breve_historia_de_la_ling_stica (1).pdf

7/27/2019 breve_historia_de_la_ling_stica (1).pdf

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CONCISE


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SEC

20th Centur

,


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20th Centurv Linguistics

From the 1930s through the 1950s the mainstrof l inguistics was defined by various American European schools (understood as groups of l ingsharing some basic common assumptions about plems and methodology, while often disagreein

particular ma tters) which are today gr ouped togeas structuralist (see Sect. 5). All of them had sgreater or lesser intellectual debt to Saussures Cand to the groundwork laid by historical-comparastudy. From the 1960s to the present, the mainstrhas been defined by the generativist approacwhich originated in the work of Chomsk


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Centu ry * LinguisticsOne other prominent contributor to genera! lingui

tics needs to be discussed here: Otto Jespersen (1861943). Jespersen, who gained his early renown in pho-netics and the history of English, undertook in th1920s an attempt to delineate the logic of grammdivorced from psychological underpinnings-wothat among other things anticipates future directionin its attention to syntax and child language acqusition, Yet Jespersen would expressly reject some othe key tenets of Saussures Co~lrs and s tructural ismmaking him the last great general linguist in the pre


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of approaches to the study of language which aroseat this time, having in common the following features:

(a )

W

The study of systematic phenomena more or

less along the lines of Saussures charac-terization of langue. (It has been noted thateven Bally, in attempting to realize a linguisticsof p a r o l e in hi s stylistics, ended up by incor-

porat ing styl ist ic phenomena into the sphere ofl a ngue . ) In conjunction with (a) , an implied bel ief thatabstract levels of analysis are more funda-


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20th Century Linguistics

brought back a f i rs t-hand famil iar i ty with Saussureanthought. Jakobson and Trubetzkoy recognized thepoints of convergence with formalism and earlierwork by Russian l inguists , but also appreciated theoriginal i ty of Saussures systematizat ion.

The Theses Presented to the First Congress oSlavic Philologists in Prague, 1929 already evince thedistinctive characteristics of Prague structuralism,namely breadth-they include programs for the studyof poetic language and applicat ions to language teach-ing-and functionalism. The document begins: Lan-

l ik th h ti i t i l i t d


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T

svntax and semantics. Here he was clearly ahead of$s t ime, and i t may be no surprise that hehas gainedhis widest audience only during the 1970s and

1980s.6, Developments in Historical LinguisticsMany l inguists interpreted Saussures arguments forsynchronic s tudy as implying that i t a lone was t ruelinguistics-despite the fact that half of the Cours isdevoted to diachronic mat ters . Jakobson took the leadin insis t ing that each of the two approaches actual ly


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b@.

t ranslat ion improved the fortunes of many l inguipart icularly in America, and gaye even more impto the development of computat ionally-based mod

In America, the neo-Bloomfieldians assumed

mainstream mantle they had previously shared wthe disciples of Sapir (see AmericanStruc tu ra l ismand anthropological linguistics retreated tostatus of a subdiscipline. Bloomfields mathematicalinclined heir apparent Charles F. Hackett (b.19rose to prominence, as did Zell ig S. Harris (1909whose Me t h o d s o f St r u ct u r a l L i n gu i s t i c s (compl1947 published 1951) marked the high point in


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through introspect ion by the l inguist-formerly sus-pect-were deemed superior to those acquired objec-tively because of the new status granted to the mind.And the t ransformations* which lead from deep to

surface structure became a hallmark not only oChomskys linguistics but of later structuralisthought general ly.

Where his work was in conflict with the structuralistmainstream Chomsky sought alignment with still ear-lier traditions, in particular with Cartesian linguisticswhich other historians of linguistics have not followedhim in recognizing. More subtly, his representation of


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Cen tu ry - Linguist icsguages. By tracing not obviously re la ted problemsingle sources, it seemed for several years to ptoward a greater economy of explanation, and he

toward real progress in the understanding of humlanguage structure.

By the late 198Os, however, new categories and pciples had begun to proliferate in the light of mdetailed data, and GB moved toward a stronglycalist mode! that rejects any notion of deep or (structure . Since 1991 Chomsky himself has turnedattention away from the kinds of problems GB w


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.

Tren

funding social research and the study of black Englishat the height of the civil rights movement.Lab&s studies establ ished themselves at once atthe forefront of sociolinguistics, to the point that earl-

ier work was largely forgotten. The reasons are bynow familiar: increased scientificness, in particularmathematicality, attained through a heavy relianceon stat is t ical information and calculat ion. The use of variable rules effect ively brought into the domain of langue much that otherwise would have been relegatedto parole,providing a further systematization andreclaiming of territory from voluntary language pro-


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2Ofh Century Linguisticsvarious trends together in the later 1960s into the fieldknown as discourse analysis (see Murray 1994).

Discourse analysis soon received valuable inpfrom an unlikely source: generative semantics. In mak-ing their case against the hegemony of syntax thgenerative semanticists gave part icular at tention tpragmatics, the study of topic and focus phenomen(a Praguean heritage), and pragmatics was readiincorporated into the more general scope of discouranalysis, which henceforth could claim probably thrichest heritage (sociological-anthropological-Gen


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Newmeyer F J 1986 Linguistic Theoy in Anlericu, 2nd edn.Academic Press, Orlando, Floridapedersen H 193 I The Discoceys qf Lunguuge. Harvard Uni-versity Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts

Robins R H 1990 A Short History* qfLinguistics, 3rd edn.Longman. London

Sampson G 1980 Schools qf Linguistics: Competition undErolution. Hutchinson, London

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