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Written by

John Lyons ,

Eric P. Hamp •All

Fact-checked by

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Jul 14, 2025 • Article History

Table of Contents
Key People:

Noam Chomsky

Lancelot Thomas Hogben

Michel Thomas

Julia Kristeva

Joseph H. Greenberg
(Show more)
Related Topics:

anomalist
 analogist

structural linguistics

applied linguistics

mathematical linguistics
See all related content
Top Questions

 What is linguistics?
 How do linguists study languages?
 What are the main branches of linguistics?
 How do phonetics and phonology differ within linguistics?
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linguistics, the scientific study of language. The word was first used in the
middle of the 19th century to emphasize the difference between a newer
approach to the study of language that was then developing and the more
traditional approach of philology. The differences were and are largely
matters of attitude, emphasis, and purpose. The philologist is concerned
primarily with the historical development of languages as it is manifest in
written texts and in the context of the associated literature and culture. The
linguist, though he may be interested in written texts and in the
development of languages through time, tends to give priority to spoken
languages and to the problems of analyzing them as they operate at a given
point in time.

The field of linguistics may be divided in terms of three

dichotomies: synchronic versus diachronic, theoretical versus applied, and
microlinguistics versus macrolinguistics. A synchronic description of a
language describes the language as it is at a given time; a diachronic
description is concerned with the historical development of the language
and the structural changes that have taken place in it. The goal of
theoretical linguistics is the construction of a general theory of the
structure of language or of a general theoretical framework for the
description of languages; the aim of applied linguistics is the application of
the findings and techniques of the scientific study of language to practical
tasks, especially to the elaboration of improved methods of language
teaching. The terms microlinguistics and macrolinguistics are not yet well
established, and they are, in fact, used here purely for convenience. The
former refers to a narrower and the latter to a much broader view of the
scope of linguistics. According to the microlinguistic view, languages should
be analyzed for their own sake and without reference to their social
function, to the manner in which they are acquired by children, to the
psychological mechanisms that underlie the production and reception
of speech, to the literary and the aesthetic or communicative function of
language, and so on. In contrast, macrolinguistics embraces all of these
aspects of language. Various areas within macrolinguistics have been given
terminological
recognition: psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological
linguistics, dialectology, mathematical and computational linguistics,
and stylistics. Macrolinguistics should not be identified with applied
linguistics. The application of linguistic methods and concepts to language
teaching may well involve other disciplines in a way that microlinguistics
does not. But there is, in principle, a theoretical aspect to every part of
macrolinguistics, no less than to microlinguistics.

A large portion of this article is devoted to theoretical, synchronic

microlinguistics, which is generally acknowledged as the central part of the
subject; it will be abbreviated henceforth as theoretical linguistics.
History of linguistics
Earlier history
Non-Western traditions
Linguistic speculation and investigation, insofar as is known, has gone on in
only a small number of societies. To the extent that Mesopotamian, Chinese,
and Arabic learning dealt with grammar, their treatments were so
enmeshed in the particularities of those languages and so little known to
the European world until recently that they have had virtually no impact on
Western linguistic tradition. Chinese linguistic and philological scholarship
stretches back for more than two millennia, but the interest of those
scholars was concentrated largely on phonetics, writing, and lexicography;
their consideration of grammatical problems was bound up closely with the
study of logic.

Certainly the most interesting non-Western grammatical tradition—and the

most original and independent—is that of India, which dates back at least
two and one-half millennia and which culminates with the grammar
of Panini, of the 5th century BCE. There are three major ways in which
the Sanskrit tradition has had an impact on modern linguistic scholarship.
As soon as Sanskrit became known to the Western learned world, the
unravelling of comparative Indo-European grammar ensued, and the
foundations were laid for the whole 19th-century edifice of comparative
philology and historical linguistics. But, for this, Sanskrit was simply a part
of the data; Indian grammatical learning played almost no direct part.
Nineteenth-century workers, however, recognized that the native tradition
of phonetics in ancient India was vastly superior to Western knowledge, and
this had important consequences for the growth of the science of phonetics
in the West. Third, there is in the rules or definitions (sutras) of Panini a
remarkably subtle and penetrating account of Sanskrit grammar. The
construction of sentences, compound nouns, and the like is explained
through ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner
strikingly similar in part to modes of modern theory. As might be imagined,
this perceptive Indian grammatical work held great fascination for 20th-
century theoretical linguists. A study of Indian logic in relation to Paninian
grammar alongside Aristotelian and Western logic in relation to Greek
grammar and its successors could bring illuminating insights.

Britannica Quiz

English 101

Whereas in ancient Chinese learning a separate field of study that might be

called grammar scarcely took root, in ancient India a sophisticated version
of this discipline developed early alongside the other sciences. Even though
the study of Sanskrit grammar may originally have had the practical aim of
keeping the sacred Vedic texts and their commentaries pure and intact, the
study of grammar in India in the 1st millennium BCE had already become
an intellectual end in itself.

Greek and Roman antiquity

The emergence of grammatical learning in Greece is less clearly known
than is sometimes implied, and the subject is more complex than is often
supposed; here only the main strands can be sampled. The term hē
grammatikē technē (“the art of letters”) had two senses. It meant the study
of the values of the letters and of accentuation and prosody and, in this
sense, was an abstract intellectual discipline; and it also meant the skill of
literacy and thus embraced applied pedagogy. This side of what was to
become “grammatical” learning was distinctly applied, particular, and less
exalted by comparison with other pursuits. Most of the developments
associated with theoretical grammar grew out of philosophy and criticism;
and in these developments a repeated duality of themes crosses and
intertwines.
Much of Greek philosophy was occupied with the distinction between that
which exists “by nature” and that which exists “by convention.” So
in language it was natural to account for words and forms as ordained by
nature (by onomatopoeia—i.e., by imitation of natural sounds) or as arrived
at arbitrarily by a social convention. This dispute regarding the origin of
language and meanings paved the way for the development of divergences
between the views of the “analogists,” who looked on language as
possessing an essential regularity as a result of the symmetries that
convention can provide, and the views of the “anomalists,” who pointed to
language’s lack of regularity as one facet of the inescapable irregularities of
nature. The situation was more complex, however, than this statement
would suggest. For example, it seems that the anomalists among
the Stoics credited the irrational quality of language precisely to the claim
that language did not exactly mirror nature. In any event, the anomalist
tradition in the hands of the Stoics brought grammar the benefit of their
work in logic and rhetoric. This led to the distinction that, in modern theory,
is made with the terms signifiant (“what signifies”) and signifié (“what is
signified”) or, somewhat differently and more elaborately, with “expression”
and “content”; and it laid the groundwork of modern theories of inflection,
though by no means with the exhaustiveness and fine-grained analysis
reached by the Sanskrit grammarians.

The Alexandrians, who were analogists working largely on literary

criticism and text philology, completed the development of the classical
Greek grammatical tradition. Dionysius Thrax, in the 2nd century BCE,
produced the first systematic grammar of Western tradition; it dealt only
with word morphology. The study of sentence syntax was to wait
for Apollonius Dyscolus, of the 2nd century CE. Dionysius called grammar
“the acquaintance with [or observation of] what is uttered by poets and
writers,” using a word meaning a less general form of knowledge than what
might be called “science.” His typically Alexandrian literary goal is
suggested by the headings in his work: pronunciation, poetic figurative
language, difficult words, true and inner meanings of words, exposition of
form-classes, literary criticism. Dionysius defined a sentence as a unit of
sense or thought, but it is difficult to be sure of his precise meaning.

The Romans, who largely took over, with mild adaptations to their highly
similar language, the total work of the Greeks, are important not as
originators but as transmitters. Aelius Donatus, of the 4th century CE,
and Priscian, an African of the 6th century, and their colleagues were
slightly more systematic than their Greek models but were essentially
retrospective rather than original. Up to this point a field that was at times
called ars grammatica was a congeries of investigations, both theoretical
and practical, drawn from the work and interests of literacy, scribeship,
logic, epistemology, rhetoric, textual philosophy, poetics, and literary
criticism. Yet modern specialists in the field still share their concerns and
interests. The anomalists, who concentrated on surface irregularity and who
looked then for regularities deeper down (as the Stoics sought them in
logic) bear a resemblance to contemporary scholars of the
transformationalist school. And the philological analogists with their
regularizing surface segmentation show striking kinship of spirit with the
modern school of structural (or taxonomic or glossematic) grammatical
theorists.
The European Middle Ages
It is possible that developments in grammar during the Middle
Ages constitute one of the most misunderstood areas of the field of
linguistics. It is difficult to relate this period coherently to other periods and
to modern concerns because surprisingly little is accessible and certain, let
alone analyzed with sophistication. By the mid-20th century the majority of
the known grammatical treatises had not yet been made available in full to
modern scholarship, so not even their true extent could be classified with
confidence. These works must be analyzed and studied in the light
of medieval learning, especially the learning of the schools of philosophy
then current, in order to understand their true value and place.

The field of linguistics has almost completely neglected the achievements of

this period. Students of grammar have tended to see as high points in their
field the achievements of the Greeks, the Renaissance growth and
“rediscovery” of learning (which led directly to modern school traditions),
the contemporary flowering of theoretical study (people usually find their
own age important and fascinating), and, since the mid-20th century, the
astonishing monument of Panini. Many linguists have found uncongenial the
combination of medieval Latin learning and premodern philosophy. Yet
medieval scholars might reasonably be expected to have bequeathed to
modern scholarship the fruits of more than ordinarily refined perceptions of
a certain order. These scholars used, wrote in, and studied Latin, a
language that, though not their native tongue, was one in which they were
very much at home; such scholars in groups must often have represented a
highly varied linguistic background.

Some of the medieval treatises continue the tradition of grammars of late

antiquity; so there are versions based on Donatus and Priscian, often with
less incorporation of the classical poets and writers.
Another genre of writing involves simultaneous consideration of
grammatical distinctions and scholastic logic; modern linguists are probably
inadequately trained to deal with these writings.

Certainly the most obviously interesting theorizing to be found in this

period is contained in the “speculative grammar” of the modistae, who were
so called because the titles of their works were often phrased De modis
significandi tractatus (“Treatise Concerning the Modes of Signifying”). For
the development of the Western grammatical tradition, work of this genre
was the second great milestone after the crystallization of Greek thought
with the Stoics and Alexandrians. The scholastic philosophers were
occupied with relating words and things—i.e., the structure of sentences
with the nature of the real world—hence their preoccupation with
signification. The aim of the grammarians was to explore how a word (an
element of language) matched things apprehended by the mind and how it
signified reality. Since a word cannot signify the nature of reality directly, it
must stand for the thing signified in one of its modes or properties; it is
this discrimination of modes that the study of categories and parts of
speech is all about. Thus the study of sentences should lead one to the
nature of reality by way of the modes of signifying.

The modistae did not innovate in discriminating categories and parts of

speech; they accepted those that had come down from the Greeks through
Donatus and Priscian. The great contribution of these grammarians, who
flourished between the mid-13th and mid-14th century, was their insistence
on a grammar to explicate the distinctions found by their forerunners in the
languages known to them. Whether they made the best choice in selecting
logic, metaphysics, and epistemology (as they knew them) as the fields to be
included with grammar as a basis for the grand account of universal
knowledge is less important than the breadth of their conception of the
place of grammar. Before the modistae, grammar had not been viewed as a
separate discipline but had been considered in conjunction with other
studies or skills (such as criticism, preservation of valued texts, foreign-
language learning). The Greek view of grammar was rather narrow and
fragmented; the Roman view was largely technical. The speculative
medieval grammarians (who dealt with language as a speculum, “mirror” of
reality) inquired into the fundamentals underlying language and grammar.
They wondered whether grammarians or philosophers discovered grammar,
whether grammar was the same for all languages, what the fundamental
topic of grammar was, and what the basic and irreducible grammatical
primes are. Signification was reached by imposition of words on things; i.e.,
the sign was arbitrary. Those questions sound remarkably like current
issues of linguistics, which serves to illustrate how slow and repetitious
progress in the field is. While the modistae accepted, by modern standards,
a restrictive set of categories, the acumen and sweep they brought to their
task resulted in numerous subtle and fresh syntactic observations. A
thorough study of the medieval period would greatly enrich the discussion
of current questions.
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