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Important aspects of Linguistic Theory -word scramble game

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Functions of Languange -Croosword puzzle game

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European linguistics in the 20th century

European linguistics in the 20th century

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The Prague school important personalities

Vilém Mathesius (1882-1945)	Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)	André Martinet (1908-1999)	Nicolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy (1890-1938)
V.M. was one of the most remarkable and most influential personalities of the Prague school. Mathesius was one of the pioneers of the synchronic approach to facts of language, and this can be already found in his 1911 treatise,, On the   potentiality of the phenomena of Language“. The first important aspect of his work was that concerning the synchronic, non-historical approach. Secondly , ever more important about his work was the term potentiality, which was conceiverd by Mathesius as synchronous oscillation of speech in the particular language community. The oscillation is a precondition for the development of the language itself. In his view there are some tendecies in the language itself, which, though not being so constant as physical laws, are obvious and can be statistically represented.The emphasis on statistical evaluation was another contribution of Mathesius at the outset of the century. Another important point in his work was that he was convinced about the procedure from statics to dynamics to be to most reliable in linguistics.	Roman Jakobson   (1896-1982) was one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century. He was born in Russia and was a member of the Russian Formalist school as early as 1915. In 1943 he became one of the founding members of the Linguistic Circle of New York and acted as its vice president until 1949. He taught at numerous institutions from 1943 on, including Harvard University and MIT. Through his   teaching in the United States, Jakobson helped to bridge the gap between European and American linguistics. He had a profound influence on general linguistics (especially on Noam Chomsky's and Morris Halle's work) and on Slavic studies, but also on semiotics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, ethnology, mythology, communication theory and literary studies. His famous model of the functions of language is part of the intellectual heritage of semiotics.	André Martinet was born in 1908. He had occupations including author and academic. He died in Châtenay-Malabry in July 1999 aged 91 years and 3 months old. French linguist and author who was noted for his pioneering work on diachronic phonology, or sound change. His work was expounded in his 1955 book. In 1964 he was the author of "Elements of General Linguistics." From 1947, he served as the head of the linguistics department of Columbia University, but returned to the University of Paris in 1955 Following World War II he moved to New York, where he was to remain until 1955. During his time in New York Martinet directed the International Auxiliary Language Association and taught at Columbia University, where he served as chair of the department   from 1947 to 1955. Also, during this time, he became editor of Word, a linguistics journal. In 1955 he returned to his position at École Pratique des Hautes Études.	Prince Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy(April 15, 1890 – June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. Having graduated from Moscow University (1913), Trubetskoy delivered lectures there until the revolution in 1917. He left Moscow, moving several times before finally taking the chair of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna (1922–1938). On settling in Vienna, he became a geographically distant yet significant member of the Prague Linguistic School. Trubetzkoy's chief contributions to linguistics lie in the domain of phonology, particularly in analyses of the phonological systems of individual languages and in search for general and universal phonological laws. His magnum opus, Grundzüge der Phonologie(Principles of Phonology), issued posthumously, was translated into virtually all main European and Asian languages. In this book   he famously defined the phoneme as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline separate from phonetics.

The Prague School

The Prague School

The Prague Linguistic Circle or Prague school was an influential group of literary critics and linguists who came together in Prague with the common desire to create a new approach to linguistics. The most well-known period of the Circle is between 1926, its official launch, and the beginning of World War II, the time when Prague offered hope of freedom and democracy for artists and scholars in Central Europe. Their spirit of collective activity, vision of a synthesis of knowledge, and emphasis on a socially defined commitment to scholarship defined and motivated the Prague Circle.

Along with its first president, Vilém Mathesius, they included Russian émigrés such as Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Sergei Karcevsky, as well as the famous Czech literary scholars René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský. Their work constituted a radical departure from the classical structural position of Ferdinand de Saussure. They suggested that their methods of studying the function of speech sounds could be applied both synchronically, to a language as it exists, and diachronically, to a language as it changes. After the war, the Circle no longer functioned as a meeting of linguists, but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English linguists following the work of J. R. Firth and later Michael Halliday). It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics.

Langue and Parole

The distinction between the French words, langue (language or tongue) and  parole (speech), enters the vocabulary of theoretical linguistics with Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was published posthumously in 1915 after having been collocated from student notes.  La langue denotes the abstract systematic principles of a language, without which no meaningful utterance (parole) would be possible.  The Course manifests a shift from the search for origins and ideals, typical of nineteenth century science, to the establishment of systems.  The modern notion of system is reflected in the title of the course: General Linguistics.  Saussure in this way indicates that the course will be about language in general: not this or that particular language (Chinese or French) and not this or that aspect (phonetics or semantics).  A general linguistics would be impossible by empirical means because there exist innumerable objects that can be considered linguistic.  Instead Saussure’s methodology allows him to establish a coherent object for linguistics in the distinction between langue and parole.

The Descriptivists

Franz Boas an anthropologist set a direction for American linguistics which turned out to be enormously fruitful and which was never seriously disputed until Noam Chomsky (Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Chomsky attended an experimental elementary school in which he was encouraged to develop his own interests and talents through self-directed learning. When he was 10 years old, he wrote an editorial for his school newspaper lamenting the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe. His research then and during the next few years was thorough enough to serve decades later as the basis of Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship (1969), Chomsky's critical review of a study of the period by the historian Gabriel Jackson). He is the founder of the relativistic, culture-centred school of American anthropology that became dominant in the 20th century.  Leonard Bloomfield, 1887-1949. Leonard Bloomfield was born in Chicago to immigrants to the United States from Austria-Hungary. He entered Harvard in 1903, finishing his degree in 3 years. At 19, with his Harvard A.B. in hand, he began graduate work in German studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he served as a teaching assistant. Here he met the linguist Eduard Prokosch, then a young instructor, and almost immediately determined to become a linguist. After two years of work at Wisconsin, he went to the University of Chicago to continue his studies in comparative-historical linguistics and Germanics. He also studied Sanskrit; his uncle was Maurice Bloomfield, a well-known professor of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics, from whom he possibly derived some of his interest.

Boas born in Westphalia began his academic career as a student of physics and geography, and it was through the latter subject that he came to anthropology. Language came to seem especially important to Boas. During his tenure at Columbia University in New York City (1899–1942), he developed one of the foremost departments of anthropology in the United States. Boas was a specialist in North American Indian cultures and languages, but he was, in addition, the organizer of a profession and the great teacher of a number of scientists who developed anthropology in the United States.

In 1914, while a young instructor in Urbana-Champaign, Bloomfield published An Introduction to the Study of Language, a scholarly yet popular book that went through many reprints.

Albert Paul Weiss (1879-1931), an early behaviorist and the most important early voice expressing concern about the need to distinguish between bodily movements and accomplishments, presenting what we here call "the incommensurability problem."

Born in Steingrund, Schlesien, Germany in 1879, Albert P. Weiss (1879-1931) was brought to America as an infant. His parents, German Lutherans, settled in St. Louis where his father worked as an architect. Little else is known about either his family or his early years beyond a report that he came from a happy and affectionate home whose members participated actively in the German/American cultural life of St. Louis. Indeed, as a young man, Weiss himself belonged to a club that met to discuss philosophy. Perhaps this early philosophical interest was one factor that led to his dissatisfaction with an engraving career and decision, at a relatively late age (approximately 27), to enroll in the University of Missouri.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna.  His father was a lawyer, and his mother a strong and intelligent housewife.  His upbringing was old-fashioned and hard-working. Burrhus was an active, out-going boy who loved the outdoors and building things, and actually enjoyed school.  His life was not without its tragedies, however.  In particular, his brother died at the age of 16 of a cerebral aneurysm.

Burrhus received his BA in English from Hamilton College in upstate New York.  He didn’t fit in very well, not enjoying the fraternity parties or the football games.  He wrote for school paper, including articles critical of the school, the faculty, and even Phi Beta Kappa!  To top it off, he was an atheist -- in a school that required daily chapel attendance.

He wanted to be a writer and did try, sending off poetry and short stories.  When he graduated, he built a study in his parents’ attic to concentrate, but it just wasn’t working for him. Ultimately, he resigned himself to writing newspaper articles on labor problems, and lived for a while in Greenwich Village in New York City as a “bohemian.”  After some traveling, he decided to go back to school, this time at Harvard.  He got his masters in psychology in 1930 and his doctorate in 1931, and stayed there to do research until 1936.

Also in that year, he moved to Minneapolis to teach at the University of Minnesota.  There he met and soon married Yvonne Blue.  They had two daughters, the second of which became famous as the first infant to be raised in one of Skinner’s inventions, the air crib.  Although it was nothing more than a combination crib and playpen with glass sides and air conditioning, it looked too much like keeping a baby in an aquarium to catch on. In 1945, he became the chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University.  In 1948, he was invited to come to Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his life.  He was a very active man, doing research and guiding hundreds of doctoral candidates as well as writing many books.  While not successful as a writer of fiction and poetry, he became one of our best psychology writers, including the book Walden II, which is a fictional account of a community run by his behaviorist principles.

August 18, 1990, B. F. Skinner died of leukemia after becoming perhaps the most celebrated psychologist since Sigmund Freud.

The London school

žMichael Halliday (1925)

His first major work on the subject of grammar was "Categories of the theory of grammar",  In this paper, he argued for four "fundamental categories" for the theory of grammar:"unit", "structure", "class" and "system". These categories he argued were "of the highest order of abstraction", but were defended as those necessary to "make possible a coherent account of what grammar is and of its place in language"  In articulating the category 'unit', Halliday proposed the notion of a 'rank scale'. The units of grammar formed a "hierarchy", a scale from "largest" to "smallest" which he proposed as: "sentence", "clause", "group/phrase", "word" and "morpheme".Halliday defined structure as "likeness between events in successivity" and as "an arrangement of elements ordered in places'. Halliday rejects a view of structure as "strings of classes, such as nominal group + verbalgroup + nominal group" among which there is just a kind of mechanical solidarity" describing it instead as "configurations of functions, where the solidarity is organic." 

The London school

Bronislaw Malinoski (1884-1942)

žHe coins the term phatic communion  for speech which serves this fucntion and in which the “meaning of the words “ in the usual sense is irrelevant.

žHe claerly ,is being led by the behaviourist .

žHe clarifies his idea of meaning by appeling to a notion of “context of situation”.

The London school

J.R. Firth (1890-1960)

žHe became the first professor of General Linguistics in Great Britian.

žHe taught courses on the sociology of languange in 1930.

žOne of the principal features of Fith´s treatment of phonology is that it is polysystemic.

žFor him the phonology of a languange consits of a number of systems of alternative possibilities which come into play a different points in a phonological unit such as a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another.

A firthian phonological analysis recognizes a number of “systems of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determines the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment –sized phonematic units that represent whatever information is left when all the co-occurrence restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as prosodies

The London school

Daniel Jones (1881-1967)

žHe stressed the importance for languange study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech sound; he invented the system of cardinal reference points.

The London school

Henry Sweet (1845-1912)

žHe was the greatest of the few historical linguistics in the nineteenth century.

žHe based his studies on a detailed understanding of the vocal organs.

žHe was concerned with systematizating phonetic transcripction in connection with problems of languange- teaching  and of speelling reform.

Systemic approach and Chomsky´s approach to grammar

Systemic approach

Chomsky Approach

·         The central component is a chart of the full set of choices available in constructing a sentence , with a specification of the relationship between choices. ·         The systems are named , and so are all the alternatives within each system; and it is taken as axiomatic that these choice elements have semantic correlates. ·         Are also identified in terms of the analyst´s intuitive feeling for semantic relationships. ·         Provide a taxonomy for sentences ,a  means of descriptively classifying particular sentences. ·         Is more relevant for the sociologist because wants to be able to describe any patterns that emerge in the particular choices that given types of individual make in given circumstances from the overall range provided by their language. ·         It will operate operate at a specific rank(it refers  to a scale of sizes of grammatical unit).

·         Defines the class of well-formed sentences in a language by providing a set of rules for rewriting symbols as other  symbols. ·         The choice points are diffused throughout the description, and no special attention is drawn to them. ·         Chomsky do use a special term to describe some particular syntactic structure. ·         Include a constituency base defining a range of deep structures as well as a set of transformational rules converting deep into surface structures. ·         Appeals to the psychologist because wants a theory that describes languages , so that he can see what kinds of languages human beings are capable of using. ·         Some morphemes are dominated immediately or almost immediately by the root  S node , other morphemes are reached only via a long chain of many rules.

Important aspects of the London school

The cardinal wovel video by daniel jones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UIAe4p2I74

Prosodic analysis

http://books.google.com.mx/books?id=dX5P5mxtYYIC&pg=PA406&lpg=PA406&dq=firthian+prosodic+analysis&source=bl&ots=mI1jgSL1E7&sig=H

• Do you know what is generative phonology?

Generative phonology is a component of generative grammar that assigns the correct phonetic representations to utterances in such a way as to reflect a native speaker’s internalized grammar.

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsGenerativePhonology.htm

 

• Do you know what is an official language?

is a language that is given a special legal status in a particular country, state, or other jurisdiction. Typically a nation's official language will be the one used in that nation's courts, parliament and administration

• Do you know what Malinowski means with the term phatic communion?

Follow this link http://tcbdevito.blogspot.com/2007/11/abcd-phatic-communion.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcC1XYJTe9E

PRAGMATICS

Pragmatics is the relationship between what is said in communication (that is, the concepts and meanings which are communicated by the speaker's choice of particular words and structures) and what is done in communication ( that is, the effects the speaker's utterance has on the hearer, such as to persuade, inform, amuse, etc.). This focus on speaker-meaning and hearer-effects and encompasses the use of linguistic items for the coding of meaning, as a communicative system. It is a two-way system of interaction. It is speaker-based in that is concerned with meanings the speaker selects, the construction of propositions from concepts, and the speaker's attitudes towards these propositions. It is also hearer based in that the propositions have perlocutionary effects on hearers. It is hence essentially a theory of speech acts.
The concept of speech acts, which, following Austin (1962), is concerned with the acts that we perform through speaking, has been studied extensively in recent years, and has constituted a topical focus for scholars from a greater number of disciplines (see Schmidt and Richards 1980). Speech Act theory has been central to the work of researchers in conversational analysis, discourse analysis and semantics. Our focus is on how propositions are interpreted as different types of speech acts so we have to discuss this in terms of the assumption about the world, about communication, and about linguistic meaning which speakers and hearers share and which they appear to make use of in interpreting utterances and assigning them appropriate meanings.

Langue and parole are more than just 'language and speech' (although this is a useful quick way of remembering them).
LANGUAGE
La langue is the whole system of language that precedes and makes speech possible. A sign is a basic unit of langue.
Learning a language, we master the system of grammar, spelling, syntax and punctuation. These are all elements of langue.
Langue is a system in that it has a large number of elements whereby meaning is created in the arrangements of its elements and the consequent relationships between these arranged elements.
PAROLE
Parole is the concrete use of the language, the actual utterances. It is an external manifestation of langue. It is the usage of the system, but not the system.
COMPETENCE
Competence refers to a speaker's knowledge of his language as manifest in his ability to produce and to understand a theoretically infinite number of sentences most of which he may have never seen or heard before.
PERFORMANCE
Performance refers to the specific utterances, including grammatical mistakes and non-linguistic features like hesitations, accompanying the use of language

Escuela de Copenhague

Escuela de copenhague

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Saussure and Chomsky

Ferdinand Sausurre.
Structuralism – Structure of the sign: ● paradigmatic (“associative”) relations ● syntagmatic relations – Dualistic sign relations ● Arbitrariness of the sign ● Signified-signifier semiotic relation – “concept” – “image acoustique”	● Speech community – Communication circuit – Collective subconscious of speech community ● Different domains of abstraction: – “langue”, language – “parole”, speech.