Linguistic control in schools

The linguistic inspection was instituted by article 18 of the law of 30 July 1963 concerning language use in education. It stipulated that the linguistic inspection is responsible for constantly monitoring application of the provisions of the law concerning the linguistic register of the students.

Interactional Linguistics:Developments and Prospects

Article Summary by: TsingHua
Author : Modern Foreign Languages
Published: October 30, 2003
This abstract was translated from 互动语言学的发展历程及其前景
People have spent so much time doing language only to realize that much of the20th century linguistic scholarship was static and unnatural instead of dynamic and natural in the sense that many researchers and scholars have more often than not resorted to imagined or invented examples in their account of real – time linguistic complexities.In other words,the language much researched by scholars is largely disconnected with that used by ordinary people in everyday interaction.Further – more,the context in which real language is used has been largely simplified,which,to use Morin ‘ s words(莫兰2002),is further represented by idealization,rationalization and standardization.This may partly account for why spoken language has been inadequately investigated.Fortunately,recent years,the last ten or so years in particular,have witnessed enthusiastic ef – forts to attach much importance to research in spoken language,which represents a big step forward in language studies and which is also counted as the first great step in the development of a new linguistic orientation called interactional linguistics.Drawing upon functional linguistics(functional grammar in particular),anthropological linguistics and talk – in – interaction(especially conversation analysis),interactional linguistics,fully aware of the dynamics and contextualization of language,aims to account for language as it occurs in everyday interaction.Language,according to interac – tional linguistics,shapes and is shaped by interaction.Specifically,interactional linguistics attempts to tackle two types of issues as follows:first,what linguistic resources do interlocutors recur to in their effort to express particular conversational structures and fulfill interactional functions?Second,what interactional functions or conversational structures can be generated by particular linguistic forms and ways of using them?The emergence of interactional linguistics forces us to ponder over many issues pertaining to language studies,and one of the issues dealt with in the present paper is our traditional view of and approaches to grammar.For long,grammar has been rigidly defined as”rules for speaking”,among other things,which has been proved impotent when it comes to ac – counting for language in use.As we understand it,grammar is a mode of social interaction and so – cio – cultural practice,which both shapes and is shaped by social interaction.Constructed in social in – teraction,grammar is ultimately an emergent phenomenon.This new view of grammar would cer – tainly shed much light upon approaches to grammar studies and upon our understanding of so – called ungrammatical language.The present article surveys interactional linguistics,a newly – emerging orientation to linguistic enterprise,touching upon its features,major concerns and how it has developed,arguing against in – venting examples to elaborate on real – life language phenomena in favor of collecting naturally oc – curring data for language studies with a view to figuring out how humans(re)construct their person – ality, social identity and social meaning.This paper ends with a discussion of what what interaction – al linguistics can bring to bear on language studies in general and Chinese linguistics in particular.

Synchronic linguistics

Descriptive Linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing the actual language spoken now, or in the past, by any group of people. Accurate description of real speech is a very difficult problem and linguists have often been reduced to very inaccurate approximations.
Almost all linguistic theory had its origin in practical problems of descriptive linguistics. Phonetics (and its theoretical developments such as phonemes) has dealt with how to pronounce languages. Syntax has developed to describe what is going on once phonetics has reduced spoken language to a control level. Lexicography collects “words” and has not given rise to much theory.
An extreme mentalist viewpoint appears to deny that the linguistic description of a language can be done by anyone but a competent speaker. Such a speaker has internalized something called “linguistic competence” which gives them the ability to correctly extrapolate from their experience to new but correct expressions and to reject unacceptable expressions. Be that as it may be there are practical immediate needs for linguistic descriptions and we cannot wait for a full exploration of linguistic competence.

The Adaptation of Solution-Focused Therapy in Chinese Culture: A Linguistic Perspective

Frederick K. C. Yeung
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Using solution-focused therapy as an example, this article discusses linguistic considerations in the cross-cultural adaptation of psychotherapy to Chinese-speaking clients. As the primary medium through which a client’s story is presented and transformed, language plays a crucial role in therapeutic conversation. Some differences between the Chinese and English languages, such as the construction of words and grammatical structure, are introduced. An examination of three linguistic dimensions – lexical usage, syntax and intonation and rhythm – illustrate the important role of language in the cross-cultural adaptation of psychotherapeutic techniques.

Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin

1. School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 14 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LN, United Kingdom
1. Edited by Henry C. Harpending, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, and approved April 12, 2007 (received for review December 7, 2006)

Improving Written Language Skills Through Multiple-Linguistic Spelling Instruction Jan Wasowicz, Ph.D.

Spelling and word-level reading are written language skills that draw upon an individual’s repertoire of linguistic knowledge, including phonological awareness; knowledge of orthography, vocabulary, morphological and semantic relationships; and mental orthographic images (Apel & Masterson, 2001; Apel, Masterson, & Niessen, 2004). Although spelling (encoding) and word-level reading (decoding) draw upon these areas of linguistic knowledge in different ways, each type of linguistic knowledge contributes to spelling and reading success (Treiman & Bourassa, 2000). A collective body of current research demonstrates the importance of integrating multiple linguistic processes within spelling instruction. In comparison to traditional spelling instruction and traditional reading instruction, multiple-linguistic spelling instruction has been shown to be more effective for improving student’s spelling and reading performance (Apel, Masterson, & Hart, 2004; Kelman & Apel, 2004; Roberts & Meiring, 2006).

Corpus Linguistics (1): Meaning in Context

Author: Lia Fail
Last modified 2004-09-20 21:04:26

1.1. LINGUISTIC TRADITIONS

For de Saussure, language structure (langue), rather than language in use (parole), was the proper object of linguistic enquiry, a position also adopted by Chomsky, who labelled this dualism competence and performance. Language was a biologically determined mental process and social factors should therefore be excluded from linguistic analysis.

The principles underlying a corpus-based approach to the analysis of language, however, are concerned with language in use as opposed to language as a mental construct. This view of linguistics can be traced back to Firth – who posited that language be studied as part of the social process – and is a stance also adopted by Halliday, whose �grammar is semantic (concerned with meaning) and functional (concerned with how language is used)� (Bloor & Bloor 1995:2). John Sinclair, initiator of the first corpus-based dictionary of general language (Cobuild 1987) at Birmingham University, also advocates the notion of meaning and use as central to understanding language.

One particularly important de Saussurean concept refers to the syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of language. Syntagmatic (horizontal) relations represent a potential for the combination of items, whereas paradigmatic (vertical) relations represent a potential for substitution among items. Conventional linguistics has tended to focus on paradigmatic relations, a fact reflected in traditional dictionaries, which are constrained by orthographic considerations that would help a user locate items. Nonetheless, �paradigms are by definition things which do not go together� (Halliday 1994:xxxii), whereas �a substantial proportion of speakers� associations to word stimuli are syntagmatic� (Fellbaum 1998:9).

A syntagmatic view of language takes account of the contribution of sense and syntax to meaning. The argument that �sense and syntax� (Sinclair 1991), or �meaning and pattern� (Hunston & Francis 2000), are associated is based on two pieces of evidence. Firstly, meanings tend to be distinguished by differing patterns, and secondly, words with the same pattern sometimes share aspects of meaning. According to Hunston & Francis (ibid:255-259), the fact that there is no perfect one-to-one correspondence between meaning and pattern is attributable to a lexicographic rather than a semantic worldview.

1.2. THE NOTION OF CO-SELECTION

Co-selection describes the general phenomenon of words that habitually keep company, to paraphrase Firth. (Note: Given time and space constraints, two particular cases of very fixed syntagmatic relationships – multiword and idiomatic expressions � will be excluded from this discussion; for a general overview see, however, Partington 1998; Nelson 2000). Sinclair�s definiens of what he refers to as collocation is �the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other in a text� (1991:170); this could logically refer to co-selection between lexical or grammatical items. Other authors draw a distinction between collocation and colligation (Firth 1957; Bahns 1993; Hoey 1997), using the former to refer to the co-occurrence of lexical items and the latter to the co-occurrence of grammatical items; Sinclair himself refers to colligation within a collocation context, yet has stated that �collocation in its purest sense recognises only the lexical co-occurrence of words� (1991:170). The debate is complicated further by the fact that the derived term collocate is generally used to refer to lexical items (cf. the Louw definition of semantic prosody below). For the purposes of this article, therefore, co-selection will henceforth be used to refer to the general phenomenon from a translator�s perspective, collocation to the co-occurrence of lexical items as per Sinclair, and colligation to co-occurrence with grammatical items. The preferred usage of individual authors will, naturally, be respected.

Sinclair describes what he terms as �collocational principles� (1991:109) as follows:

� The open-choice principle – on which virtually all grammars are based – refers to the possibility of selecting words to �slot and fill� a unit, with the only restrictions being grammatical ones.
� The idiom principle, on the other hand, refers to �the large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments�.

The open choice principle, therefore, would broadly correspond to paradigmatic choice (restricted by grammaticality), whereas the idiom principle corresponds to syntagmatic choice (restrictions may be lexical, grammatical or semantic). Sinclair identified colligation and semantic prosody as particular features of the idiom principle.

Colligation (defined above) has also been referred to in terms of collocational frameworks (Renouf & Sinclair 1991:128-144), which are units based on a grammatical, as opposed to lexical, core (e.g., �the/an…of�, �too�to�). Hunston & Francis�s (2000) analysis of �words and their patterns� (from the perspective of concordance lines) and �patterns and their words� (from the perspective of word-class labels) describe a dual approach to patterning from the lexical and grammatical perspectives; likewise, Benson et al. (1997) organise their dictionary in terms of both grammatical collocations and lexical collocations.

Semantic prosody, defined as �the consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates� (Louw 1993:157), refers to an additional layer of perceived meaning, over and above that accorded by lexical and grammatical patterning alone. The notion of semantic prosody posits an initial selection of word or phrase in relation to which choices are realised at the lexical, grammatical and semantic levels. To use Sinclair�s example (as cited in Tognini-Bonelli 2001:104), the collocation �barely visible to the naked eye� reflects an expression of semantic prosody (difficulty experienced implied by barely), a lexical choice (the notion of seeing) and the requisite colligation (to the).

Although Sinclair has largely focused on positive and negative connotations, other authors (Nelson 2000; Stubbs 1996) have broadened the meaning of semantic prosody somewhat. Nelson�s (2000) use of the term to include people and places associated with �business� is possibly over-extended, since if semantic prosody is an �aura�, then it would typically occur at the textual or extra-textual level. Typical co-selection at the co-textual level is more correctly referred to as semantic preference.

1.3. CO-SELECTION AND TRANSLATION

Two issues relating to co-selection are of particular concern to the translator:

� The co-selection of items from memory may be affected by SL interference (what Toury has referred to as the �law of interference� (1995) or Baker (1992:54) as �the engrossing effect of source text patterning�), with the result that a translation seems unnatural. Bahns (1993:61), for example, attributes the majority of collocational errors to SL interference.
� Given that appropriate co-selection within a particular register is outside the range of everyday language, linguistic intuition may be inadequate in terms of producing appropriate language and style.

Traditional translation resources (e.g. dictionaries) are primarily word-focused and therefore of little help in resolving either problem. Indeed, a �dictionary answer� to a translation difficulty is the mark of the inexpert translator, who typically tends to translate word-for-word. A semantic rather than lexicographic worldview, however, is provided by text; to quote Lindquist (1999:179):

With the emergence of computer tools for translators, texts have become increasingly useful as a rich source of lexical data that enable translators not only to identify appropriate collocations but also to interpret lexical items in their pragmatic and linguistic contexts.

Moreover, as Heid (2001:793) points out in relation to the recording of terminological data:

The�structuring of collocations according to semantic criteria is most useful for tasks like text production because it not only helps organise the material but also to access collocations by the types of abstract meanings they potentially express.

For the translator, therefore, successful problem solution depends on a semantic representation of the word in context.

A Linguistic Big Bang

For the first time in history, scholars are witnessing the birth of a language — a complex sign system being created by deaf children in Nicaragua. By LAWRENCE OSBORNE Photographs by SUSAN MEISELAS

Linguistic typology

‘Typology is the classification of languages by grammatical features. Typological classification contrasts with the more familiar genetic’ classification of languages into families that share an ancestor language (see historical linguistics). A genetic class is a language family, while a typological class is a language type.

Linguistic

Linguistics is narrowly defined as the scientific approach to the study of language, but language can, of course, be approached from a variety of directions, and a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to it and influence its study. Semiotics, for example, is a related field concerned with the general study of signs and symbols both in language and outside of it. Literary theorists study the use of language in artistic literature. Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and acoustics.
Someone who engages in linguistics is called a linguist, although this term is also commonly used, outside linguistics, to refer to people who speak many languages.

Names for the discipline

Before the twentieth century, the term “philology”, first attested in 1716,[5] was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus.[6] Since Ferdinand de Saussure’s insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted[7] and the term “philology” is now generally used for the “study of a language’s grammar, history and literary tradition,” especially in the United States,[8] where it was never as popular as elsewhere in the sense of “science of language”.[5]
Although the term “linguist” in the sense of “a student of language” dates from 1641,[9] the term “linguistics” is first attested in 1847.[9] It is now the usual academic term in English for the scientific study of language.

Fundamental concerns and divisions

Linguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of human language. Relevant to this are the questions of what is universal to language, how language can vary, and how human beings come to know languages. All humans (setting aside extremely pathological cases) achieve competence in whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of signed languages) around them when growing up, with apparently little need for explicit conscious instruction. While non-humans acquire their own communication systems, they do not acquire human language in this way (although many non-human animals can learn to respond to language, or can even be trained to use it to a degree).[10] Therefore, linguists assume, the ability to acquire and use language is an innate, biologically-based potential of modern human beings, similar to the ability to walk. There is no consensus, however, as to the extent of this innate potential, or its domain-specificity (the degree to which such innate abilities are specific to language), with some theorists claiming that there is a very large set of highly abstract and specific binary settings coded into the human brain, while others claim that the ability to learn language is a product of general human cognition. It is, however, generally agreed that there are no strong genetic differences underlying the differences between languages: an individual will acquire whatever language(s) he or she is exposed to as a child, regardless of parentage or ethnic origin.[11]
Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form; such pairings are known as Saussurean signs. In this sense, form may consist of sound patterns, movements of the hands, written symbols, and so on. There are many sub-fields concerned with particular aspects of linguistic structure, ranging from those focused primarily on form to those focused primarily on meaning:

• Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech
(orsigned) production and perception
• Phonology, the study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract
elements in the speaker’s mind that distinguish meaning
• Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how
they can be modified
• Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical
sentences
• Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical
semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how
these combine to form the meanings of sentences
• Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used in
communicative acts, and the role played by context and
non-linguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning
• Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in texts
(spoken, written, or signed)

Many linguists would agree that these divisions overlap considerably, and the independent significance of each of these areas is not universally acknowledged. Regardless of any particular linguist’s position, each area has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and research.
Alongside these structurally-motivated domains of study are other fields of linguistics, distinguished by the kinds of non-linguistic factors that they consider:

• Applied linguistics, the study of language-related issues applied
in everyday life, notably language policies, planning, and
education. (Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.)
• Biolinguistics, the study of natural as well as human-taught
communication systems in animals, compared to human language.
• Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the field
of Speech-Language Pathology.
• Computational linguistics, the study of computational
implementations of linguistic structures.
• Developmental linguistics, the study of the development of
linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the acquisition of
language in childhood.
• Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the origin and subsequent
development of language by the human species.
• Historical linguistics or diachronic linguistics, the study of
language change over time.
• Language geography, the study of the geographical distribution
of languages and linguistic features.
• Linguistic typology, the study of the common properties of
diverse unrelated languages, properties that may, given sufficient
attestation, be assumed to be innate to human language
capacity.
• Neurolinguistics, the study of the structures in the human brain
that underlie grammar and communication.
• Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and
representations underlying language use.
• Sociolinguistics, the study of variation in language and its
relationship with social factors.
• Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in
context.
The related discipline of semiotics investigates the relationship between signs and what they signify. From the perspective of semiotics, language can be seen as a sign or symbol, with the world as its representation.[citation needed]

Variation and universality

Much modern linguistic research, particularly within the paradigm of generative grammar, has concerned itself with trying to account for differences between languages of the world. This has worked on the assumption that if human linguistic ability is narrowly constrained by human biology, then all languages must share certain fundamental properties.
In generativist theory, the collection of fundamental properties all languages share are referred to as universal grammar (UG). The specific characteristics of this universal grammar are a much debated topic. Typologists and non-generativist linguists usually refer simply to language universals, or universals of language.
Similarities between languages can have a number of different origins. In the simplest case, universal properties may be due to universal aspects of human experience. For example, all humans experience water, and all human languages have a word for water. Other similarities may be due to common descent: the Latin language spoken by the Ancient Romans developed into Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy; similarities between Spanish and Italian are thus in many cases due to both being descended from Latin. In other cases, contact between languages — particularly where many speakers are bilingual — can lead to much borrowing of structures, as well as words. Similarity may also, of course, be due to coincidence. English much and Spanish mucho are not descended from the same form or borrowed from one language to the other;[12] nor is the similarity due to innate linguistic knowledge (see False cognate).
Arguments in favor of language universals have also come from documented cases of sign languages (such as Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) developing in communities of congenitally deaf people, independently of spoken language. The properties of these sign languages conform generally to many of the properties of spoken languages. Other known and suspected sign language isolates include Kata Kolok, Nicaraguan Sign Language, and Providence Island Sign Language.

Structures

Ferdinand de Saussure

It has been perceived that languages tend to be organized around grammatical categories such as noun and verb, nominative and accusative, or present and past, though, importantly, not exclusively so. The grammar of a language is organized around such fundamental categories, though many languages express the relationships between words and syntax in other discrete ways (cf. some Bantu languages for noun/verb relations, ergative-absolutive systems for case relations, several Native American languages for tense/aspect relations).
In addition to making substantial use of discrete categories, language has the important property that it organizes elements into recursive structures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to contain another noun phrase (as in “the chimpanzee’s lips”) or a clause to contain a clause (as in “I think that it’s raining”). Though recursion in grammar was implicitly recognized much earlier (for example by Jespersen), the importance of this aspect of language became more popular after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky’s book Syntactic Structures,[13] which presented a formal grammar of a fragment of English. Prior to this, the most detailed descriptions of linguistic systems were of phonological or morphological systems.
Chomsky used a context-free grammar augmented with transformations. Since then, following the trend of Chomskyan linguistics, context-free grammars have been written for substantial fragments of various languages (for example GPSG, for English). It has been demonstrated, however, that human languages (most notably Dutch and Swiss German) include cross-serial dependencies, which cannot be handled adequately by context-free grammars.[14]
Some selected sub-fields

Diachronic linguistics

Studying languages at a particular point in time (usually the present) is “synchronic”, while diachronic linguistics examines how language changes through time, sometimes over centuries. It enjoys both a rich history and a strong theoretical foundation for the study of language change.
In universities in the United States, the historic perspective is often out of fashion. The shift in focus to a non-historic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant with Noam Chomsky.
Explicitly historical perspectives include historical-comparative linguistics and etymology.

Contextual linguistics

Contextual linguistics may include the study of linguistics in interaction with other academic disciplines. The interdisciplinary areas of linguistics consider how language interacts with the rest of the world.
Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology are seen as areas that bridge the gap between linguistics and society as a whole.
Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics relate linguistics to the medical sciences.
Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include evolutionary linguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive science.

Applied linguistics

Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all language. Applied linguistics takes the result of those findings and “applies” them to other areas. The term “applied linguistics” is often used to refer to the use of linguistic research in language teaching only[citation needed], but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas as well, such as lexicography and translation. “Applied linguistics” has been argued to be something of a misnomer[who?], since applied linguists focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply “applying” existing technical knowledge from linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g. conversation analysis) and anthropology.
Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints.

Linguistic analysis

Linguistic analysis is used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim.[15] This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted in either the asylum seeker’s native language through an interpreter, or in an international langua franca like English.[15] Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved.[15] Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis, which can be done by either private contractors or within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker’s nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government’s decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.

Description and prescription

Main articles: Descriptive linguistics, Linguistic prescription
Linguistics is descriptive; linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature is “right” or “wrong”. This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular animal is better or worse than another.
Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favouring a particular dialect or “acrolect”. This may have the aim of establishing a linguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be destructive to society.

Speech and writing

Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken (or signed) language is more fundamental than written language. This is because:
• Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of
producing and hearing it, while there have been many cultures
and speech communities that lack written communication;
• Speech evolved before human beings invented writing;
• People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily
and much earlier than writing;
Linguists nonetheless agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.
The study of writing systems themselves is in any case considered a branch of linguistics.

History

Main article: History of linguistics
Some of the earliest linguistic activities can be recalled from Iron Age India with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas (from ca. the 8th century BC) constitute as it were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Pānini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to. Pānini formulates close to 4,000 rules which together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure, reminiscent of contemporary “machine language” (as opposed to “human readable” programming languages).
Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries; Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Panini. In the later centuries BC, however, Panini’s grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartrihari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation) and third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.
Western linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as Plato’s Cratylus. The first important advancement of the Greeks was the creation of the alphabet. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology and critic. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument. Furthermore Aristotle works on rhetoric and poetics were of utmost importance for the understating of tragedy, poetry, public discussions etc. as text genres.
One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.[16] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.[17] In De vulgari eloquentia (“On the Eloquence of Vernacular”), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.[citation needed]
In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology.[citation needed]
Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with classical Latin and Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches.
In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm’s Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who formulated Verner’s Law; August Schleicher, who created the “Stammbaumtheorie” (“family tree”); and Johannes Schmidt, who developed the “Wellentheorie” (“wave model”) in 1872.
Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e. non-historical) explanations for language form.
In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the bible) and Anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field of anthropology in the United States[18][19], linguistics is now considered a separate scientific discipline in the US, Australia and much of Europe.
Edward Sapir, a leader in American structural linguistics, was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His methodology had strong influence on all his successors. Noam Chomsky’s formal model of language, transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly influenced by Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant model since the 1960s.
The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative grammar in the 1950s and 60s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal and language specific rules. Noam Chomsky remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such frameworks such as Transformational grammar, Generative Semantics, Relational Grammar, Generalized Phrase-structure Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Other linguists working in Optimality Theory state generalizations in terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon the traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in generativist linguistics.
Functionalist linguists working in functional grammar and Cognitive Linguistics tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus differing significantly from the Chomskyan school. They reject Chomskyan intuitive introspection as a scientific method, relying instead on typological evidence.

Schools of study

There are a wide variety of approaches to linguistic study. These can be loosely divided (although not without controversy) into formalist and functionalist approaches. Formalist approaches stress the importance of linguistic forms, and seek explanations for the structure of language from within the linguistic system itself. For example, the fact that language shows recursion might be attributed to recursive rules. Functionalist linguists by contrast view the structure of language as being driven by its function. For example, the fact that languages often put topical information first in the sentence, may be due to a communicative need to pair old information with new information in discourse.

Generative grammar

Main article: Generative grammar
During the last half of the twentieth century, following the work of Noam Chomsky, linguistics was dominated by the generativist school. While formulated by Chomsky as a way to explain how human beings acquire language and the biological constraints on this acquisition, its application to natural languages rarely explores that aspect of the theory. Generative theory is modularist and formalist in character. While generative grammar remains the dominant paradigm for studying linguistics,[20] Chomsky’s writings have also gathered much criticism.
Cognitive linguistics
Main article: Cognitive linguistics
In the 1970s and 1980s, a new school of thought known as cognitive linguistics emerged as a reaction to generativist theory. Led by theorists such as Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff, linguists working within the realm of cognitive linguistics posit that language is an emergent property of basic, general-purpose cognitive processes. In contrast to the generativist school of linguistics, cognitive linguistics is non-modularist and functionalist in character. Important developments in cognitive linguistics include cognitive grammar, frame semantics, and conceptual metaphor, all of which are based on the idea that form-function correspondences based on representations derived from embodied experience constitute the basic units of language.