4 Major Schools of Linguistic Study

Dr. Chhaya Jain

Learning outcome

This chapter offers a variety of viewpoints on the four major schools of Linguistic study. Learner will be able to demonstrate understanding of the concepts, theories, and methodologies used by linguists in qualitative and quantitative analyses of linguistic structure, and patterns of language use.

They will be in the position to demonstrate understanding of processes of language change and variation, the role of language in reflecting and constructing social identities, and the distinctive properties of human language.

They are ready for significant scholarly participation in the field of linguistics.

Multiple-choice exercises will help students in assessing their knowledge and understanding of the work. Bibliography, list of websites and You Tube videos will help them in their in- depth study and further reading.

Introduction

Linguistics is the study of languages done in a scientific way. This is not limited to looking at the words or their meanings and context in a language, but at how the language is formed, the contexts it is used in, and many more related issues. Modern linguistics does not begin until the late 18th century, and the romantic or animist theses of Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Christoph Adelung remained influential well into the 19th century. Since it is the scientific study of languages, there are, of course, numerous schools of thought related to it. Here are four of the most well known linguistic schools of thought.

Functionalism

Since the 1970s, inspired by the work of Jespersen, Bolinger, Dik, Halliday, and Chafe, functionalism has been attached to a variety of movements and models making major contributions to linguistic theory and to various subfields within linguistics, such as syntax, discourse, language acquisition, cognitive linguistics, typology, and documentary linguistics.

This first school of thought focuses on how language is actually used in everyday life. Functional theories of language propose that ‘’since language is fundamentally a tool, it is reasonable to assume that its structures are best analyzed and understood with reference to the functions they carry out.’’

The theories of functionalism put emphasis on phonological, semantic, syntactic, as well as the pragmatic functions of language. Functionalism emphasizes the importance of social context, usage, and the communicative function of the grammar, phonology, orthography etc in relation of a language.

According to Wikipedia, ‘’Functionalism, in linguistics, the approach to language study that is concerned with the functions performed by language, primarily in terms of cognition (relating information), expression (indicating mood), and conation (exerting influence). Especially associated with the Prague school of linguists prominent since the 1930s, the approach centers on how elements in various languages accomplish these functions, both grammatically and phonologically.

Functional theories of grammar are different from the formal theories of grammar. Formal theories seek to define the different elements of language and describe the way they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations; whereas the former defines the functions performed by language and then relates these functions to the linguistic elements that carry them out. This means that functional theories of grammar tend to pay attention to the way language is actually used. Functionalism, as characterized by Allen, (2007:254) “holds that linguistic structures can only be understood and explained with reference to the semantic and communicative functions of language, whose primary function is to be a vehicle for social interaction among human beings.”

Functional theories describe language in term of the functions existing at all levels of language.

Phonological function: the function of the phoneme is to distinguish between different lexical materials.

Semantic function: (Agent, Patient, Recipient, etc.), describing the role of participants in states of affairs or actions expressed.

Syntactic functions: (e.g. Subject and Object), defining different perspectives in the presentation of a linguistic expression.

Pragmatic functions: (Theme and Rhyme, Topic and Focus, Predicate), defining the informational position of ingredients, determined by the pragmatic context of the verbal interaction. Functional descriptions of grammar strive to explain how linguistic functions are performed in communication through the use of linguistic forms.

Functional linguistics began to develop as a field in the 1970s, in the work of linguists such as Joan Bybee, Bernard Comrie, John Haiman, Paul Hopper, Sandra Thompson, and Tom Givon. The principal focus of functional linguistics is on explanatory principles that derive from language as a communicative system, whether or not these directly relate to the structure of the mind. Functional linguistics developed into discourse-functional linguistics and functional-typological linguistics, with slightly different foci, but broadly similar in aims to Cognitive Linguistics. At the same time, a historical linguistics along functional principles emerged, leading to work on principles of (grammaticization) by researchers such as Elizabeth Traugott and Bernd Heine. All of these theoretical currents hold that language is best studied and described with reference to its cognitive, experiential, and social contexts, which go far beyond the linguistic system proper. Although Leonard Bloomfield, whose work Chomsky rejects, saw the ancient Indian grammarian Pāṇini as an antecedent of structuralism, Chomsky, in an award acceptance speech delivered in India in 2001, claimed “The first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini’s grammar”.

Structuralism

Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units. He is thus known as a father of modern linguistics for bringing about the shift from diachronic (historical) to synchronic (non-historical) analysis, as well as for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today, such as syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis.

Based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure of Switzerland, structuralism is an approach to linguistics that focuses on the idea that languages are fixed systems made up of many different units that connect with each other. Saussure introduced the idea of language as a static system of interconnected units, defined through the oppositions between them. Saussure also introduced several basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that are still foundational in many contemporary linguistic theories, such as the distinctions between syntagmatic and paradigm, and the langue- parole distinction, distinguishing language as an abstract system (langue) from language as a concrete manifestation of this system (parole).Substantial additional contributions following Saussure’s definition of a structural approach to language came from The Prague school, Leonard Bloomfield, Charles F. Hockett, Louis Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson.

Structural linguistics involves collecting a corpus of utterances and then attempting to classify all of the elements of the corpus at their different linguistic levels: the phonemes, morphemes, lexical categories, noun phrases, verb phrases, and sentence types. Two of Saussure’s key methods were syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, which define units syntactically and lexically, respectively, according to their contrast with the other units in the system.

This school of thought marked a shift from historical linguistic analysis to non-historical analysis. It worked for phonology and morphology, but the theories it proposes don’t make as much sense as the ones proposed by new schools of thought. Saussure was aware of the fact that, in his time, he would not be able to get a good understanding of the human brain, and so left that to future linguists.

The foundation of structural linguistics is a sign, which in turn has two components: a “signified” is an idea or concept, while the “signifier” is a means of expressing the signified. The “sign” is thus the combined association of signifier and signified. Signs can be defined only by being placed in contrast with other signs, which forms the basis of what later became the paradigmatic dimension of semiotic organization (i.e., collections of terms/entities that stand in opposition). This idea contrasted drastically with the idea that signs can be examined in isolation from a language and stressed Saussure’s point that linguistics must treat language synchronically.

Paradigmatic relations hold among sets of units that exist in the mind, such as the set distinguished phonologically by variation in their initial sound cat, bat, hat, mat, fat, or the morphologically distinguished set ran, run, running. The units of a set must have something in common with one another, but they must contrast too, otherwise they could not be distinguished from each other and would collapse into a single unit, which could not constitute a set on its own, since a set always consists of more than one unit. Syntagmatic relations, in contrast, are concerned with how units, once selected from their paradigmatic sets of oppositions, are ‘chained’ together into structural wholes.

One further common confusion here is that syntagmatic relations, assumed to occur in time, are anchored in speech and are considered either diachronic (confusing syntagmatic with historical) or are part of parole (“everyday speech”: confusing syntagmatic with performance and behaviour and divorcing it from the linguistic system), or both. Both paradigmatic and syntagmatic organizations belong to the abstract system of language. Different linguistic theories place different weight on the study of these dimensions: all structural and generative accounts, for example, pursue primarily characterizations of the syntagmatic dimension of the language system (syntax), while functional approaches, such as systemic linguistics, focus on the paradigmatic. Both dimensions need to be appropriately included, however. Those working in the generativist tradition often regard Structuralist’’s approaches as outdated and superseded.

In the 1950s Saussure’s ideas were appropriated by several prominent figures in continental philosophy, anthropology, and from there were borrowed in literary theory, where they are used to interpret novels and other texts. However, several critics have charged that Saussure’s ideas have been misunderstood or deliberately distorted by continental philosophers and literary theorists and are certainly not directly applicable to the textual level, which Saussure himself would have firmly placed within parole and so not amenable to his theoretical constructs

Generativism

The term Generativism was originally used in relation to the theoretical linguistics of grammar developed by Noam Chomsky, beginning in the late 1950s. Linguists who follow the generative approach have been called generativists. The generative school has focused on the study of syntax, but has also addressed other aspects of a language’s structure, including morphology and phonology.

The first technical use of the term generative within the discipline of linguistics occurred in 1957 when Noam Chomsky published a book entitled Syntactic Structures. In the book, Chomsky proposed a theory of generative grammar that he called “transformational grammar.” Many consider the publication of Syntactic Structures to be the birth of generative linguistics as a subfield of linguistics.

During the 1970s, Chomsky made the strong claim of innateness of the linguistic capacity leading to a great debate in the field of acquisition that still reverberates today. His idea of acquisition as a ‘logical problem’ rather than an empirical problem, and view of it as a matter of minor parameter-setting operations on an innate set of rules, were rejected by functionally and cognitively oriented researchers and in general by those studying acquisition empirically, who saw the problem as one of learning, not fundamentally different from other kinds of learning.

The work of Noam Chomsky became the basis for the generativist approach to linguistics. It was originally a way to explain how humans acquire language in the first place, but soon it came to be used to explain the different phenomena that occur in all natural languages. The generative theory of language suggests that, in its most basic form, language is made up of certain rules that apply to all humans and all languages. This led to the theory of “universal grammar”, that all humans are capable of learning grammar. Chomsky described it is the primary objective of the discipline of linguistics. For this reason the grammars of individual languages are of importance to linguistics only in so far as they allow us to discern the universal underlying rules from which the observable linguistic variability is generated. All of this was developed in the second half of the 20th century, with Noam Chomsky taking into account the work of Zellig Harris as well.

Generative grammars can be described and compared, with the aid of the Chomsky hierarchy (proposed by Chomsky) in the 1950s. This sets out a series of types of formal grammars with increasing expressive power. Among the simplest types are the regular grammars ; Chomsky claims that these are not adequate as models for human language, because of the allowance of the center-embedding of strings within strings, in all natural human languages. At a higher level of complexity are the context-free grammars . The derivation of a sentence by such a grammar can be depicted as a derivation tree. Linguists working within generative grammar often view such trees as a primary object of study. According to this view, a sentence is not merely a string of words, but rather a hierarchy with subordinate and superordinate branches connected at nodes.

Essentially, the tree model works something like this example, in which S is a sentence, D is a determiner, N a noun, V a verb, NP a noun phrase and VP a verb phrase:

The resulting sentence  could  be The dog ate the bone. Such a tree  diagram is also  called     a phrase marker. They can be represented more conveniently in text form, (though the result is  less  easy  to   read);   in   this   format   the   above   sentence   would   be   rendered   as: [S [NP [D The ] [N dog ] ] [VP [V ate ] [NP [D the ] [N bone ] ] ] ]

Chomsky has argued that phrase structure grammars are also inadequate for  describing natural languages, and formulated the more complex system of transformational grammar.[4] Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words, which form grammatical  sentences  in  a  given language. The term was originally used in relation to the theoretical linguistics of grammar developed by Noam Chomsky, beginning in the late 1950s. Linguists who follow the generative approach have been called generativists. The generative school has focused on the study of syntax, but has also addressed other aspects  of  a  language’s  structure,  including morphology and phonology.

IN other words Generativism is a linguistic theory that considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words, which form grammatical sentences in a given language. Early versions of Chomsky’s theory were called transformational grammar, and this is still used as a general term that includes his subsequent theories. The most recent is the Minimalist Program, from which Chomsky and other generativists have argued that many of the properties of a generative grammar arise from a universal grammar, which is innate to the human brain, rather than being learned from the environment.

There are a number of versions of generative grammar currently practiced within linguistics. A contrasting approach is that of constraint-based grammars. Where a generative grammar attempts to list all the rules that result in all well-formed sentences, constraint-based grammars allow anything that is not otherwise constrained. Constraint-based grammars that have been proposed include certain versions of dependency grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, categorical grammar, relational grammar, link grammar, and tree-adjoining grammar. In stochastic grammar, grammatical correctness is taken as a probabilistic variable, rather than a discrete (yes vs. no) property.

Early versions of Chomsky’s theory were called transformational grammar, and this is still used  as  a  general  term  that  includes  his  subsequent  theories.[1] The  most   recent  is   the Minimalist Program, from which Chomsky and other generativists have argued that many of the properties of a generative grammar arise from a universal grammar which is innate to the human brain, rather than being learned from the environment (see the poverty of the stimulus argument).

Noam Chomsky (1928- ) and his followers have transformed linguistics. Indeed, despite many difficulties and large claims later retracted, the school of deep or generative grammar still holds center stage. Chomsky came to prominence in a 1972 criticism of the behaviorists’

B.F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behaviour. Linguistic output was not simply related to input. Far from it, and a science that ignored what the brain did to create its novel outputs was no science at all. Chomsky was concerned to explain two striking features of language — the speed with which children acquire a language, and its astonishing fecundity, our ability to create an endless supply of grammatically correct sentences without apparently knowing the rules. How was that possible? Only by having a) an underlying syntax and b) rules to convert syntax to what we speak. The syntax was universal and simple. A great diversity of sentences can be constructed with six symbols.

There are a number of versions of generative grammar currently practiced within linguistics. A contrasting approach is that of constraint-based grammars. Where a generative grammar attempts to list all the rules that result in all well-formed sentences, constraint-based grammars allow anything that is not otherwise constrained. Constraint-based grammars that have been proposed include certain versions of dependency grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, categorial grammar, relational grammar, link grammar, and tree-adjoining grammar. In stochastic grammar, grammatical correctness is taken as a probabilistic variable, rather than a discrete (yes vs. no).

The set of assumptions underpinning the philosophy of generative linguistics includes two important ideas. The first is that the human ability for language is innate, and the second is that human language is based on a set of logical rules that allow a speaker to produce novel sentences that can be understood by others who speak the same language.The idea that a set of formal rules could be used as a model of the human cognitive ability to create language is said to be structure-dependent. In other words, the formal rules of a generative grammar must refer to the structural units of the language. Once the structural units are defined, algorithmic rules can be written to model the cognitive language building processes that underlie spoken and written language.

The concept of a generative grammar was first applied in the field of syntactic theory, where it was employed in attempts to describe the human ability to construct sentences. The generative linguistics approach has since been expanded on — vigorously — and it has become useful in the fields of phonology, morphology, and semantics. There are now many different models of generative grammar that attempt to explain how the human mind processes language.

Several assumptions underpin the philosophy of generative linguistics. Foremost is the idea that the human ability for natural language is innate. Additionally, the generative approach assumes that a speaker of a given language must have command of certain linguistic knowledge in order to produce grammatically correct, or well-formed, sentences in that language. This linguistic knowledge theoretically includes a generative grammar that allows the speaker to construct sentences that have never before been uttered. Other speakers of the language who hear those sentences use the same grammar to decode them, and are thus able understand sentences they have never heard before.

COGNITIVISM:

Cognitive linguistics emerged as a reaction to generativist theory in the 1970s and 1980s. In basic terms, cognitivism says that language emerges from human cognitive processes. It challenges “universal grammar” by suggesting that grammar is not something that all humans can inherently understand, but rather it is learned by using language. In this sense, it is a bit similar to functionalism.

Cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the school of thought within linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms. Cognitive linguistics takes an opposing position to the historically prominent position of Noam Chomsky and others in the field of generative grammar. Cognitive linguistics is closely associated with semantics. In its approach to semantics, it is distinct  from psycholinguistics,  which  draws  upon  empirical  findings  from cognitive psychology, rather than underlying concepts, to explain the mental processes that underlie the acquisition, storage, production and understanding of speech and writing.

Cognitive linguistics broadly breaks down into three main areas of study: cognitive  semantics, cognitive approaches to grammar and cognitive phonology.

Led by theorists like Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff, cognitive linguists propose that language is an emergent property of basic, general-purpose cognitive processes. In contrast to the generativist school of linguistics, cognitive linguistics is non-modularist and functionalist in  character.  Important  developments  in  cognitive  linguistics  include cognitive   grammar, frame semantics, and conceptual metaphor, all of which are based on the idea that form–function correspondences based on  representations  derived  from embodied  experience constitute the basic units of language. Cognitive linguistics interprets language in terms of concepts (sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue) that underlie   its   form.   It   is   thus   closely   associated    with semantics but    is    distinct from psycholinguistics, which draws upon empirical findings from cognitive psychology in order to explain the mental processes that underlie the acquisition, storage, production and understanding of speech and writing. Unlike generative theory, cognitive linguistics denies that there is an autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind; it understands grammar in terms   of conceptualization; and claims that knowledge of language  arises  out  of language  use.[47] Because of its conviction that knowledge of language is learned through use, cognitive linguistics is sometimes considered to be a functional approach, but it differs from other functional approaches in that it is primarily concerned with how the mind creates meaning through language, and not with the use of language as a tool of communication.

However, the main focus of cognitivism is how language is based on meaning that the mind creates. Cognitive Linguistics grew out of the work of a number of researchers active in the 1970s who were interested in the relation of language and mind, and who did not follow the prevailing tendency to explain linguistic patterns by means of appeals to structural properties internal to and specific to language. Rather than attempting to segregate syntax from the rest of language in a ‘syntactic component’ governed by a set of principles and elements specific to that component, the line of research followed instead was to examine the relation of language structure to things outside language: cognitive principles and mechanisms not specific to language, including principles of human categorization; pragmatic and interactional principles; and functional principles in general, such as iconicity and economy.

Wallace Chafe, Charles Fillmore, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, and Leonard Talmy were the most prominent linguists centering on cognitive principles and organization.Each of these linguists began developing their own approach to language description and linguistic theory, centered on a particular set of phenomena and concerns. One of the important assumptions shared by all of these scholars is that meaning is so central to language that it must be a primary focus of study. Linguistic structures serve the function of expressing meanings and hence the mappings between meaning and form are a prime subject of  linguistic analysis. Linguistic forms, in this view, are closely linked to the semantic structures they are designed to express.

Because cognitive linguistics sees language as embedded in the overall cognitive capacities of man, topics of special interest for cognitive linguistics include: the structural characteristics of natural language categorization (such as prototypicality, systematic polysemy, cognitive models, mental imagery and metaphor); the functional principles of linguistic organization (such as iconicity and naturalness); the conceptual interface between syntax and semantics (as explored by cognitive grammar and construction grammar); the experiential and pragmatic background of language-in-use; and the relationship between language and thought, including questions about relativism and conceptual universals.

For many cognitive linguists, the main interest in CL lies in its provision of a better-grounded approach to and set of theoretical assumptions for syntactic and semantic theory than generative linguistics provides. For others, however, an important appeal is the opportunity to link the study of language and the mind to the study of the brain.

 Some other schools of Linguistic study

• According to Gestalt psychologists, the human mind works by interpreting data through various laws, rules or organizing principles, turning partial information into a whole. For example, your mind might interpret a series of lines as a square, even though it has no complete lines; your mind fills in the gaps. Gestalt psychotherapists apply this logic to problem-solving to help patients.
• Psychoanalytic theory, which originated with Sigmund Freud, explains human behavior by looking at the subconscious mind. Freud suggested that the instinct to pursue pleasure, which he described as sexual in nature, lies at the root of human development. To Freud, even the development of children hinged on key stages in discovering this pleasure, through acts such as feeding at the mother’s breast and defecating, and he treated abnormal behavior in adults by addressing these stages.
• Behaviorism: In the 1950s, B.F. Skinner carried out experiments with animals, such as rats and pigeons, demonstrating that they repeated certain behaviors if they associated them with rewards in the form of food. Behaviorists believe that observing behavior, rather than attempting to analyze the inner workings of the mind itself, provides the key to  psychology.
• Humanistic Psychology: Humanist psychologists teach that to understand psychology, we must look at individuals and their motivations. Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” exemplifies this approach: a system of needs, such as food, love and self-esteem, determines a person’s behavior to various extents. Meeting these needs leads to a sense of self-satisfaction and solves psychological problems.

Summary: Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is sometimes thought of as the father of modern linguistics. Although Saussure was well known in his lifetime for his work in the history of Indo-European, his most influential work was not published until after his death, when some of his students got together and, on the basis of their lecture notes, reconstructed the course in linguistics that he had taught in Geneva. The Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure 1969 [1916]) became one of the key texts in linguistics, and ushered in the era of structuralism, which we might argue continues today. Saussure says there are two sides to language: langue and parole. While the French terms are generally used in English, they are sometimes translated as ‘language’ and ‘speech’ respectively, though not without some danger of ambiguity. We have Functionalism, Gestalt psychology, Psychoanalysis, Behaviorisms, Humanistic Psychology and Cognitivism as well to understand this concept.

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