History
Some of the earliest linguistic activities can be recalled from
Iron Age India with the analysis of
Sanskrit. The
Pratishakhyas (from ca. the 8th century BC) constitute as it were a proto-linguistic
ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given
corpus particular to a given
Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the
Vedanga discipline of
Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of
Pānini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to.
Pānini formulates close to 4,000 rules which together form a compact
generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the
phoneme, the
morpheme and the
root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to "human readable" programming languages).
Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries;
Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Panini. In the later centuries BC, however, Panini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it.
Bhartrihari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation) and third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.
Western linguistics begins in
Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as
Plato's
Cratylus. The first important advancement of the
Greeks was the creation of the
alphabet. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the
Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of
philology and
critic. The
sophists and
Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text genre.
Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument. Furthermore Aristotle works on
rhetoric and
poetics were of utmost importance for the understating of tragedy, poetry, public discussions etc. as text genres.
One of the greatest of the
Greek grammarians was
Apollonius Dyscolus.
[17] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. In the 4th c.,
Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar
Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.
[18] In
De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"),
Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.
[citation needed]
In the
Middle East, the
Persian linguist
Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of
Arabic in 760, in his monumental work,
Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو,
The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished
phonetics from
phonology.
[citation needed]
Sir William Jones noted that
Sanskrit shared many common features with classical
Latin and
Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the
case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung from a common source and to the discovery of the
Indo-European language family. He began the study of
comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches.
In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were
Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as
Grimm's Law – in 1822;
Karl Verner, who formulated
Verner's Law;
August Schleicher, who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" ("family tree"); and
Johannes Schmidt, who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872.
Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e. non-historical) explanations for language form.
In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the bible) and Anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field of
anthropology in the United States,
[19][20] linguistics is now considered a separate scientific discipline in the US, Australia and much of Europe.
Edward Sapir, a leader in American structural linguistics, was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His methodology had strong influence on all his successors.
Noam Chomsky's formal model of language,
transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher
Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly influenced by
Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant model since the 1960s.
The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative grammar in the 1950s and 60s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal and language specific rules.
Noam Chomsky remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such frameworks such as
Transformational grammar,
Generative Semantics,
Relational Grammar,
Generalized Phrase-structure Grammar,
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and
Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Other linguists working in
Optimality Theory state generalizations in terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon the traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in generativist linguistics.
Functionalist linguists working in
functional grammar and
Cognitive Linguistics tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus differing significantly from the formal approaches.
