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

units), but attempts to show how one group developed into another broke down in hopeless Notes
disagreement.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

So linguistics might have ended: documenting random changes in random directions. But that
was hardly a science, only a taxonomy. When therefore Ferdinand de Saussure tentatively suggested
that language be seen as a game of chess, where the history of past moves is irrelevant to the
players, a way though the impasse was quickly recognized. Saussure sketched some possibilities.
If the word high-handed falls out of use, then synonyms like arrogant and presumptuous will
extend their uses. If we drop the final f or v the results in English are not momentous (we might
still recognize belie as belief from the context), but not if the final s is dropped (we should then
have to find some new way of indicating plurals).
Saussure’s suggestion was very notional: his ideas were put together by students from lecture
notes and published posthumously in 1915. But they did prove immensely fruitful, even in such
concepts as langue (the whole language which no one speaker entirely masters) and parole (an
individual’s use of language). Words are signs, and in linguistics we are studying the science of
signs: semiology. And signs took on a value depending on words adjacent in use or meaning.
English has sheep and mutton but French has only mouton for both uses. Above all (extending the
picture of a chess game) we should understand that language was a totality of linguistic possibilities,
where the “move” of each word depended on the possible moves of others.
A word (sign) was a fusion of concept (signified) and sound-image (signifier) the two being
somehow linked as meaning in the mind. Both signifieds and signifiers independently played on
their own chess board of possibilities — i.e. they took up positions with regard to other pieces,
indeed owed their existence to them. Though championed by the Structuralists, this theory of
semantics was a disastrous one, raising the problems recognized by linguistic philosophy. But that
was not Saussure’s fault. He was not a philosopher, but a philologist, one whose simple idea,
though much anticipated by Michel Breal and perhaps Franz Boas, largely recast linguistics in its
present form.

Saussure had a theory of meaning. He envisaged language as a series of contiguous
subdivisions marked off on the indefinite planes of ideas and sounds.

3.1 Traditional Grammar
The Greeks and the Indians are the first to have started speculations about language and contributed
tremendously to linguistic studies. In the words of John Lyons, “Traditional grammar, like so
many other of our academic traditions, goes back to Greece of the fifth century before Christ. For
the Greeks ‘grammar’ was from the first a part of ’Philosophy’. That is to say, it was a part of their
general inquiry into the nature of the world around them and of their own social institutions”
(Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics,). Bloomfield has also said that linguistics derives from the
speculations of ancient and medieval philosophers.
3.1.1 ‘Naturalists’ and ‘Conventionalists’

A beginning of what is known now as ‘traditional grammar’ was made by the Greeks with
discussions on the origin of language. The Greek philosophers debated whether language was
governed by ‘nature’ or ‘convention’.
The naturalists like Plato believed that there was by nature a correct name for everything. They
pointed out that a number of words had the quality onomatopoeia, and the others had a ‘natural’
connection with their meaning, by reference to one or more of their constituent sounds. They
maintained that every word contained a sound which was ‘naturally’ appropriate to its meaning.

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