways the speaker enters a speech situation and perform a speech act.

Interpersonal function is realised by MOOD(语气 ) and MODALITY(情态 ).

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 Languag

es (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, whil

e 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 exp

ression. The important task for linguists is to discover a lg’s particu

lar 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 s

ystems, concrete combinations of sound and meaning, various means of representing all kinds of relations.

Bloomfield’s theory The principal representative of American descriptive li

nguistics. 1933-1950 the Bloomfieldian Era, in which the Americ

an 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.

S—r-------------------s—R When one individual is stimulated, his speech c

an 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 i

n order to develop discovery procedures for structure above the sentence level.

Some works Harris: Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951): mar

king the maturity of American descriptive linguistics. Hockett: A Course in Modern Linguistics (1958): a w

ell-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 (法位学 ) Sydney M. Lamb: stratificational grammar (层次语法 ).

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) mar

ked the beginning of the Chomskyan Revolution. Five stages: 1. The Classical Theory aims to make linguistics a scie

nce. 2. The Standard Theory deals with how semantics sho

uld 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 di

scussion 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 D

evice (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 versio

n of grammar)

What is generative grammar? A system of rules that in some explicit and wel

l-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 cor

rect 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 well-

formed 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 whil

e 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