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

century, Sweet and Jones were among the pioneers of modern phonetics, and the latter contributed Notes
to a great extent to the development of the phoneme theory Among others, we must mention
Saussure, Trubetzkoy, and Meillet in Europe, Sapir.Bloomfield, Harris, and Chomsky in America,
and Firth and Halliday in Britain. Linguistics now has become inter-disciplinary, extremely wide
and complex and kaleidoscopic in character.

3.2 The Geneva School
The leader and pioneer of this school was Saussurre who will be discussed below. In general, the
supporters of this school have tried to remain whole-heartedly loyal to the teaching and spirit of
Saussure. For a long time the leaders were Charles Bally and A. Sechehaye, who had assumed the
responsibility of publishing the Course. Bally, who tackled the difficult problem of the relationship
between thought and its linguistic expression, renewed the study of stylistics by defining it as the
study of the effective elements of language and by devoting his attention to the deviations that
individual usage (parole) imposes on the system (langue). His work is remarkable for strict logic
and care. Schehaye applied himself to constructing a grammatical method (the psychological
analysis of thought) that would introduce Saussurian concept effectively into the field of teaching.
Henri Frei is known as the promotor of functional linguistics.
The major concern of the linguistics of this school was the classification and interpretation of the
principles of the Course.
3.2.1 Ferdinand de Saussure
The credit for bringing a revolution in the field of linguistics goes to the Swiss scholar Ferdinand
de Saussure. At the age of twenty, while still a student at Leipzig, he left his linguistic imprint by
publishing his monumental treatise on the Proto-Indo-European vocalic system. He studied under
the neogrammarians Orthoff and Leiskien, yet refuted their atomistic approach to linguistics. He
attempted to frame a coherent theory of linguistic science. In his work he was influenced by
Brugmann, naturalistic philologist Schleicher, Geo-linguist Gillen, Whitney, and the Kazaan school
of linguistics, etc.

Saussure is the founder of modern linguistics, the father of Structural Linguistics
which came to be called descriptive linguistics also.

Sassure knew many languages—Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Swiss, French, Old German, etc. At Paris,
where he taught Sanskrit for ten years from 1881 to 1891 and served as secretary of the Linguistic
Society of Paris, his influence on the development of linguistics was decisive. Later on he accepted
the Chair of Linguistics at the University of Geneva where he taught linguistics between 1906 and
1911.
His Course de linguistique generate, (hereafter the Course) was published in 1916, three years after his
death, from his lecture notes by his two students—Charles Bally (1865-1947) and Albert Sechehaye
(1870-1946). Although, Saussure has about 600 pages on linguistics to his credit, yet his main work
is the Course. It is this book that marks the beginning of modern linguistics and tries to study
language synchronically for its own sake.
Saussure introduced the following notions in linguistics:
1. Synchronic and diachronic
2. Language, Langue and Parole
3. Linguistic Sign
4. Linguistic Value
5. Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic.

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