History of Linguistics
The history of linguistics , i.e. the history of the systematic preoccupation with human language , extends over almost the entire written and thus comprehensible human history . Different early advanced cultures developed systems for describing language independently or at least largely independently of one another. From the Greek tradition in particular, linguistics in its current, modern form has grown, with some breaks and new reflections.
India
Sakatayana
The oldest reflective engagement with language both in India and in general comes from the 8th century BC. It is the work of a certain Sakatayana , which is lost and is only substantiated by quotations from later authors.
Yaska
From the nirukta , which is ascribed to the grammarian Yaska immediately following Śākaṭāyana , z. For example, it can be seen that Śākaṭāyana must have held the view that nominal expressions can be etymologically traced back to verbal roots . Yaskas Nirukta is also mostly concerned with etymology, especially obscure words in the Vedas . The aim of the treatise is to explain how particularly important words of the Vedas get their meaning. Nirukta is also part of the so-called Vedangas , a collection of six auxiliary sciences for the understanding and the correct transmission of the Vedas. This is important for the development of linguistics because it makes it clear that it is initially not an end in itself, but subordinated to another goal that is important for religious reasons and is earmarked.
Panini
This also applies to the grammar of the probably best-known ancient Indian grammarist, Panini , who was probably born in the 5th century BC. Lived, although this was already considerably developed. Panini's grammar, known as Ashtadhyayi, is extremely complex. It implicitly presupposes the phoneme concept , the morpheme concept and a concept of a word root that was only developed much later by modern linguistics. The grammar also shows generative features and describes the morphological properties of Sanskrit completely and unreservedly. In addition to a short introductory section on the phonemes he distinguishes, the Shiva Sutras, the main part of the grammar consists of 3,959 individual rules, the sutras, which are divided into further subsections, to generate grammatically correct structures of Sanskrit. None of the approaches developed centuries later in Greece and Rome (see below) can match Panini's work in terms of complexity and adequacy of the descriptions.
Greece
There are two different currents within the Greek preoccupation with language: a philosophically oriented one, the v. a. is represented by Plato and a later, strongly Alexandrian philological orientation:
Plato's Kratylos
An important early evidence of the preoccupation with language-related issues is the Platonic dialogue Kratylos . It was written in Greece and dates to around 360 BC. Dated. The question of the dialogue is whether the designations for the things in the world come from them by nature (φυσει) or through arbitrary positing (θεσει). The dialogue ends in an aporia that leads to the Platonic doctrine of ideas . In the kratylos, however, another core theme of ancient linguistics appears: the etymology . This is because large parts of the dialogue, which is somewhat less well known, consist in the fact that Socrates proposes etymologies for a large number of Greek words, which are intended to indicate that the relationship between word and object must have been natural at least in an earlier state of speech. As far as we know today, these etymologies are almost without exception wrong, but initially the only important question is the origin of the words.
Dionysios Thrax and Apollonios Dyscolus
Another tradition is represented by the grammarian Dionysios Thrax , who worked in Alexandria in the 2nd century BC . As in the Indian tradition, linguistics is not an end in itself, but serves as preparation for the study of literature . Thrax wrote the first (known) grammar of Greek, the τέχνη γραμματική ( Technē grammatikē , "grammatical science"). The main focus is on the classification of parts of speech . However, the grammar also deals extensively with Greek morphology , whereby morphosyntactic categories such as case , tense , diathesis etc. are spoken of as "side effects" of the noun or verb. In addition, metric issues are dealt with. Thrax wasn't concerned with syntax . Apollonios Dyskolos , who lived in the 2nd century , dealt intensively with syntactic issues in addition to the subject of parts of speech. Thrax, Dyskolos and his son Ailios Herodianos are usually regarded as the most important Greek-speaking grammarians of antiquity.
Stoa
Furthermore, the Stoics dealt with language primarily with regard to questions of propositional logic and developed a calculus for propositional logic. The Stoic Chrysippus , fragmentarily handed down by Sextus Empiricus, was particularly trend-setting .
Rome
The Roman linguistic tradition ties in seamlessly with the Greek and continues it (in some cases they even overlap in time) without, however, developing it significantly. The Roman grammarians like Marcus Terentius Varro (main work on language: De lingua latina libri XXV , 25 books on the Latin language) are mainly occupied with translating the statements made by Dionysius Thrax for the Greek into the Latin language . Roman linguistics reached a late high point in the 4th and 5th centuries AD with Aelius Donatus Ars grammatica and Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae , the most extensive representations of Latin grammar from antiquity. These works, however, are also strongly oriented towards the Thraxian Greek tradition and imitate its structure, as Priscian states in the preface himself. The reception history of the two works is immense; they were the standard works for the description of language in the European Middle Ages and form the basis for most of the preoccupation with language during this period.
middle Ages
Arabia
With the general cultural heyday of the Arab world from around the 8th century, a linguistic tradition developed which culminated in the work of the Persian linguist Sibawayhi (approx. 760–793 AD), whose work al-kitab fi al -nahw (book on grammar) is a detailed description of the Arabic language , within the framework of which a distinction is made between phonetics and phonology .
The "First Grammarian"
The so-called First Grammatical Treatise is a presentation of the phonology of the Old Icelandic language written around 1150 . The treatise is so named because it is the first of four treatises on language that appeared together in the Codex Wormianus ; the author whose name is unknown is therefore referred to as the “first grammarian”. The work of the first grammarian is remarkable because, according to Einar Haugen's interpretation , he established phonemes through minimal pair analysis and thus anticipated the method of modern structuralism .
Grammatica speculativa and modism
Petrus Helie wrote a Priscian commentary in 1150 in which he tried to base Priscian's analysis of the Latin parts of speech on the basis of the Aristotelian Organon writings Categories and De Interpretations . With this he tried to philosophically justify grammatical categories, especially the parts of speech. With this approach, Petrus Helie was a pioneer of “speculative grammar” (Latin grammatica speculativa ) and modism.
The term grammatica speculativa is derived from the Latin word speculum , mirror, image. Early authors of this tradition such as Roger Bacon with his summa grammaticae or Robert Kilwardby were of the conviction that the structure of being (cf. ontology ) is reflected in the structure of language, and in the same way in all languages. To this extent, these philosophers represent an early form of a universalistic grammar concept. By reflecting reality in language, it becomes the real key to metaphysics .
The representatives of this philosophical direction are also called "Modists" (Latin modistae ), because they believe that language reflects reality in different modi significandi . Significandi a mode the way, as a linguistic sign is on "things" refers (see. Semiotics ). This can be a morphological category or a part of speech or a specific discursive operation such as predication .
In a certain sense, the modernist tradition is a synthesis of the philologically oriented Greco-Roman tradition, which goes back to Dionysius Thrax, with initially independent philosophical currents of the Middle Ages, especially scholasticism . Important milliners were Thomas von Erfurt and Johannes de Dacia . The fashionable tradition was mainly received within philosophy and outside of it was largely forgotten until the 19th century.
Modern times
Port Royal grammar
Originally entitled grammaire générale et raisonnée by the authors Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot , the work better known under the name of Port-Royal's Grammar and published in 1660 reflects the impact of rationalism (cf. Descartes ) on the study of language. On the basis of the languages Greek, Latin and French , the grammar of Port Royal tries to develop logic- obeying, universally valid structures for all languages. The grammar thus makes a universalistic claim. Where the examined natural languages deviate from the logical (regular) structure, they are criticized.
In addition, the grammar offers a rudimentary distinction between surface and deep structure, which is reminiscent of the distinction in generative grammar. The deep structure can be identified with the above-mentioned, generally applicable linguistic laws that obey logic. Noam Chomsky himself cites Port Royal's grammar as a precursor and early relative of his own theories.
18th and early 19th centuries
In the 18th century there was increasing interest in the question of the origin of language. There are numerous publications on this subject from this period, the most famous being On the Origin of Language by Johann Gottfried Herder .
A typologist of the early 19th century was Wilhelm von Humboldt , who also carried out comparative studies on the basis of a large number of exotic languages, e.g. B. About the Dualis . In addition, Humboldt is the author of a well-known linguistic-philosophical essay, On the diversity of the human language structure and its influence on the spiritual development of the human race , which has experienced very different interpretations. This is because Humboldt does not precisely define his terms. So said z. B. Chomsky also found a kindred spirit in Humboldt, where he relies primarily on Humboldt's statement that language is a system that allows an infinite number of utterances with finite means (words, grammar).
Other authors interpret Humboldt's concept of inner language form, developed in this essay, more in the direction of linguistic relativism .
Establishment of historical-comparative linguistics
In 1786 Sir William Jones , a British judge and Sanskrit scholar working in India , discovered the relationship between Sanskrit and the "classical languages" (Greek and Latin) and published this discovery. The ancient grammarians did not notice the obvious relationship between Greek and Latin from today's perspective. With this discovery, Jones prepared the ground for the future establishment of the scientific study of the Indo-European language family from a historical-comparative perspective.
In 1816, the German Franz Bopp, in his treatise On the Conjugation System of the Sanskrit Language in comparison with that of the Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic languages, for the first time demonstrates the relationship between these languages using a scientific methodology, thereby establishing the scientific discipline in the true sense of the word . The scientifically and methodologically founded modern linguistics is thus conspicuously initially historically ( diachronous ). In the following, numerous initially European researchers, including the Dane Rasmus Rask , expanded their knowledge of the relationship between the languages studied.
Another milestone in the history of historical linguistics is the establishment of the family tree theory by August Schleicher . Schleicher conceptualized language analogous to Darwin's discoveries in biology as an organism that is subject to evolution , so that the relationships between languages and between species can be represented as a family tree. In addition, Schleicher was the first to use reconstructed, non-documented, only developed forms and did not use the ancient Indian forms as the oldest, as was customary until then.
The young grammarians are a well-known group of Leipzig Indo-Europeanists who tie in with Schleicher's language concept, which is based on the natural sciences. Among them were Berthold Delbrück , Hermann Osthoff , Karl Brugmann and Hermann Paul , whose work Principles of Language History has achieved a high level of awareness. They are called young grammarians because of their novel theses in contrast to the previous doctrinal opinion. In terms of content, the young grammarians are, due to their scientific attitude, above all characterized by their hypothesis of the absence of exception of the sound laws . The young grammarians postulate that there are laws in the development of languages analogous to the natural laws of the natural sciences.
De Saussure, Structuralism and Synchronous Linguistics
Synchronous linguistics, ie the study of a language not from a historical point of view as in Indo-European studies, but as a system given at a certain point in time, was only established in 1916 by the Cours de linguistique générale by the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure . To what extent the thoughts in this fundamental work actually have to be assigned to Saussur's thinking cannot be completely clarified, because critical studies have shown that parts of the cours were actually written by Saussure's students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye . De Saussure was initially also an Indo-Europeanist, as this was the only linguistic subject represented at the university at the time, and laryngeal theory also contributed to this field . In addition, developed Saussure in the Cours but also a perspective on language as a system of signs in synchrony excluding any extra-linguistic aspects. The central point of view is how these linguistic signs relate to one another and thus constitute the structure of language. Important terms shaped by Saussure are in particular those of the syntagma and the paradigm , which define the relationships between the signs.
Saussure's approach is structuralist and groundbreaking for its development in other humanities disciplines. Other important Saussurian concepts are the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign as well as the consistent differentiation between langue (language as this coherent system of signs) and parole , the specific use of language, with Saussure's focus clearly on the langue.
With his structuralist description of language, Saussure also established the so-called Geneva School ; another important representative was Antoine Meillet . Later, two more structuralist schools developed in Europe: the Copenhagen School with the main representative Louis Hjelmslev (central concept: glossematics ) and the Prague School with the main representatives Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Sergejewitsch Trubetzkoy , which concentrated primarily on phonological issues. Jakobson also dealt with literature from a linguistic perspective.
In America, structuralism is mainly represented by Leonard Bloomfield . Bloomfield was a behaviorist and criticized the previous occupation with the meaning of linguistic units as inadequate. He did not deny meaning, but saw no exact way to explain it.
The anthropological tradition: boas and sapir
Another tradition in American linguistics is more anthropologically oriented. This trend goes back to the ethnologist Franz Boas , who carried out field research among the indigenous peoples of North America and also examined their languages. In doing so, he encountered structures (e.g. polysynthesis ) that were structurally so radically different from the known European languages that he taught his students to approach a language to be described without prejudice or any kind of preconceived notion of how language works. In this respect, Boa's approach was particularistic: every language can only be described by itself. The most famous student of Boa was Edward Sapir , who also worked as an anthropologist and did a lot in the field of American languages. Sapir has also dealt extensively with language typology and in his work Language from 1921 developed a system of typological parameters for the classification of languages that was more refined than that of Humboldt. Sapir is also associated with the idea of linguistic relativity.
Chomsky and Generative Grammar
With Noam Chomsky published in 1956 Syntactic Structures and 1965 following Aspects of the theory of syntax is the generative grammar founded. In many respects, this represents a radical departure from the previously common description of language: the description of language as a system is no longer of primary interest, but rather the underlying, cognitively anchored educational rules that generate (generate) grammatically correct sentences in a language. The language that is actually to be observed empirically (performance) now appears in this tradition as an epiphenomenon of this very language-generating mechanism. One of the initiating factors for this rethinking was the idea that a language enables its speaker to recursion an infinite number of sentences with finite grammatical means. The goal of generative grammar is to determine the rules that enable this ability to be determined. This goes hand in hand with a strong focus on formalism and especially on syntax .
Chomsky's approach - in a very simplified way - led to a division of modern linguistics, which continues to this day, into generative grammarians on the one hand and so-called functionalists rooted in structuralism on the other. Both groups, however, are anything but homogeneous: In the context of generative grammar, since Chomsky's first publications there has been a multitude of modified formalisms and modified models. T. were brought about by Chomsky himself, z. B. The Revised Extended Standard Theory (REST), the Government & Binding Model (GB), the Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) or the Principles & Parameter Model (P&P). The most recent representatives of generative theories are the minimalist program and, especially in phonology, the optimality theory .
Diversification after 1950
Outside of generative grammar, too, there has been an increasing trend towards diversification in linguistics and the development of numerous sub-disciplines since around 1950. In the late 1950s, sociolinguistics first emerged, which, in contrast to generative grammar, emphasizes the social dimension of language. Basil Bernstein and William Labov were the main leaders in establishing this discipline .
Psycholinguistics has existed as a research field since around 1960 , which primarily inquires into the psychological foundations of human language ability and the conditions for language understanding. Research on the acquisition of the mother tongue also falls within this framework .
There is also text linguistics , which examines the text as a structural unit superordinate to the sentence, corpus linguistics , which aims to gain knowledge from working with large amounts of linguistic data, and contact linguistics , which examines which processes act when two linguistic communities come into contact (see Pidgin- Languages ) as well as research on intercultural communication . There are also various more recent directions, e.g. B. feminist linguistics , eco- linguistics or political linguistics , which z. T. are only moderately established.
See also
Web links
- History of linguistics teaching material by Christian Lehmann (German)
- Dionysios Thrax 'τέχνη γραμματική in ancient Greek
- Edward Sapir's Language
- Introduction to the history of linguistics
literature
- Sylvain Auroux, EFK Koerner & Hans-Josef Niederehe (eds.): History of the Language Sciences / Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaften / Histoire des sciences du langage. An international handbook on the development of linguistic research from its beginnings to the present. 3 vols., Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter 2006.
- Hans Arens : Linguistics. The course of their development from antiquity to the present . 2 vols. 2nd edition (Fischer Athenaeum pocket books, 2077f). Athenäum Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt 1974. ISBN 3-8072-2077-1
- Brigitte Bartschat: Methods of Linguistics. From Hermann Paul to Noam Chomsky . 1st edition Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1996. ISBN 3-503-03740-3
- Herbert Ernst Brekle : Introduction to the History of Linguistics. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1985.
- Sverker Johansson : Origins of language. Constraints on hypotheses. Converging evidence in language and communication research . John Benjamin Pub., Amsterdam 2005, ISBN 90-272-3891-X . (English)
- RH Robins: A Short History of Linguistics. , 3. Edition. Longman 1990.
- Peter Schmitter: Historiography and Narration. Metahistoriographic aspects of the history of science in linguistics. Narr, Tübingen 2003.
- Wolfgang Wildgen : The linguistics of the 20th century. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2011.
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Konrad Koerner : Einar Haugen as a Historian of Linguistics . In: American Journal of Germanic Languages and Literatures 9: 2 (1997), pp. 221-238. Unlike Haugen, Körner interprets the "Grammar Tract" as an orthographic treatise.
- ↑ This paragraph is largely based on [1] (PDF; 201 kB)
- ↑ See Konrad Körner: Linguistics and evolution theory (Three essays by August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Bleek ) . John Benjamin, Amsterdam-Philadelphia 1983.