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Linguistics Theory, Foundations, and Modern Development

An Overview of Linguistics and Linguistic Applications

On the Origins of Linguistics

Linguistics as a Discipline: Nineteenth Century and the Early Twentieth Century

[ v ] Linguistic Assumptions and Principles

Linguistics as a Discipline: Nineteenth Century and the Early Twentieth Century

By the early nineteenth century, linguistics as the study of language had become a discipline in its own right. It was still strongly related to philology and anthropology, because there was still a strong interest in origin-speculations. Linguistics had, however, become a specialization which had heretofore been one of the many general interest studies.

The earliest linguists were Bopp and Grimm (1785-1863 C.E.). Bopp was a student of Leibniz's grammaire rationelle as interpreted by Wolff in the German schools. Bopp's method "was a system of material elements and formal relations, parallel to the system of ideas" [Verburg in Hymes, 214]. Unique to Bopp's analysis was his separation of stems and roots from affixes to analyze the language as wholes into parts, elements, and segments. A flaw in Bopp's view of language is that he saw it as a static collection of written words.

Grimm's effect on the study of language was to transform comparative morphology (as developed by Bopp) into a historical lexicology, which more closely analyzed sound changes and phonetics. Bopp viewed the sound changes as a seesaw, with the emphasis being offset from heavy to light and light to heavy, in a mechanical fashion. Grimm, however, believed these sound changes to be inherently formative and grammatical in nature. Humboldt (1767-1835 C.E.) also has a real, but limited impact on linguistics with his marriage of the mathematico-theoretical and moral-practical thoughts on language, drawing from Leibniz, Wolff, Harris, Condillac, Rousseau, and even Kant (who never discussed language in particular). Humboldt's effect is reflected in Sapir's (1884-1939 C.E.) student Whorf (1897-1941 C.E.), through Croce (1866-1952 C.E.) [Verburg in Hymes, 214- 216].

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, until the 1870s, linguistics further developed the theories of Bopp, where language is a static representation. Late in the century, dynamism returned to the forefront. Schmidt (1843-1901 C.E.) released his wave theory to correct and amend the rigid tree theory. Schuchart (1842-1927 C.E.) introduced his views on the complex relationships of language, and rejected dogmatic views. Steinthal (1823 - 1899 C.E.) and Paul (1864-1921 C.E.) ended the one-sided interest in Indo-European languages. Whitney (1827-1894 C.E.) introduced linguistics to America and emphasized the life-cycle and the growth of languages as a social phenomenon. The dynamic nature of language, however, was mostly limited to the laws of sound-shifts (concerned with the natural conditions of speech). According to Verburg, "the positivistic conception remained, only changing the static substratum for the dynamic subsistence of sounds" [in Hymes, 216]. Brugmann (1849 - 1919 C.E.) summarized the century's results, and Delbruck added a syntax, which had been forgotten or ignored for a very long time.

Saussure (1857-1913 C.E.) posited that languages are composed of two essential and autonomous systems, speech and signs, which must be investigated simultaneously for true understanding. Phonemics (originally phonology) was born in 1928 in the Prague Linguistics Circle, representing an effort to embody Saussure's analysis of sounds for a language in terms of a functional system. This differed from the traditional view in that the phoneme was defined by its semantic qualities and the distribution of the phonemes within words. Bloomfield (1887-1949 C.E.) published Language in 1933 C.E. establishing a theory of lingual intersubjectivity, where language is a means of cooperation between two nervous systems [Verburg in Hymes, 217-218].

Linguistic study has changed rapidly from about 1940 to present day, accelerated by the development of the computer. While the volume of changes is too much to chronicle in this paper, most of the assumptions and principles in use today (as shown in the following chapters) are developed from interdisciplinary paradigms, and the application of computing technology to the study and classification of language.

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