II MA ENGLISH- HEL- MODERN LINGUISTICS

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.