The Study of Language

Summary
Submitted to Professor Ryadh Al-Amidi
Babylon University-PhD Program

Waleed K. Abdulabbas
 Introduction

The study of language is sometimes called the science of language or technically speaking as
Linguistics. Linguistics is the subject that 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).
Originally, as practiced in the nineteenth century, linguistics was philology: the history of
words. 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. 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 units), but attempts to show how one group developed into another
broke down in hopeless disagreement.

The study of language and linguistics has grown up in many widely separated parts of the
Western world. Often one individual or a small group of original minds has founded a tradition
which has continued to mould approaches to language in the university or the nation in which
that tradition began; between adherents of different traditions there has usually been relatively
limited contact. It cannot fail to be an advantage to any student of linguistics (whether he is a
'student' in the formal or the amateur sense) to learn something of the ideas that have been
current in traditions other than the one with which he is most familiar. (Samson, 1980, 9).

Key Ideas of Chapter 1-Introduction to the schools of linguistics (Samson, 1980).

 It is never easy to appreciate novel ideas without understanding of the climate of opinion
existing when those ideas were formed, and against which they constituted a reaction.

 The scientific study of language did not begin in this century; but the years around 1900
happen to have marked an important turning-point in the history of modern linguistics.
 Roughly that time independently in Europe and America, linguistics shifted its
 orientation in such a way that much nineteenth century work in the subject

 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.
 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. 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 Bréal and perhaps Franz
Boas, largely recast linguistics in its present form.
 The 20th century linguistics is a wholly new enterprise quite lacking connections with the
past; far from it. Noam Chomsky, in some ways the most innovative of contemporary
linguists, stresses the relationship between his own work and the than of Humboldt
(1767-1835).
  The re-orientation that occurred about then was a shift from the “historical linguistics” or
diachronic linguistics or philology that dominated the 19ths century lingsutic research
that sought to uncover the the relationship among languages fro which families of extant
languages descend towards what became know as synchronic linguistics or the analysis
of languages as communicative systems as they exist at a given point of time ignoring the
route by which they arrived at their present form. (Samson, 1980, p. 14).
 The change of emphasis from 'classical philology' to the new linguistics occurred first in
Germany and the flourishing of Indo-European linguistic studies went hand in hand with
the general intellectual and artistic movement of late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth-
century Germany known as Romanticism, with its rejection of the classical tradition and
its emphasis on indigenous ethnic and cultural roots.
 The history-centred outlook of nineteenth-century linguistic scientists was related to the
general state of science at the time. From physics, philologists took the notion of
describing the history of sound-changes occurring in a language in terms of 'laws' which
apply uniformly to whole ranges of examples, rather than discussing individual words in
the anecdotal, case-by-case.

Languages must be regarded as organic bodies. According to the early views of language,
Bopp (1827, p.1) states that “A language is in a constant state of change throughout its
life: like every organic object it has its periods of gestation and maturation, times of
accelerated and of slackened growth, its prime, decay and gradual extinction”.

Until 100 years ago, then, the historical approach was the natural one for the study of
language. Nineteenth-century historical 'linguists in many cases took it for granted that
linguistic change was similarly 'directional'. Thus, according to Rask (1818, pp 35-6),
languages became steadily simpler over time.

Otto Jespersen suggests that the three-way classification originated with Friedrich von
Schlegel's. By the mid-19th C, we find Schleicher (1848) claiming that the prehistory of
languages involves a regular development from isolation through agglutination to inflexion, and
that this is an evolution from less to more perfect. August Schlegel divided inflecting languages
into two subclasses, synthetic and analytic languages. The former being inflecting languages in
the fullest sense, the latter including some characteristics of the isolating type (prepositions in
place of case-endings, subject pronouns in verb conjugations); and he treated the history of the
Romance family of languages as a process of decay from synthetic Latin to analytic modern
languages such as French. (Samson, 1080, p.22).

Jan Baudouin de Courtenay argued that languages tend to replace sounds formed relatively far
back in the mouth and throat with sounds formed nearer the teeth and lips: notice for instance
that pharyngal and uvular consonants were common in the Semitic languages (which are among
the earliest languages for which we possess records) but are rare in languages which emerged
more recently, and compare the various fronting rules that have applied to velar consonants in
the Slavonic languages. For Baudouin, this represents a 'humanizing' tendency, by which
languages are losing the beastlike sounds that characterized their primaeval origins (Baudouin de
Courtenay 1893).

Schleicher, a language corresponded to a biological species, and an idiolect in linguistics to an

individual member of a species in biology.(1980, p.28). However, Paul Postal (1968, p. 283)
finds it clear that there is no more reason for languages to change than there is for automobiles to
add fins one year and remove them the next, for jackets to have three buttons one year and two
the next.

Samson (1980, pp.30-33) suggested that the abandonment of the Darwinian paradigm for
linguistics was in fact less well motivated than may have appeared at the time; but, at the turn of
the century, it at least seemed clear that if there was a scientific method available for the study of
language, the historical approach was not it. The time was ripe for the invention of synchronic
linguistics and modern shape of linguistics.

References

Sampson, G. (1980). Schools of linguistics. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.