Page 30 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University

Notes
Unit 3: Brief History of the Growth of Modern Linguistics:
Bloomfield to Chomsky

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
3.1 Traditional Grammar
3.2 The Geneva School
3.3 The Copenhagen School
3.4 The Prague School (Czechoslovakia)
3.5 The British Tradition of Linguistics
3.6 The American School of Linguistics
3.7 Recognition of Indian Contribution by the West
3.8 The Vedas, Brahmins and Aranayakas
3.9 The Pratisakhyas
3.10 Yaska’s Nirukta
3.11 Panini
3.12 Katyayana
3.13 Patanjali
3.14 After Patanjali
3.15 Summary
3.16 Key-Words
3.17 Review Questions
3.18 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this Unit students will be able to:
• Know the History of the Growth of Linguistics.
• Discuss Linguistics from Bloomfield to Chomsky.

Introduction
Linguistics is the study of language, sometimes called the science of language. {1} The subject has
become a very technical, splitting into separate fields: sound (phonetics and phonology), sentence
structure (syntax, structuralism, deep grammar), meaning (semantics), practical psychology
(psycholinguistics) and contexts of language choice (pragmatics). {2} But originally, as practised in
the nineteenth century, linguistics was philology: the history of words. {3} Philologists tried to
understand how words had changed and by what principle. Why had the proto-European
consonants changed in the Germanic branch: Grimm’s Law? Voiceless stops went to voiceless
fricatives, voiced stops to voiceless stops, and voiced aspirates to voiced stops. What social
phenomenon was responsible? None could be found. Worse, such changes were not general. Lines
of descent could be constructed, but words did not evolve in any Darwinian sense of simple to
elaborate. One could group languages as isolating (words had a single, unchanging root),
agglutinizing (root adds affixes but remains clear) and inflecting (word cannot be split into recurring

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