1. Theories and Schools in Modern Linguistics
Lecture 11
Theories and Schools
in Modern Linguistics

2. 11.1 Saussure ( )
Saussure is often described as “father of modern linguistics” and “a master of a discipline which he made modern”. His 1916 book, Course in General Linguistics, which was a collection of his lecture notes, marked the beginning of modern linguistics.

3. Who influenced Saussure
Saussure’s ideas were developed along three lines: linguistics, sociology, and psychology. In linguistics, he was greatly influenced by the American linguist W. D. Whitney ( ), who insisted on the concept of arbitrariness of the sign. In sociology, he followed the French sociologist Durkheim. In psychology, Saussure was influenced by Freud.

4. Saussure’s ideas on language
Saussure believed that language is a system of signs. To communicate ideas, they must be part of a system of conventions, part of a system of signs. This sign is the union of a form and an idea, which Saussure called the signifier and the signified. Some important distinctions Saussure made in linguistics include langue vs. parole, syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic, and synchronic vs. diachronic.

5. Saussure’s influence
Saussure exerted two kinds of influence on modern linguistics. First, he provided a general orientation, a sense of the task of linguistics which has seldom been questioned. Second, he influenced modern linguistics in the specific concepts. Saussure’s fundamental perception is of revolutionary significance, and it is he that pushed linguistics into a brand new stage and all linguistics in the twentieth century are Saussurean linguistics.

6. 11.2 The Prague School
The Prague School can be traced back to its first meeting under the leadership of V. Mathesius (1882–1946) in Its most important contribution to linguistics is that it sees language in terms of function.
Three important points concerning the ideas of the Prague School: First, it was stressed that the synchronic study of language is fully justified. Second, there was an emphasis on the systemic character of language. Elements are held to be in functional contrast or opposition. Third, language was looked on as functional in another sense, that is, as a tool performing a number of essential functions or tasks for the community using it.

7. 11.2.1 Phonology and phonological oppositions
Trubetzkoy (1980~1938), Russian linguist
Principles of Phonology (1939)
Phonetics belonged to parole whereas phonology belonged to langue.
“Phoneme” is an abstract unit of the sound system as distinct from the sounds actually produced.
In classifying distinctive features, Trubetzkoy proposed three criteria: (1) their relation to the whole contrastive system; (2) relations between the opposing elements; and (3) their power of discrimination.

8. Trubetzkoy’s contribution
Trubetzkoy’s contributions to phonological theory concern four aspects. First, he showed distinctive functions of speech sounds and gave an accurate definition for the phoneme. Second, by making distinctions between phonetics and phonology, and between stylistic phonology and phonology, he defined the sphere of phonological studies. Third, by studying the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations between phonemes, he revealed the interdependent relations between phonemes. Finally, he put forward a set of methodologies for phonological studies, such as the method of extracting phonemes and the method of studying phonological combinations.

9. 11.2.2 Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) 功能句子观
Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to an analysis of utterances (or texts) in terms of the information they contain. The principle is that the role of each utterance part is evaluated for its semantic contribution to the whole.

10. Important concepts
Theme – the point of departure of a sentence, which is equally present to the speaker and hearer;
Rheme -- the goal of discourse which presents the very information that is to be imparted to the hearer;
Known/ given information -- information that is not new to the reader or hearer;
New information -- what is to be transmitted to the reader or hearer.

11. Sally stands on the table. subject predicate
Therefore the subject-predicate distinction is not always the same as theme-rheme distinction.
Sally stands on the table.
subject predicate
theme rheme
On the table stands Sally.
predicate subject
theme rheme

12. Communicative Dynamism (CD)
In research into the relation between structure and function, J. Firbas developed the notion of communicative dynamism (CD), which is meant to measure the amount of information an element carries in a sentence. The degree of CD is the effect contributed by a linguistic element, for it “pushes the communication forward”. Usually a context-dependent element carries a lower CD than a context-independent element. For example, in “I have read a nice book”, “a nice book” carries a higher CD than “I” and the finite verb.
Firbas defined FSP as “the distribution of various degrees of CD”. This can be explained as: the initial elements of a sequence carry the lowest degree of CD, and with each step forward, the degree of CD becomes incremental till the element that carries the highest.

13. 12.3 The London School
The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognised distinct academic subject in Britain was J. R. Firth. Firth was influenced by the anthropologist B. Malinowski. In turn, he influenced his student, the well-known linguist M. A. K. Halliday. The three men all stressed the importance of context of situation and the system aspect of language. Thus, London School is also known as systemic linguistics and functional linguistics.

14. 12.3.1 Malinowski’s theories
Malinowski regards language “a mode of action, rather than as a counterpart of thought”. According to him, the meaning of an utterance does not come from the ideas of the words comprising it but from its relation to the situational context in which the utterance occurs.
He distinguished three types of context of situation: (1) situations in which speech interrelates with bodily activity; (2) narrative situations; and (3) situations in which speech is used to fill a speech vacuum – phatic communion.
1884~1942

15. Two important points on Malinowski’s theory of meaning
First, he prescribed the data for linguistic studies, holding that isolated words are only imagined linguistic facts, and they are the products of advanced analytical procedures of linguistics. According to him, the real linguistic data are the complete utterances in actual uses of language. The second point is that when a certain sound is used in two different situations, it cannot be called one word, but two words having the same sound, or homonyms. He said that in order to assign meaning to a sound, one has to study the situations in which it is used.

16. Firth started the branch called linguistic semantics
Firth started the branch called linguistic semantics. He put forward the idea that in analysing a typical context of situation, one has to take into consideration both the situational context and the linguistic context of a text:
 (1) The internal relations of the text itself
(a) the syntagmatic relations between the elements in the structure;
(b) the paradigmatic relations between units in the system.
(2) The internal relations of the context of situation
(a) the relations between text and non-linguistic elements, and the general effects;
(b) the analytical relations between words, parts of words, phrases and the special elements of the context of situation

17. Firth also listed a model in his Papers in Linguistics (1957) that covers both the situational context and the linguistic context of a text:
 (1) the relevant features of the participants: persons, personalities
(a)  the verbal action of the participants
(b)  the non-verbal action of the participants
(2) the relevant topics, including objects, events, and non-linguistic, non-human events
(3) the effects of the verbal action.

18. Firth’s second important contribution to linguistics is his method of prosodic analysis (节律分析), called prosodic phonology. Firth pointed out that in actual speech, it is not phonemes that make up the paradigmatic relations, but phonematic units. There are fewer features in phonematic units than in phonemes, because some features are common to phonemes of a syllable or a phrase (even a sentence). When these features are considered in syntagmatic relations, they are all called prosodic units.
Firth did not define prosodic units. However, his discussion indicates that prosodic units include such features as stress, length, nasalisation, palatalisation, and aspiration. In any case, these features cannot be found in one phonematic unit alone.

19. 11.3.3 Halliday and Systemic-Functional Grammar
Systemic - Functional (SF) Grammar is a sociologically oriented functional linguistic approach and one of the most influential linguistic theories in the twentieth century, having great effect on various disciplines related to language, such as language teaching, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, stylistics, and machine translation.

20. Systemic-Functional Grammar has two components: systemic grammar and functional grammar. Systemic grammar aims to explain the internal relations in language as a system network, or meaning potential. Functional grammar aims to reveal that language is a means of social interaction, based on the position that language system and the forms that make it up are inescapably determined by the uses or functions which they serve.

21. Systemic-Functional Grammar is based on two facts: (1) language users are actually making choices in a system of systems and trying to realise different semantic functions in social interaction; and (2) language is inseparable from social activities of man. Thus, it takes actual uses of language as the object of study, in opposition to Chomsky’s TG Grammar that takes the ideal speaker’s linguistic competence as the object of study.

22. Systemic Grammar
The dimension along which the utterance sequence occurs is the axis of chain; the basic patterns along the vertical line form the axis of choice. The axis of chain represents syntagmatic relations; the axis of choice represents paradigmatic relations.

23. Transitivity choices

25. Functional Grammar
Halliday views language development in children as “the mastery of linguistic functions”, and “learning a language is learning how to mean”. So he proposes seven functions in children’s model of language:
(1) the instrumental function;
(2) the regulatory function;
(3) the interactional function;
(4) the personal function;
(5) the heuristic function;
(6) the imaginative function; and
(7) the informative function.

26. According to Halliday, the adult’s language becomes much more complex and it has to serve many more functions, and the original functional range of the child’s language is gradually reduced to a set of highly coded and abstract functions, which are metafunctions: the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual functions.

27. 11.4 American structuralism
AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM is a branch of SYNCHRONIC LINGUISTICS that emerged independently in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. It developed in a very different style from that of Europe, under the leadership of the anthropologist F. Boas.

28. 11.4.1 Early period: Boas and Sapir
Boas, 1911, Handbook of American Indian Languages.
His methodology in processing linguistic data of American Indian languages is analytical, without comparing them with such languages as English or Latin. Starting from an anthropological view, Boas regarded linguistics as part of anthropology and failed to establish linguistics as an independent branch of science. But his basic theory, his observation, and his descriptive methods paved the way for American descriptive linguistics and influenced generations of linguists.

29. Sapir, 1921, An Introduction of the Study of Language.
Sapir undertook the description of American Indian languages after Boas’s method, using a native informant in his own cultural surroundings. In his book, he started from an anthropological viewpoint to describe the nature of language and its development, with his main focus on typology. Sapir is most famous for his ideas on language and thought, which were later developed by his student, B. L. Whorf ( ), and is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

30. Bloomfield’s theory
Bloomfield, 1933, Language. This book started American structuralism as a school of thought.
For Bloomfield, linguistics is a branch of psychology, and specifically of the positivistic brand of psychology known as behaviourism. Behaviourism is a principle of scientific method, based on the belief that human beings cannot know anything they have not experienced. Behaviourism in linguistics holds that children learn language through a chain of “STIMULUS-RESPONSE reinforcement”, and the adult’s use of language is also a process of stimulus-response.

31. Bloomfield exemplified the stimulus-response theory and developed the following principles: 1) When one individual is stimulated, his speech can make another individual react accordingly. 2) The division of labour and all human activities based on the division of labour are dependent on language. 3) The distance between the speaker and the hearer, two separate nervous systems, is bridged up by sound waves.

32. 11.4.3 Post-Bloomfieldian linguistics
Influenced by Bloomfield’s Language, American linguists such as Z. S. Harris ( ), C. Hockett ( ), G. Trager, H. L. Smith, A. Hill, and R. Hall further developed structuralism, characterised by a strict empiricism.
The most significant figure in continuing the structuralist tradition may be K. Pike ( ), who and his followers have a special name for their technique of linguistic analysis – tagmemics.
Last but not least, starting from the late 1950s, Sydney M. Lamb developed his theory in a model consisting of three levels, or strata: phoneme, morpheme, and morphophoneme. This laid the foundation for his stratificational grammar. This later developed into neurocognitive linguistics.

33. To summarize, structuralism is based on the assumption that grammatical categories should be defined not in terms of meaning but in terms of distribution, and that the structure of each language should be described without reference to the alleged universality of such categories as tense, mood and parts of speech. Firstly, structural grammar describes everything that is found in a language instead of laying down rules. However, its aim is confined to the description of languages, without explaining why language operates the way it does. Secondly, structural grammar is empirical, aiming at objectivity in the sense that all definitions and statements should be verifiable or refutable. However, it has produced almost no complete grammars comparable to any comprehensive traditional grammars. Thirdly, structural grammar examines all languages, recognising and doing justice to the uniqueness of each language. But it does not give an adequate treatment of meaning. Lastly, structural grammar describes even the smallest contrasts that underlie any construction or use of a language, not only those discoverable in some particular use.

34. 11.5 Transformational-Generative Grammar
In the late 1950s, A. N. Chomsky (1928-  ), a student of Hebrew with the structuralist methodology, Chomsky tried to open up a new route when he found that the classification of structural elements of language according to distribution and arrangement had its limitations. From this practice Chomsky gradually established the well-known Transformational-Generative (TG) grammar. The publication of his Syntactic Structures (1957) marked the beginning of the Chomskyan Revolution.

35. From its birth to the present day, TG Grammar has seen five stages of development.
•  The Classical Theory aims to make linguistics a science. Syntactic Structures
•  The Standard Theory deals with how semantics should be studied in a linguistics theory. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
•   The Extended Standard Theory focuses discussion on language universals and universal grammar.
•   The Revised Extended Standard Theory (or GB) focuses discussion on government and binding.
Major works in this period include: “Remarks on Nominalization” (1970), Reflections on Language (1975), Rules and Representations (1980), Lectures on Government and Binding (1981).
•  The latest is the Minimalist Program, a further revision of the previous theory.
The Minimalist Program (1995), Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework (1998).

36. Chomsky’s TG Grammar differs from the structural grammar in a number of ways:
(1) rationalism;
(2) innateness;
(3) deductive methodology;
(4) emphasis on interpretation;
(5) formalization;
(6) emphasis on linguistic competence;
(7) strong generative powers;
(8) emphasis on linguistic universals.

37. First, Chomsky defines language as a set of rules or principles
First, Chomsky defines language as a set of rules or principles. Second, Chomsky believes that the aim of linguistics is to produce a generative grammar which captures the tacit knowledge of the native speaker of his language. This concerns the question of learning theory and the question of linguistic universals. Third, Chomsky and his followers are interested in any data that can reveal the native speaker’s tacit knowledge. They seldom use what native speakers actually say; they rely on their own intuition. Fourth, Chomsky’s methodology is hypothesis-deductive, which operates at two levels: (a) the linguist formulates a hypothesis about language structure – a general linguistic theory; this is tested by grammars for particular languages, and (b) each such grammar is a hypothesis on the general linguistic theory. Finally, Chomsky follows rationalism in philosophy and mentalism in psychology.