History of Linguistics (note)

Historical and comparative linguistics (18th/19th Century)

• focus on diachrony
• language as part of culture
• "humanistic" approach
• grammar, applied linguistics

Influence of natural science

• Discovery of Sanskrit
• "laws" of sound change
• 1822 Grimm's law: "Sound shift" of consonants from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic.
• primacy of spoken language
• Neo-Grammarians: No exceptions
• Still: Social, psychological enterprise

Structuralism

• Saussure: La parole and la langue
• The idea of language as a complex structure
• Structuralist Phonology: Phonetic vs. phonemic difference
• Arbitrariness of the linguistic sign

American Structuralism

• Structuralism
• Discovery procedures
• Behaviourist psychology

Behaviourist Psychology

• Language as conditioned behaviour vs language as a system of knowledge

Chomsky's Mentalism

• 1950s
• Competence (not performance)
• Creativitiy (infinite set of sentences)
• Deductively developed hypotheses

Modern linguistics

• Mentalism
• Universal grammar
• Descriptive grammar
• The components of a grammer
• Levels of processing