Linguistics can be defined as the science of language. Language, however, may be approached from a number of different perspectives, and it plays such a central role in human life that many disciplines are concerned with language in one way or another. Indeed every science contains one linguistic component at the very least, the language of its theory and observations with which it may at times be concerned. What then distinguishes linguistics from other sciences?
There is one field which is particularly close to linguistics, and that is the study of literature, since its very material is verbal. However, even in this case the preoccupation with linguistic matters is different from that of linguistics itself. In all other fields, language is a means to an end; only in linguistics is it studied as an end in itself.
Like so many other sciences, linguistics took its modern form as a separate academic discipline in the nineteenth century, although it has a long prehistory. In particular it was preceded by national philologies, which arose in literate societies such as those of India, China and Greece. Modern linguistics developed in Europe on the basis of the Graeco-Roman tradition with minor contributions from Semitic sources in the Renaissance. The most theoretically sophisticated of these national philologies was that of India, and yet it became known to Europe only in the nineteenth century, while an appreciation of its significance is even more recent.
Although the philological studies of the grammarians is the chief source for linguistics in the classical tradition, two other pursuits are worthy of mention. One is the philosophical concern with the nature of language. The main question was whether the relation between sound and meaning is natural or conventional and the most important discussion is Plato’s Cratylus. The second source is rhetoric, the effective use of language in public speaking and writing. Some of the earliest analyses of linguistic phenomena, such as Protagoras’ distinguishing of the various moods of the verb, grew out of this applied interest.
The most important, though, was the philological tradition of the grammarians which developed in the Alexandrian period. In common with other national philologies it displayed the following features: The study of languages has as its goal the understanding of certain highly valued texts, sacred or, in the case of the Greeks, profane, namely the Homeric poems. It involves concentration on a single language and a valuation of it as superior to all other forms of speech including the contemporary spoken language which inevitably, in the course of linguistic change, has come to differ from it. It views historic change ‘not as a rational process but as a haphazard degeneration from a formerly ideal state. This in turn involves the notion of ‘prescriptivism’, an attempt to restore a particular norm which is contrary to existing usage. The concentration on written texts also makes the written form primary vis-à-vis the spoken, since sounds are merely the momentary realizations of the apparently stable and fixed written norms. That language is not here studied for its own sake is very strikingly expressed in the Techne Grammatike (attributed to Dionysius Thrax around 100 BC), itself the model of numerous subsequent grammars. After enumerating the various subdivisions of grammar, the last mentioned is ‘the appreciation of literary composition which is the noblest part of grammar’.
Nevertheless this tradition made lasting contributions. It provided a comprehensive model for describing language which was well suited to Latin and Greek and is the source of a large part of current linguistic terminology. It may be called the ‘wordparadigm model’. The sentence consists of words which are divisible on the basis of form and function into a small number of classes, the parts of speech. Further, each part of speech can be considered from two points of view, internal variability of form (‘morphology’) and functional relation to other words in the speech chain (‘syntax’). In the area of morphology the lasting achievement was the discovery of the ‘paradigm’, literally ‘example’. Inflectional parts of speech such as the noun vary according to a set of categories, for example, case and number, and the number of distinct models is very small. For instance, all Latin nouns of the first declension have similar variations of form and any one noun, such as puella (‘girl’), can be viewed as an example to follow for the rest. This was no mean achievement and grew out of the dispute in the Alexandrian period between the analogists, who stressed regularity in language, and the anomalists, who denied it. It was the search for regularities by the analogists that revealed the existence of comprehensive patterns, namely paradigms.
In syntax, there was the classification of types of relationships among words such as ‘government’, as when a verb requires and hence ‘governs’ a particular case, and agreement, as when two words agree in having the same categories, for example, the adjectives agreeing with nouns in gender, number and case.
One further feature of this model should be mentioned. It involved a hierarchy of levels. Sounds made up words; words made up sentences. On this basis there were two main levels, the ‘phonological’ and ‘grammatical’, the latter divided, as has been seen, into morphology and syntax. Such a notion of levels has remained as part of linguistic theory. In particular the existence of phonological and grammatical levels, even though there are relationships between them, seems to be fundamental to any theory of language.
The model just described was not all discovered at once by the Greeks. It developed considerably in the Roman, medieval and the post-medieval periods. In particular the rise of grammaire générale, largely but not exclusively French, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (though without medieval predecessors) deserves mention. It employed the word-paradigm model but sought to explain its structure by reference to universal reason and the very nature of the world and of thought as shown by metaphysics and logic. Thus the difference between nouns and adjectives mirrored the difference between substances and their qualities. Moreover, a number of languages were often compared on the assumption that such categories, inherent in human reason, must exist in all languages.
The nineteenth century was not marked merely by the rise of linguistics as a separate discipline but involved a revolution in the conception of language. As a result of exploration and colonization, Europe became acutely aware of the vast number and diversity of human languages. The traditional explanation was the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, and at first the main question was what language was spoken before the confusion of tongues, the lingua Adamica. However, it began to be noticed that the differences in language were not haphazard; they fall into groupings such as the Romance, Germanic and Semitic languages.
The basic explanation which developed about the turn of the nineteenth century was that just as Spanish was like Italian because they were both changed forms of an originally homogeneous language, Latin, so where the original language was not recorded, the explanation had to be similar. There must have been a ‘Proto-Germanic’ and a ‘Proto-Semitic’ and so on. Moreover this process of differentiation of an ancestral language was not confined to the most obvious groupings. In particular the discovery of Sankrit, the sacred language of India, with its obvious resemblance to Latin, Greek and other European languages, led to the hypothesis of an original Indo-European language which had branched into Latin, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Slavic and so on, which then in most instances differentiated once more in a more recent period. The metaphor was that of a family tree.
The historical-comparative method that dominated nineteenth-century linguistics had as its goal the reconstruction of the original ancestral language and of the subsequent changes in it, which gave rise to later language. It was mainly applied to Indo-European but was also employed in the study of other language families. This way of looking at language was in many ways diametrically opposed to the traditional one inherited from classical philology. Change is not a haphazard degeneration but follows rational patterns, indeed, becomes the central object of linguistic science. Changes on the phonological level are understandable in terms of articulatory and auditory similarity. Hence the written form is equally valuable since change is not degeneration, and the logical basis for linguistic prescriptivism is destroyed.
During the nineteenth century and up to about 1920, the inherited pattern of grammatical description, though often modified, continued its sway because the focus of interest was historical change. However, in the late 1920s another basic revolution in linguistics occurred, which we may call the ‘structural’. The first articulation of this was in 1915 in the posthumous Cours de linguistique générale (English translation, Course in General Linguistics, 1959) of Ferdinand de Saussure of Geneva. De Saussure, himself a historical linguist by training, introduced a terminology which has become general in the social sciences. Language can be studied ‘diachronically’ in its aspect of historical process, or ‘synchronically’ in terms of the internal relations within a state as abstracted from change. There were a number of structural schools, differing in many respects but united in finding in the ‘synchronic structure’ of language the central object of linguistic science. An important factor was the work of anthropologists on non-western languages where both the profound differences from western languages and the usual absence of historical records combined to concentrate attention on synchronic structure.
The nature of these new methods can be most easily illustrated from phonology, which was in fact the earliest area of interest for the structuralists. A mere enumeration of the sounds of the language without regard to their functional relations was unenlightening. Thus two languages might both have p and b sounds which were phonetically identical but, if a rule could be formulated that told us when p occurs and when b in terms of other sounds, there could never be a functional meaning contrast. This is the case for the Algonquian languages. In English, on the other hand, pat and bat are different words. For the Algonquian languages p and b belong to the same phoneme or functional unit, while in English they are two contrasting units.
Similarly, methods were extended to the grammatical level leading to the positing of functional units like the morpheme. Thus the English phonemic variants of the plural -s, -z and -∂z are predictable on the basis of the final phoneme, the stem, and hence are members of the same functional unit.
In 1957, Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures ushered in the period of ‘generative grammar’. The basic concept uses not functional units but rules. Moreover, grammar was constructed not as in the American structural school of observation by induction from the bottom up, morphemes consisting of phonemes and so on, but from top down—from syntax, particularly relations among whole sentence patterns (‘transformations’) with appeals to native intuitions of grammaticality. The whole grammar was not unlike an axiomatic system. The basic formulas often called ‘deep structure’ such as subject + predicate occurred first and by rule-governed substitutions, and transformations ended up as strings which would then be realized as actual utterances by phonological rules. After some years it became apparent that describing languages with this basic approach also leads to differing theories as in structuralism, and at the time of writing no one version holds the field.
A basic question raised by both the structuralist and generative revolution was the role of interlinguistic comparisons. Historical linguistics was essentially comparative, but was it possible to compare structures ahistorically? Did one just end up with an indefinitely large number of non-comparable individual descriptions? The American structuralist school seemed on the whole content with these results. The only universals of the dominant view were those of methodology. Languages could differ to any degree so that no cross-linguistic generalization was possible. The Prague school stressed the possibility of comparing structures and made some beginnings, especially in phonology Chomsky had by 1965 (Syntactic Structures) moved to the notion of universal grammar and indeed hailed grammaire générale as a predecessor. All grammars had identical deep structures and these reflected a universal genetically based human endowment. This viewpoint ultimately had to be abandoned to be replaced by universal constraints on the forms of grammars. Finally there were those who approached language universals by noting the existence of recurring and limited sets of types based on observations close to the surface, for example, in word order. Such constraints were frequently in the form of implicational relationships. For instance, language of the VSO type (with basic order verb-subject-object) always had the dependent genitive after the noun, but not necessarily vice versa. There were also non-restricted universals, such as that all sound systems have at least two vowel levels and two series of stop sounds based on the point of articulation.
Linguistics is at present divided into a considerable number of subfields, some of which are interdisciplinary. Some linguists pursue historical comparison whose legitimacy has never been seriously questioned by structuralists, usually specializing in some particular historical family, or subfamily, of languages. Others, particularly anthropological linguists, concentrate on the synchronic description of unwritten languages often with an areal specialization and some historical-comparative interests. On the basis of linguistic structure, some specialize in phonology frequently involving laboratory phonetics. Others work on grammatical level, particularly the syntactic, and may have connections with computer science. Still others are chiefly interested in semantics, often in alliance with philosophy. More purely interdisciplinary fields include psycholinguistics involving an analysis of the psychological processes at work in language use, acquisition of language by the child or second-language learning. A further important interdisciplinary area is sociolinguistics, commonly divided into macro-socio-linguistics, for example, language in relation to ethnicity with its accompanying social, political and education problems, and micro-sociolinguistics, which is concerned with conversational interaction as related, for example, to situational factors and the relative social status of the participants.
Since the 1950s linguistics, usually a minor speciality in other departments, has had an almost explosive growth, particularly in the USA, with a corresponding expansion in the number and size of independent departments and reflecting both the intellectual development of the field itself and its numerous connections with other disciplines.
Joseph Greenberg
Stanford University
Further reading
Greenberg, J.H. (1977), New Invitation to Linguistics, Garden City, NY.
Greenberg, J.J. (ed.) (1978) Universals of Human Language, 4 vols, Stanford, CA.
Lyons, J. (1968) Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, 2 vols, London.
Newmeyer, F.J. (1980) Linguistic Theory in America, New York.
