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

The Austrian psychologist Karl Buhler also was very influential. Many specifically linguistic features Notes
of their work are thus not to be found in Saussure at all.
This school stressed the necessity of studying the observable and varifiable form of language—the
phonetic form of utterance; that is, a study of SOUND as it functions in language. Linguists like
Trubetzkoy and Jakobson, among others, contributed to the study of sound in language.
Trubetzkoy’s Principles of Phonology (1939) and Jakobson’s theory of distinctive features as the
basis for analysis of sounds are the most memorable contributions of the Prague School. The
theory of distinctive features, i.e. the principles of establishing meaningful contrasts between
sounds, led the Polish linguist Bondonin de Courtenay to propose a new unit, the phoneme, in
linguistic analysis. The Prague school developed between the two world wars. Its main interests
were phonology, stylistics, language planning and historical linguistics.
The scholars of the Prague school (in particular, Vilem Mathsius) developed an approach to
syntactic analysis using the Saussurean notion of functionally contrastive constituent of sentences
(it is known as the theory of functional sentence perspective), and this is currently being developed
in Prague (by Josef Vachek, Jan Firbas, and other scholars) as the work of ‘neo’ Prague school. A
convenient collection of articles is A Prague School Reader in Linguistics, edited by J. Vachek in 1964.
Roman Jakobson, an original member of the Prague School, later moved to America, where he
further developed notions of the various functions of language, and of diachronic linguistics, and
played an influential role in the development of generative phonology.
The concept of functional approach to linguistic analysis has also attracted the attention of Andre
Martinet in France. His Elements of General Linguistics arid a Functional View of Language shows the
clear influence of the Prague scholarship. But he applies the idea of language as a system of
function of elements more to syntax than was the practice so far.

3.5 The British Tradition of Linguistics
Until the late nineteenth century, the British tradition of linguistics was by and large imitative and
was Greek and Latin oriented. For over a hundred years, until Henry Sweet’s A New English
Grammar in 1891, Bishop Loweth dominated linguistic discussion in England. Popularization of
his grammar by such copyists as Lindley Murray and Samuel Kirham led to his work being sold
in millions. As a result of the popularity of such grammars, ‘the nineteeth’ century has been
termed ‘the midsummer madness of grammar’. Sweet’s method was analytical rather than dogmatic
or prescriptive. Then appeared the famous work of Otto Jesperson. All these attempts, however,
were on traditional lines, yet they were full of fresh insights.
The greatest contribution of England, however has been in the field of phonetics. Modern linguistics
in Britain has been influenced by the European comparative historical studies of the nineteenth
century and the American anthropological studies of the twentieth century.But both these currents
were supplemented by the strong British interest in phonetics which was the gift of English
scholars who had worked on the phonetics of Sanskrit. At the end of the nineteenth and in the first
half of the twentieth centuries Sweet and Jones were among the pioneers of modern phonetics,
and the latter contributed to a considerable extent to the development of phoneme theory. In the
field of phonetics, the work of Prof. Gimson and Prof Abercrombie is also of great significance.
Then we have the Firthian school of linguistics. In fact the term ‘Firthian’ refers to the followers of
the linguistic principles of J. R. Firth, Professor of General Linguistics in the University of London
(1945-56). These principles, as subsequently developed, were largely in the field of phonology
(where his views of ‘prosodic phonology’ were in opposition to traditional American phonemics),
and in the study of meaning, where he developed a complex view of all levels of linguistic
structure simultaneously contributing to total statement of the meaning of an utterance. The ‘neo-
Firthain’ approach to linguistics is that which is primarily associated with the work of Michael
Halliday who developed scale and category grammar in the early sixties. To describe language
structure his theory postulates four major theoretical categories, and relates them to various scales
of abstraction. The categories comprise class (covering concepts such as ‘verb’ and noun’), unit

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