Western Scholarship

20th – 21st CenturyPrepared by :1. Samini A.

2. Shareen Lee3. Thanavathi

TIMELINE

Structuralism

Sassure, Bloomfield

Generativism

20th century

21th century

Functionalism

Chomsky, Shaumyan

Simon Dik, Michael Halliday, Robert van Valin

Structuralism

When?• Early 20th century 1920s

1930s – 1960s

Father of Structuralism…Ferdinand de Saussure

What?• Language has a structure - Language is a structure in which each element interact

• Language is a system of signs

- Noise is only language when it

expresses or communicates idea.

• Language operates at two levels: Langue and Parole

- Langue – Abstract system

Parole – The actual speech

Swiss Linguist Studied and taught in

University of Geneva Intellectual ability at 14 Learnt Greek, Latin,

Sanskrit Born in 1857, died at 55

in 1913 PhD Locative Absolute in

Sanskrit Famous bible “Cours de

linguistique generale” (1916)

EUROPEAN STRUCTURALISM

Leonard BloomfieldWhat?• Language is a descriptive

science. -Describe what people say. Not what people should say.

• The primary form of language is the spoken one.

- Not every language has a written form. Spoken comes first, then the written.

• Language is a system. - Smaller units are arranged systematically to form the larger ones.

• Language is observable speech, not knowledge.

- Language should be based on observable samples (corpus/corpora).

Led the development of structural linguistics in the 1930s and 1940s.

Born in 1887, died at 62 in 1949.

Influential textbook, Language,published in 1933. Comprehensive description on American structural linguistics.

GENERATIVISM

GENERATIVISM

When?– Mid - Late 20th Century (1960s)

(Robert de Beaugrande)

Generativism can designate an approach for relating language to the

intuitive knowledge of speakers and to the mental capacities of humans at large.

Who?

History

• Dec 7 1928 • American Linguist,

Philosopher, Cognitive Scientist, Logician, Activist

What

• Highly credited for the development of Generativism

• Has a significant impact on the intellectual community since the mid 20th Century

Contributions

• Development of the Theories of generative grammar

• Classification of formal language properties in the Chomsky Hierarchy

• Critiques of the school of Behaviorism

Avram Noam Chomsky

GENERATIVE THEORYWhat?

explains language as a form of knowledge, a unique (human) capacity which is part of our cognitive makeup

.

.

Universal Grammarprimary objective

of the discipline of linguistics

basic form of language is a set of universal syntactic rules

and underlies the grammars of all languages

UNIVERSAL GRAMMARChomsky’s theories grew out of criticism of

Behaviourism. In learning language,

complex grammars are acquired rapidly. Mental grammar is

innate and universal

SINS OF GENERATIVISMShaumyan (1987: 30)

Generativism distorts

linguistic reality in the

following ways: rejects the

phonological level.

confounds the

constituency

relations with linear word order

uses fictitious entities called

deep structures and fictitious phonological

representations

confounds the phonological level with the morphological

level

FUNCTIONALISM

FUNCTIONAL THEORIES OF GRAMMAR

approaches to the study of language that see the functions of language.

pay attention to the way language is actually used in communicative context.

differs significantly from other linguistic theories which stress purely formal approaches to grammar.

The structuralist functionalism of the Prague school, was the earliest functionalist framework developed in the

1920s.

Framework

Simon Dik – a language is in the first place conceptualized as an instrument of social instrument

among human beings.

Michael Halliday – linguistics as study of “how people exchange meaning by ‘languaging’.

Robert Van Valin – Sentence is formulated in terms of its semantic

structure and communicative functions.

Danish functional

grammar – pragmatics

and discourse

Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. England : Penguin. p.22 Widdowson, H.G. (2000).Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. o en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Functional_theories_of_grammarowww.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/222121/functionalism

o http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080625033158AAAD0DY

o https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Michael_Halliday.html

o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralismo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Bloomfieldo http://

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure

REFERENCES:

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