History of Linguistics

Linguistics, the study of language, has drawn on a wide range of fields, but not, as of 2010, LEGO construction.

Linguistics, the study of language, has a long, complicated history, drawing on science, philosophy, and literary theory. Unlike comparative literature or neuroscience focused on the technical basis of language, linguistics focuses less on the principles of grammar and more on the philosophical basis of language. Though linguistics could be traced back to the ancient Greek and Roman study of rhetoric, it is often distinguished as a range of movements in the late 19th century through contemporary research.

18th and 19th Century

Linguistics is most closely related to philology, which developed as a field of study in the 18th and 19th century in European universities. Philology traces the form and meaning of words, often in ancient texts. Philologists like Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) analyzed the historical patterns of words. In his earliest work, "The Birth of Tragedy," Nietzsche famously made large pervasive arguments about the nature of Greek drama, based on the etymology of words, like "tragedy," which derives from the word for "goat song." Philology also has had a significant impact on literary study, especially the field of English literature.

From Philology to Linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist with knowledge of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, set the framework for the field of linguistics. Saussure proposed a set of principles that collectively is known as Structuralism and has influenced anthropology, literary study, sociology, architecture, and psychology. He argued that linguists should study language as an isolated field of interrelated parts, instead of the relationship of language to objects. The implicit suggestion is that the words we associate with things is "arbitrary".

After Structuralism

A number of divergent approaches came to be known as "Post-Structuralism." Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a major French philosopher whose work was heavily influenced by Saussure. His work, including the landmark "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science," also responded to and critiqued his predecessor, Saussure. In that speech, delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966, Derrida argued that meaning, in the structure of language, is infinitely deferred in a cycle of "play" and "differance." Thinkers like Michel Foucalt (1926-1984), who analyzed the relationship of power and knowledge, and Julia Kristeva (1941-present), who linked feminism and Freudianism, are sometimes also classified as post-Structuralists.

Late 20th Century

In his 1957 book "Syntactic Structure," Noam Chomsky (1928-present) articulated the his theory of "generative grammar." Chomsky's theory proposes that all languages share principles that make morphology of sentences and the combination of words predictable. Someone has acquired their culture's "generative grammar" means that this person can recognize the sentence as grammatical and sensical. One American linguist, Dan Everett, has argued that at least one civilization, the Piraha people in Brazil, defies all the major tenets of Chomsky's theory.

Other Developments

Linguistics has diverged in the last forty years, blurring disciplinary lines. One area of development has been psycholinguistics, a field focused on the relationship between neuroscience and the acquisition and use of language. Trained in experimental psychology, Steven Pinker (1954-present) has contributed books like "How the Mind Works" and "The Blank Slate," which outline a theory about evolutionary psychology in relationship to language.

William Labov (1927-present), an American linguist, has been a leading pioneer in sociolinguistics, which charts how aspects of identity like gender or race affects language. His first work "The Social Stratification of English in New York City" (1966) argued against the stigmatization of vernacular English and outlined the rules of what he called "African American Vernacular English" (AAVE).

References

• Times Literary Supplement: The poet who could smell vowels
• University of California, Irvine: Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"
• The New Yorker: A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter
• The Noam Chomsky Website