Linguistic Schools

年 代 语 言 理 论 所受主要学科影响 主要特征 教学法

1 -4 -- 19c 传统语法 传统哲学观、文化观 静止规定型

2 19c 比较语言学 达尔文进化论 发展比较型 语法翻译法

3 20c 初— 60s

结构语言学 / 美国结构主义语言学

分析哲学，行为主义，物理、化学方法

严谨描写型 结构句型法

4 50s 功能语言学 受社会学影响 交际功能型 情景 / 功能教学法

5 57-- TG 语言学 混合哲学、心智主义 智慧演绎型  

6 80s 认知语言学 体验哲学 / 认知科学

互动归纳型 认知教学法

 

(1) 布拉格学派a. 理解音位学和音位对立b. 理解句子功能前景

(2) 伦敦学派a. 了解马林诺夫斯基的理论b. 理解弗斯的理论c. 理解韩礼德与系统功能语法

(3) 美国结构主义a. 了解早期：博厄斯和萨丕尔b. 理解布龙菲尔德的理论c. 了解后布龙菲尔德时期语言学

(4) 转换生成语法a. 理解天赋假设b. 理解生成语法c. 了解古典理论d. 了解标准理论e. 了解扩展的标准理论f. 了解后期理论g. 理解转换生成语法的主要特征

(5) 修正还是反叛？a. 了解格语法b. 了解生成语义学

Brief Introduction

Saussure---- modern linguistics (Structuralism)

The Prague School The London School American Structuralism Transformational-Generative Grammar Cognitive Linguistics

1. Saussure

Ferdinard de Saussure (1857-1913):

--- “He is the father of modern linguistics”

--- “a master of a discipline which he made modern." (Jonathan Culler)

Structural theory--Sign

1.) language is a system of signs, each of which consists of two parts: SIGNFIED (concept ） and  SIGNIFIER (sound image).

He showed that the principles of langue must be described as a system of elements composed of lexical ， grammatical, and phonological components. The terminology of linguistics was to be considered relative to each other, and linguistics was really the study of signs and their relationships. The linguistic sign is constituted by the structural relationship between the concept (signified) and the sound of the word (signifier).

2.) language is a SYSTEM or SIGNS.

To communicate ideas, we must be part of system of conventions, part of system of signs. The sign, for him, is the basic unit of communication, the central of language. Therefore, we must start from the nature of the sign itself.

3.) The sequence which a sign forms with those it is in a syntagmatic relation is sometimes called a STRUCTURE. Any structure is formed by two principal types of relations which Saussure identified are SYNTAGMATIC and PARDIGMATIC relations. The former is a relation between one item and other in a sequence, or between elements which are all present.

Syntagmatic relationships of a word are those relationships that can obtain with neighboring in a sentence. Associative structural relations pertain to the ways in which words can replace one another, and the ways in which they do not. These relationships are about how words and sounds are associated with each other and form part of the synchronic relationship within the language structure.

4.) meaning was to be found within the structure of a whole language rather than in the analysis of individual words.

Synchronic & Diachronic

Saussure was determined to delimit and define the boundaries of language study. To this end he began by distinguishing between historical linguistics and descriptive linguistics, or diachronic and synchronic analyses respectively.

Linguistic was a pervasive interest of the Darwinist in 19th century. Diachronic linguistics deals with the evolution of a language through time, as a continually changing medium without end. They study the change from Old English to Middle English, then to modern English; or from “A Grammar of Modern Greek” to “The Structure of Shakespeare's English”.

A language has an existence separate from its history. Language system is complete and operates as a logical system or any point in time regardless of influence from the past. In other words, there is no relation between Diachronic analyses and language system.

“Synchrony is a fiction, for language changes as the minutes pass and grammar-writing is a lengthy enterprise. How ever, the fiction of synchronic description is essential of linguistics” (Fowler).

If the signs of language had no changes, the distinction between Synchronic analyses and Diachronic analyses is meaningless. But a language is evolving continually, the distinction is significant because synchronic analyses were either ignored or overlooked in the past, and most importantly, the distinction drew attention to the current structural properties of language as well as historical dimensions.

Langue & parole

Language is such a complex and varied phenomenon that it would be impossible to study it without assuming some basic operating principles. Saussure distinguished the linguistic competence of the speaker and the actual phenomena or data of linguistics as LANGUE and PAROLE.

Langue is an abstract system that all of us has in common and enables us to speak. When a man learns a language, he should assimilate the data of the langue and to some extent, obey the linguistic rules, including the lexicon, grammar, and phonology. “It is the social product whose existence permits the individual to exercise his linguistic faculty.”, “For language (langue) is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity.

On the other hand, PAROLE is the “executive side of language." Parole, is the actualization of langue. It is a personal, dynamic and social activity, which exists at a particular time and place and in a particular situation, as opposed to LANGUE, which is a corporate, social phenomenon, existing apart from any particular speeches.

The distinction between Langue and parole is very important. In distinguishing them, “we are separating what is social from what is individual, and what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental”.

The distinction between langue and parole also has important implications for other disciplines as well. It is essential for any field of research to distinguish what belongs to the underlying system which makes possible various types of behavior and what belongs to actual instances of such behavior.

The Prague School

1. The History of the Prague School Phonology

Forerunner

The forerunner of the Prague School was the Moscow Linguistic Circle founded in 1915. It is a circle consisted of a group of young scholars such as Trubetzkoy (25yr) and Jakobson (20yr), who is the president from 1915-1920. The issues that this circle concerns are of both language and linguistics including problems of poetics, literature analysis, and general artistic structure under the influence of Slavic and historical linguistics. The sources of their study are based on Saussure and Baudouin’s works. When the Revolution broke out on October 1917 the members of this circle fled and this circle nearly dismissed.

Foundation

By the 1920s, the terms ‘phoneme’ and ‘phonology’ were well known to European linguistics. More importantly, de Saussure had left a legacy of modern structuralism which greatly influenced linguistics in general. Working within this structuralist tradition were, among others, a group of scholars known from 1926 as the Linguistic Circle of Prague. In phonology, two members of the Circle stand out: Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), who began his career in Moscow but moved to Czechoslovakia and worked there in the 1930s before fleeing via Scandinavia to the USA; and Nikolai S. Trubetzkoy (1890-1938), also of Russian origin, who was a professor in Vienna from 1923 until his death

Chronicle of the Prague School Phonology

a.   1915.  The foundation of the Moscow Linguistic circle, Jakobson’s being the president

b.   1917  Members fleeing Moscow due to October Revolution

c.    1926  The foundation of the Prague School Linguistic Circle, Jagobson’s being the vice president

d.   1928  Presenting the Prague Circle manifesto( drafted by Jakobson and cosigned by Trubetzky and Karcevskij) at the first International Congress of Linguistic at Hague.

e.   1938  Trubetzkoy died.f.      1982  Jakobson died in Massachusetts

The Representative Characters Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) Jakobson’s contribution to linguistics can be represented as the concept s

uch as feature, binary  opposition, markedness, redundancy, and universals. He also focuses the importance of linguistics on language acquisition, aphasia, act of communication, meaning in grammar, poetry, and the systematicity of language change. Jakobson’s greatest insight, distinctive feature, (after the phoneme) belongs to the (Functional) Structuralist Phonology. So, for more information, you may consult functional phonology. Jakobson’s contribution in the Prague school phonology can be represented as the Prague Circle manifesto, which changes the direction of the development of the European phonology.

Trubetzkoy, Nikolai Sergeyevič (1890-1938)Trubetzkoy’s chief contribution in phonology was taken in the sense of fun

ctional phonology. (So, for more information, see the functional (structuralist) phonology. Trubetzkiy’s notable contributions made to phonological theory are as follows:

a.      Clarifying the distinction between phonetics and phonology by the criterion of function

b.      Investigating insistently on phonic substance in terms of its various functions in individual languages

c.      Emphasizing on the concept of phonological opposition (primary) over phoneme (secondary)

d.      Classifying phonological oppositions typologically instead of binaristic

Main Theories

Following de Saussure’s emphasis on the differential function of linguistic elements, both Jakobson and Trubetzkoy attached great importance to the oppositions among phonemes rather than to the phonemes themselves. Thus to say that English has phonemes /s/ and /z/ is a statement about a distinction which English speakers make and recognize rather than a claim about phonemes as mental images or phonetic entities. This was a significant insight, which seemed to accord with linguistic experience. By the very nature of spoken language, a speaker is aware of differences and reacts to mispronunciation or interference with the system of oppositions. But the isolation of individual phonemes from their spoken context is neither a typical nor an easy task. Most speakers seem incapable of doing it in any systematic way, and, in literate societies, usually resort to naming letters and spelling out a word rather than attempting to articulate separate phonemes.

Jacobson (and others of the Prague School) published actively during the 1920s and 1930s, but it was Trubetzkoy who provided the School’s most comprehensive and widely consulted work on phonology, GrundzÜge der phonologie (Principles of Phonology), which first appeared in 1939, the year after his death. Besides discussing the nature of distinctive oppositions in theoretical terms, Trubetzkoy also surveys analytical procedures and gives extensive examples of the different oppositions of various languages. He follows through the implications of the structural approach in a number of ways, particularly in the classification of oppositions. He is also responsible for the concepts neutralization and archiphoneme which are consistent with a functional view of the phoneme.

Jacobson and Trubetzkoy also initiated modern distinctive feature theory. The notion of component features is already implicit in the idea of opposition. The notion was made explicit by Jakobson’s and Trubetzkoy’s recognition of such features as ‘differential qualities’ or ‘relevant properties’. This further strengthened their point that phonemes represented points in a system rather than physical or mental entities.

Distinctive Features Jakobson (1939, 1949) drawing on earlier phonological con

cepts of de Saussure and Hjelmslev, pointed to the limited number of “differential qualities” or “distinctive features” that appeared to be available to languages. Jakobson’s interest was in showing hoe oppositions – as the constitutive features of relations among phonemes – reflected a hearer’s response to an acoustic signal. Just as this signal contains a limited number of variables, so perceptual response to it operates with a limited number of categories.

The most famous elaboration of this approach is clarified in works by Jakobson, Fant and Hlle (1952) and Jakobson and Halle (1956). This scheme uses perceptual terms which reflect acoustic cues rather than articulatory mechanics. In 1939, Jakobson took Grammont’s terms “acute” and “grave” representing opposite ends of a scale that measures the predominance of upper or lower components of the acoustic spectrum. The “acute-grave” feature distinguishes both high front vowels (i, y) from back vowels (u, o, a…) and palatal consonants from velar consonants.

Jakobson and Halle employed only 12 features, which were listed with articulatory correlates as well as acoustic cues. All of the features are polar oppositions, allowing relative values. So the acute vowels of one language need not to be identical in nature with the acute vowels of another, provided that they are more acute than the grave vowels to which they are opposed. Moreover, the same acoustic effect can be achieved by different articulatory means. Lip rounding, pharyngealization and retroflexion, for instance, may all be covered by the one distinctive feature of “flatness”. Each feature is binary, with only two opposed values along a single dimension.

Neutralization For any particular system, biuniqueness is a requir

ement that phonemes and allophones can be unambiguously assigned to each other. A problem in this connection is that contrastive systems are often unequally exploited. This means, for example, that two phonemes may be distinguished in some structures but not in others. Following Trubetzkoy (1939) we may say that some phonemic oppositions are suspended or neutralized under certain conditions. Trubetzkoy distinguishes three kinds of neutralization.

Firstly, a language has a contrast but only one of the relevant phonemes occurs under neutralization. Suppose a language has a contrast of voiced and voiceless plosives in word-initial and word-final positions, nut only voiceless plosives occur word-finally. Since the word-final plosives are not in contrast with voiced plosives, the contrast of voicing is inoperative or neutralized word-finally.

Secondly, neutralization may be represented by some kind of variation or alternation among the otherwise contrasting phonemes. For example, in Indonesian, there are four nasal consonant phonemes (bilabial, alveolar, palatal and velar). But sequences of nasal plus other consonants are homorganic, that is the nasal and following consonants are at the same point of articulation. So, we can find clusters such as /mb/ and /nd/, but not /md/ and /nb/.

Thirdly, neutralization may be represented by a sound which is distinct from both of the otherwise contrasting phonemes. One of the most common instances of this kind of neutralization is where vowel contrasts are reduced under certain conditions.

Historical Status

a. Prague school linguistics’ success essentially changed the character of European linguistics.

b. Trubetzkoy’s contributions were inherited and further elaborated by Martinet and his associates who found the Functionalist School, i.e., Prague School is the cradle of Structuralism.

      Influence 

The concept of neutralization and the theory of markedness is expanded in generative grammar as well as nowadays.

The London School

American Structuralism

It became popular and influential in the 1930s and 40s through the world.

Two forerunners:

Franz Boas & Edward Sapir

The father:

Leonard Bloomfield

Franz Boas: the traditional grammatical model could not be used to analyze the structures of those languages.

Edward Sapir: Although Indian’s languages had no written forms, they were very communities.

Leonard Bloomfield:Accepted the theories and principles of behaviorism;Characterized language and language acquisition in terms of

behaviorist terminology. Language was a habit of verbal behavior which consisted of a series of stimuli and response.

Argued that to acquire a language was to form a habit of verbal behavior and learning a L2 was learning a new habit.

Thought speech was primary and writing was secondary.

Transformational-Generative Grammar

Put forward by Norm Chomsky in 1957.

Wrote a book Syntactic Structures to spread his theory.

Main points:1) Children are born with a LAD. This is made

up of general principles called UG. Once the child is born, the particular environment will trigger the LAD. The child will use and text the principles again and again until his hypotheses agree with the actual grammar of the language.

2) Made the distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. He believes that linguistics should study the linguistic competence, not the performance, of the native speaker so as to set up a system of rules that will generate an infinite number of grammatical sentences. To gain the goal, he argues we should use a deductive, hypothesis-testing approach.

Cognitive Linguistics