Modern Linguistics
Ferdinand
de Saussure is usually referred to as the father of modern linguistics. There
are many schools of linguistics in the twentieth century, but all of them seem
to be derived directly or indirectly from his book, A Course in Linguistics. The publication of his book could be considered the
starting point of modern linguistics.
De
Saussure’s contributions to linguistics lay in the following. Firstly he made a
distinction between two approaches to the study of language: the synchronic approach and the diachronic approach. The synchronic
or descriptive
study of a language is concerned with language as it exists at a particular
point of time. Thus, if we make a study of English of Shakespeare’s time or
Chaucer’s time, it would be a synchronic study. The diachronic
or historical study of a language is
concerned with the historical development of language through time. This
distinction between the two approaches helped modern linguists to arrive at a
clear perspective and steer away from the danger of mixing up the two
approaches.
Secondly,
de Saussure distinguished between what he called langue and parole. Parole is
the concrete manifestation of language either through speech or through
writing. The sentences written on a page is an example of parole. The lecture or the speech we hear is also an example of parole. Langue is the abstract knowledge necessary for listening, speaking,
reading and writing, i.e. for producing instances of parole. It is the total
set of inventions that the members of a language community share. Every
linguist aims to study this set of conventions (langue) and for arriving at statements about langue he makes use
of vocal occurrences of speech or writing (parole) as his data.
De
Saussure’s third contribution is the doctrine that language is a system of
systems where each symbol has a meaning to it. Those symbols, words, can be
combined and it allows a speaker to communicate messages which have not been
expressed before. The total number of words in any language can be listed in a
dictionary. But, the total number of sentences cannot be listed because they
are infinite. Certain principles are governing the way words combine to form
sentences, and these principles can be used by a speaker to produce innumerable
sentences which have never been uttered before. The distinction between the signifier and the signified is also de Saussure’s contribution. Symbols in language
are vocal symbols which are arbitrary. In other words, signifiers are not
naturally related to the signified. They are made of speech sounds which
combine in certain principled ways to form an infinite set of messages.
De
Saussure’s teachings laid the foundation for the work of later linguists like Benjamin Lee Whorf, Louis Hjemslev and others. A group that took its inspiration from his A Course in General Linguistics
was the Prague School of Linguistics, the most important exponents
[persons who support an idea or
theory] of which were Nikolas S. Trubetzkoy
and Roman Jakobson.
In America, the
anthropologist Franz Boas encouraged
his followers, Edward Sapir and Leonard
Bloomfield to record and analyze
the Red Indian languages. The publication of Bloomfield’s Book Language (1933) was another turning point in the history of
linguistics. The follower of Bloomfield developed his theories and later formulated
Structural Linguistics.
The forties and fifties were the glorious days of American structuralism.
In 1957, a revolutionary linguist, Noam Chomsky published
his
Syntactic Structures, in which he attacked the basic tenets on structuralism and
proposed a new theory called Transformational
Generative Grammar.
The present state of linguistics is quite colourful. Some of
the disciples of Chomsky have proposed new theories known as Case Grammar, Generative Semantics etc.
The followers of linguists like Halliday is the chief exponent of a school
called Systemics. Kenneth l. Pike is the
founder of Tagmenics, and Sidney Lamb practises Stratificational
Grammar.
Key points of Modern Linguistics
1. Speech is primary and writing,
secondary.
Traditional
grammarians held that the spoken form of a language is inferior to the written
form. The spoken form was a corrupt version of the written form. As a result, their
descriptions were based on the written language, and they tended to ignore the
spoken language altogether. The modern linguist, on the other hand, believes
that the spoken form is primary and that systems of writing are based on the
spoken language.
There
are several reasons to prove that the spoken form is primary and the written
form secondary.
1.
In our daily life, we
make use of speech more than we make use of writing.
2.
There are many
languages for which there is no writing system has been evolved as yet, but
there is only the written form and no spoken form.
3.
Even in the case of
those languages which have a writing system, we find that, historically, the
written form appeared much later than the spoken form.
4.
Children learn to
speak their mother tongue first and learn to write only later.
2. There are no ‘backward’ languages.
Linguistic studies reveal that all languages are equally
complex and efficient systems, however ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ the people
using the language might be. All languages are equally effective as far as the
purposes of the particular language community are concerned.
Some
people believe that most Indian languages are ‘backward’ compared to English which
is a ‘refined’ and ‘beautiful’ language. They point out that Indian languages are
inadequate to discuss neurology or abstract paintings. Indeed, we do not have
the vocabulary to discuss these subjects now, but when a need arises any
language is capable of fulfilling that need. The fact that a particular
language does not have the technical terminology for a certain field does not
mean that it is a poor language.
Example:
The
language of the Eskimos has more than a dozen words for referring to different
kinds of snow. English has only two or three words for this purpose. This doesn’t
mean that English is inferior to the Eskimo language. Snow is a matter of life
and death to Eskimos, and they need many words for snow in such an environment.
In England, the people can live without bothering about such subtle
distinctions. and they can manage with two or three words.
3. Change is natural for languages.
Traditional
grammarians observed that languages change and they thought that change was a
sign of corruption and decay. For them, the purest form of the language was the
language of the great masters of some golden ages of the past. Any deviation
from this norm was resented by them.
All
living languages change and that such a change is neither for the worse nor for
the better. Each living language is an efficient system of communication,
serving the different needs of a particular society. As these needs change,
languages tend to change to meet the new needs.
4. There are no ‘pure’ forms of language.
Some
people believe that the English spoken by the BBC announcers is the pure or
correct form and that the English spoken by the flower girls in London is ‘impure’
and ‘incorrect’. [Ex: Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw portrays this attitude]. It was
only a historical accident that one of the varieties of English gained social
prestige and became the standard variety. The social status of a language has
nothing to do with ‘purity’ or ‘impurity’.
Linguists
make no value judgments in these matters. They study all forms objectively and
then add the note, if necessary, that a certain form has more social prestige
than the other.
5. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive.
A prescriptive grammarian tells the speakers what forms and
what rules they ought to use, a descriptive grammarian describes the forms and
rules the native speakers use.
Traditional
grammarians started prescribing their dos and don’ts when they discovered that the
current speech was quite different from the kind of languages they imagined to
be pure and beautiful. John Dryden, for example, didn’t like prepositions at
the end of a sentence. He said that they were ugly and many grammarians also believed
it because it was insisted by him repeatedly. [Ex: Who did you speak to? This is the house we lived in] but these
sentences are quite common in England.
Both
the prescriptive and the descriptive grammarians make use of rules. The prescriptive
grammarian’s rules, like the laws of the government, tell the people what they
ought to do. The descriptive grammarian’s rules, like the laws of physics or
biology, describes what happens or is done.
