Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
It involves an analysis of language form,
language meaning, and language in context.Linguistic
study was originally motivated by the correct
description of classical liturgical language,
notably that of Sanskrit grammar in ancient
India, or by the development of logic and
rhetoric in ancient Greece, leading to a grammatical
tradition in Hellenism.
Beginning around the 4th century BCE, China
also developed its own grammatical traditions.
Traditions of Arabic grammar and Hebrew grammar
developed during the Middle Ages, also in
a religious context.
Modern linguistics began to develop in the
18th century with work almost entirely centering
around Indo-European studies and leading to
a highly elaborate and consistent reconstruction
of the Proto-Indo-European language. The first
half of the 20th century was marked by the
structuralist school, based on the work of
Ferdinand de Saussure in Europe and Edward
Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield in the United
States. The 1960s saw the rise of many new
fields in linguistics, such as Noam Chomsky's
generative grammar, William Labov's sociolinguistics,
Michael Halliday's systemic functional linguistics
and also modern psycholinguistics.
In the early 20th century, de Saussure distinguished
between the notions of langue and parole in
his formulation of structural linguistics.
According to him, parole is the specific utterance
of speech, whereas langue refers to an abstract
phenomenon that theoretically defines the
principles and system of rules that govern
a language. This distinction resembles the
one made by Noam Chomsky between competence
and performance, where competence is individual's
ideal knowledge of a language, while performance
is the specific way in which it is used.
== Antiquity ==
Across cultures, the early history of linguistics
is associated with a need to disambiguate
discourse, especially for ritual texts or
in arguments. This often led to explorations
of sound-meaning mappings, and the debate
over conventional versus naturalistic origins
for these symbols. Finally this led to the
processes by which larger structures are formed
from units.
=== Babylonia ===
The earliest linguistic texts – written
in cuneiform on clay tablets – date almost
four thousand years before the present. In
the early centuries of the second millennium
BCE, in southern Mesopotamia there arose a
grammatical tradition that lasted more than
2,500 years. The linguistic texts from the
earliest parts of the tradition were lists
of nouns in Sumerian (a language isolate,
that is, a language with no known genetic
relatives), the language of religious and
legal texts at the time. Sumerian was being
replaced in everyday speech by a very different
(and unrelated) language, Akkadian; it remained
however as a language of prestige and continued
to be used in religious and legal contexts.
It therefore had to be taught as foreign language,
and to facilitate this, information about
Sumerian was recorded in writing by Akkadian-speaking
scribes.
Over the centuries, the lists became standardised,
and the Sumerian words were provided with
Akkadian translations. Ultimately texts emerged
that gave Akkadian equivalents for not just
single words, but for entire paradigms of
varying forms for words: one text, for instance,
has 227 different forms of the verb ĝar “to
place”.
=== India ===
Linguistics in ancient India derives its impetus
from the need to correctly recite and interpret
the Vedic texts. Already in the oldest Indian
text, the Rigveda, vāk ("speech") is deified.
By 1200 BCE, the oral performance of these
texts becomes standardized, and treatises
on ritual recitation suggest splitting up
the Sanskrit compounds into words, stems,
and phonetic units, providing an impetus for
morphology and phonetics.
Some of the earliest activities in the description
of language have been attributed to the 4th
century BCE Indian grammarian Pāṇini, who
wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit
language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī.Over the
next few centuries, clarity was reached in
the organization of sound units, and the stop
consonants were organized in a 5x5 square
(c. 800 BCE, Pratisakhyas), eventually leading
to a systematic alphabet, Brāhmī, by the
3rd century BCE.
In semantics, the early Sanskrit grammarian
Śākaṭāyana (before c. 500 BCE) proposes
that verbs represent ontologically prior categories,
and that all nouns are etymologically derived
from actions. The etymologist Yāska (c. 5th
century BCE) posits that meaning inheres in
the sentence, and that word meanings are derived
based on sentential usage. He also provides
four categories of words—nouns, verbs, pre-verbs,
and particles/invariants—and a test for
nouns both concrete and abstract: words which
can be indicated by the pronoun that.
Pāṇini (c. 4th century BCE) opposes the
Yāska view that sentences are primary, and
proposes a grammar for composing semantics
from morphemic roots. Transcending the ritual
text to consider living language, Pāṇini
specifies a comprehensive set of about 4,000
aphoristic rules (sutras) that:
Map the semantics of verb argument structures
into thematic roles
Provide morphosyntactic rules for creating
verb forms and nominal forms whose seven cases
are called karaka (similar to case) that generate
the morphology
Take these morphological structures and consider
phonological processes (e.g., root or stem
modification) by which the final phonological
form is obtainedIn addition, the Pāṇinian
school also provides a list of 2000 verb roots
which form the objects on which these rules
are applied, a list of sounds (the so-called
Shiva-sutras), and a list of 260 words not
derivable by the rules.
The extremely succinct specification of these
rules and their complex interactions led to
considerable commentary and extrapolation
over the following centuries. The phonological
structure includes defining a notion of sound
universals similar to the modern phoneme,
the systematization of consonants based on
oral cavity constriction, and vowels based
on height and duration. However, it is the
ambition of mapping these from morpheme to
semantics that is truly remarkable in modern
terms.
Grammarians following Pāṇini include Kātyāyana
(c. 3rd century BCE), who wrote aphorisms
on Pāṇini (the Varttika) and advanced mathematics;
Patañjali (2nd century BCE), known for his
commentary on selected topics in Pāṇini's
grammar (the Mahabhasya) and on Kātyāyana's
aphorisms, as well as, according to some,
the author of the Yoga Sutras, and Pingala,
with his mathematical approach to prosody.
Several debates ranged over centuries, for
example, on whether word-meaning mappings
were conventional (Vaisheshika-Nyaya) or eternal
(Kātyāyana-Patañjali-Mīmāṃsā).
The Nyaya Sutras specified three types of
meaning: the individual (this cow), the type
universal (cowhood), and the image (draw the
cow).
That the sound of a word also forms a class
(sound-universal) was observed by Bhartṛhari
(c. 500 CE), who also posits that language-universals
are the units of thought, close to the nominalist
or even the linguistic determinism position.
Bhartṛhari also considers the sentence to
be ontologically primary (word meanings are
learned given their sentential use).
Of the six canonical texts or Vedangas that
formed the core syllabus in Brahminic education
from the 1st century CE until the 18th century,
four dealt with language:
Shiksha (śikṣā): phonetics and phonology
(sandhi), Gārgeya and commentators
Chandas (chandas): prosody or meter, Pingala
and commentators
Vyakarana (vyākaraṇa): grammar, Pāṇini
and commentators
Nirukta (nirukta): etymology, Yāska and commentatorsBhartrihari
around 500 CE introduced a philosophy of meaning
with his sphoṭa doctrine.
This body of work became known in 19th-century
Europe, where it influenced modern linguistics
initially through Franz Bopp, who mainly looked
at Pāṇini. Subsequently, a wider body of
work influenced Sanskrit scholars such as
Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield,
and Roman Jakobson. Frits Staal discussed
the possible European impact of Indian ideas
on language. After outlining the various aspects
of the contact, Staal posits the theory that
the idea of formal rules in language, first
proposed by de Saussure in 1894, and finally
developed by Chomsky in 1957, based on which
formal rules were also introduced in computational
languages, may indeed lie in the European
exposure to the formal rules of Paninian grammar.
In particular, de Saussure, who lectured on
Sanskrit for three decades, may have been
influenced by Pāṇini and Bhartrihari; his
idea of the unity of signifier-signified in
the sign is somewhat similar to the notion
of Sphoṭa. More importantly, the very idea
that formal rules can be applied to areas
outside of logic or mathematics, may itself
have been catalyzed by Europe's contact with
the work of Sanskrit grammarians.
The Pali Grammar of Kacchayana, dated to the
early centuries CE, describes the language
of the Buddhist canon.
=== Greece ===
The Greeks developed an alphabet based on
a system previously used by the Phoenicians,
adding signs for vowels and for extra consonants
appropriate to their idiom (see Robins, 1997).
As a result of the introduction of writing,
poetry such as the Homeric poems became written
and several editions were created and commented
on, forming the basis of philology and criticism.
Along with written speech, the Greeks commenced
studying grammatical and philosophical issues.
A philosophical discussion about the nature
and origins of language can be found as early
as the works of Plato. A subject of concern
was whether language was man-made, a social
artifact, or supernatural in origin. Plato
in his Cratylus presents the naturalistic
view, that word meanings emerge from a natural
process, independent of the language user.
His arguments are partly based on examples
of compounding, where the meaning of the whole
is usually related to the constituents, although
by the end he admits a small role for convention.
The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics
as a new text genre. The Platonic dialogs
contain definitions of the meters of the poems
and tragedy, the form and the structure of
those texts (see the Republic and Phaidros,
Ion, etc.).Aristotle supports the conventional
origins of meaning. He defined the logic of
speech and of the argument. Furthermore, Aristotle's
works on rhetoric and poetics became of the
utmost importance for the understanding of
tragedy, poetry, public discussions etc. as
text genres. Aristotle's work on logic interrelates
with his special interest in language, and
his work on this area was fundamentally important
for the development of the study of language
(logos in Greek means both "language" and
"logic reasoning"). In Categories, Aristotle
defines what is meant by "synonymous" or univocal
words, what is meant by "homonymous" or equivocal
words, and what is meant by "paronymous" or
denominative words. He divides forms of speech
as being:
Either simple, without composition or structure,
such as "man," "horse," "fights," etc.
Or having composition and structure, such
as "a man fights," "the horse runs," etc.Next,
he distinguishes between a subject of predication,
namely that of which anything is affirmed
or denied, and a subject of inhesion. A thing
is said to be inherent in a subject, when,
though it is not a part of the subject, it
cannot possibly exist without the subject,
e.g., shape in a thing having a shape. The
categories are not abstract platonic entities
but are found in speech, these are substance,
quantity, quality, relation, place, time,
position, state, action and affection. In
de Interpretatione, Aristotle analyzes categoric
propositions, and draws a series of basic
conclusions on the routine issues of classifying
and defining basic linguistic forms, such
as simple terms and propositions, nouns and
verbs, negation, the quantity of simple propositions
(primitive roots of the quantifiers in modern
symbolic logic), investigations on the excluded
middle (which to Aristotle isn't applicable
to future tense propositions — the Problem
of future contingents), and on modal propositions.
The Stoics made linguistics an important part
of their system of the cosmos and the human.
They played an important role in defining
the linguistic sign-terms adopted later on
by Ferdinand de Saussure like "significant"
and "signifié". The Stoics studied phonetics,
grammar and etymology as separate levels of
study. In phonetics and phonology the articulators
were defined. The syllable became an important
structure for the understanding of speech
organization. One of the most important contributions
of the Stoics in language study was the gradual
definition of the terminology and theory echoed
in modern linguistics.
Alexandrian grammarians also studied speech
sounds and prosody; they defined parts of
speech with notions such as "noun", "verb",
etc. There was also a discussion about the
role of analogy in language, in this discussion
the grammatici in Alexandria supported the
view that language and especially morphology
is based on analogy or paradigm, whereas the
grammatic in schools in Asia Minor consider
that language is not based on analogical bases
but rather on exceptions.
Alexandrians, like their predecessors, were
very interested in meter and its role in poetry.
The metrical "feet" in the Greek was based
on the length of time taken to pronounce each
syllable, with syllables categorized according
to their weight as either "long" syllables
or "short" syllables (also known as "heavy"
and "light" syllables, respectively, to distinguish
them from long and short vowels). The foot
is often compared to a musical measure and
the long and short syllables to whole notes
and half notes. The basic unit in Greek and
Latin prosody is a mora, which is defined
as a single short syllable. A long syllable
is equivalent to two moras. A long syllable
contains either a long vowel, a diphthong,
or a short vowel followed by two or more consonants.
Various rules of elision sometimes prevent
a grammatical syllable from making a full
syllable, and certain other lengthening and
shortening rules (such as correption) can
create long or short syllables in contexts
where one would expect the opposite. The most
important Classical meter as defined by the
Alexandrian grammarians was the dactylic hexameter,
the meter of Homeric poetry. This form uses
verses of six feet. The first four feet are
normally dactyls, but can be spondees. The
fifth foot is almost always a dactyl. The
sixth foot is either a spondee or a trochee.
The initial syllable of either foot is called
the ictus, the basic "beat" of the verse.
There is usually a caesura after the ictus
of the third foot.
Subsequently, the text Tékhnē grammatiké
(c. 100 BCE, Gk. gramma meant letter, and
this title means "Art of letters"), possibly
written by Dionysius Thrax (170 – 90 BCE),
lists eight parts of speech and lays out the
broad details of Greek morphology including
the case structures. This text was intended
as a pedagogic guide (as was Panini), and
also covers punctuation and some aspects of
prosody. Other grammars by Charisius (mainly
a compilation of Thrax, as well as lost texts
by Remmius Palaemon and others) and Diomedes
(focusing more on prosody) were popular in
Rome as pedagogic material for teaching Greek
to native Latin-speakers.
One of the most prominent scholars of Alexandria
and of the antiquity was Apollonius Dyscolus.
Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises
on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology,
prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more.
Happily, four of these are preserved—we
still have a Syntax in four books, and three
one-book monographs on pronouns, adverbs,
and connectives, respectively.
Lexicography become an important domain of
study as many grammarians compiled dictionaries,
thesauri and lists of special words "λέξεις"
that were old, or dialectical or special (such
as medical words or botanic words) at that
period. In the early medieval times we find
more categories of dictionaries like the dictionary
of Suida (considered the first encyclopedic
dictionary), etymological dictionaries etc.
At that period, the Greek language functioned
as a lingua franca, a language spoken throughout
the known world (for the Greeks and Romans)
of that time and, as a result, modern linguistics
struggles to overcome this. With the Greeks
a tradition commenced in the study of language.
The Romans and the medieval world followed,
and their laborious work is considered today
as a part of our everyday language. Think,
for example, of notions such as the word,
the syllable, the verb, the subject etc.
=== Rome ===
In the 4th century, Aelius Donatus compiled
the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was
to be the defining school text through the
Middle Ages. A smaller version, Ars Minor,
covered only the eight parts of speech; eventually
when books came to be printed in the 15th
century, this was one of the first books to
be printed. Schoolboys subjected to all this
education gave us the current meaning of "grammar"
(attested in English since 1176).
=== China ===
Similar to the Indian tradition, Chinese philology,
Xiaoxue (小學 "elementary studies"), began
as an aid to understanding classics in the
Han dynasty (c. 3rd century BCE). Xiaoxue
came to be divided into three branches: Xungu
(訓詁 "exegesis"), Wenzi (文字 "script
[analysis]") and Yinyun (音韻 "[study of]
sounds") and reached its golden age in the
17th century CE (Qing Dynasty). The glossary
Erya (c. 3rd century BCE), comparable to the
Indian Nighantu, is regarded as the first
linguistic work in China. Shuowen Jiezi (c.
2nd century BCE), the first Chinese dictionary,
classifies Chinese characters by radicals,
a practice that would be followed by most
subsequent lexicographers. Two more pioneering
works produced during the Han Dynasty are
Fangyan, the first Chinese work concerning
dialects, and Shiming, devoted to etymology.
As in ancient Greece, early Chinese thinkers
were concerned with
the relationship between names and reality.
Confucius (6th century BCE) famously emphasized
the moral commitment implicit in a name, (zhengming)
stating that the moral collapse of the pre-Qin
was a result of the failure to rectify behaviour
to meet the moral commitment inherent in names:
"Good government consists in the ruler being
a ruler, the minister being a minister, the
father being a father, and the son being a
son... If names be not correct, language is
not in accordance with the truth of things."
(Analects 12.11,13.3).
However, what is the reality implied by a
name? The later Mohists or the group known
as School of Names (ming jia, 479-221 BCE),
consider that ming (名 "name") may refer
to three kinds of shi (實 "actuality"): type
universals (horse), individual (John), and
unrestricted (thing). They adopt a realist
position on the name-reality connection - universals
arise because "the world itself fixes the
patterns of similarity and difference by which
things should be divided into kinds". The
philosophical tradition is well known for
conundra resembling the sophists, e.g. when
Gongsun Longzi (4th century BCE) questions
if in copula statements (X is Y), are X and
Y identical or is X a subclass of Y. This
is the famous paradox "a white horse is not
a horse".
Xun Zi (3rd century BCE) revisits the principle
of zhengming, but instead of
rectifying behaviour to suit the names, his
emphasis is on
rectifying language to correctly reflect reality.
This is consistent with a more "conventional"
view of word origins (yueding sucheng 約定俗成).
The study of phonology in China began late,
and was influenced by the Indian tradition,
after Buddhism had become popular in China.
The rime dictionary is a type of dictionary
arranged by tone and rime, in which the pronunciations
of characters are indicated by fanqie spellings.
Rime tables were later produced to aid the
understanding of fanqie.
Philological studies flourished during the
Qing Dynasty, with Duan Yucai and Wang Niansun
as the towering figures. The last great philologist
of the era was Zhang Binglin, who also helped
lay the foundation of modern Chinese linguistics.
The Western comparative method was brought
into China by Bernard Karlgren, the first
scholar to reconstruct Middle Chinese and
Old Chinese with Latin alphabet (not IPA).
Important modern Chinese linguists include
Y. R. Chao, Luo Changpei, Li Fanggui and Wang
Li.
The ancient commentators on the classics paid
much attention to syntax and the use of particles.
But the first Chinese grammar, in the modern
sense of the word, was produced by Ma Jianzhong
(late 19th century). His grammar was based
on the Latin (prescriptive) model.
== Middle Ages ==
=== Arabic grammar ===
Due to the rapid expansion of Islam in the
8th century, many people learned Arabic as
a lingua franca. For this reason, the earliest
grammatical treatises on Arabic are often
written by non-native speakers.
The earliest grammarian who is known to us
is ʿAbd Allāh ibn Abī Isḥāq al-Ḥaḍramī
(died 735-736 CE, 117 AH). The efforts of
three generations of grammarians culminated
in the book of the Persian linguist Sibāwayhi
(c. 760-793).
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). In his book
he distinguished phonetics from phonology.
=== European vernaculars ===
The Irish Sanas Cormaic 'Cormac's Glossary'
is Europe's first etymological and encyclopedic
dictionary in any non-Classical language.
The Modistae or "speculative grammarians"
in the 13th century introduced the notion
of universal grammar.
In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence
of Vernacular"), Dante expanded the scope
of linguistic enquiry from Latin/Greek to
include the languages of the day. Other linguistic
works of the same period concerning the vernaculars
include the First Grammatical Treatise (Icelandic)
or the Auraicept na n-Éces (Irish).
The Renaissance and Baroque period saw an
intensified interest in linguistics, notably
for the purpose of Bible translations by the
Jesuits, and also related to philosophical
speculation on philosophical languages and
the origin of language.
== Modern linguistics ==
Modern linguistics did not begin until the
late 18th century, and the Romantic or animist
theses of Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann
Christoph Adelung remained influential well
into the 19th century.
=== "Historical" linguistics ===
During the 18th century conjectural history,
based on a mix of linguistics and anthropology,
on the topic of both the origin and progress
of language and society was fashionable. These
thinkers contributed to the construction of
academic paradigms in which some languages
were labelled "primitive" relative to the
English language. Within this paradigm a primitive
people could be discerned by their primitive
language, as in the case of Hugh Blair who
argued that Native Americans gesticulated
wildly to compensate for poor lexicon of their
primitive language. Around the same time,
James Burnett authored a 6 volume treatise
that delved more deeply into the matter of
"savage languages". Other writers theorized
that Native American languages were "nothing
but the natural and instinctive cries of the
animal" without grammatical structure. The
thinkers within this paradigm connected themselves
with the Greeks and Romans, viewed as the
only civilized persons of the ancient world,
a view articulated by Thomas Sheridan who
compiled an important 18th century pronunciation
dictionary: "It was to the care taken in the
cultivation of their languages, that Greece
and Rome, owed that splendor, which eclipsed
all the other nations of the world".In the
18th century James Burnett, Lord Monboddo
analyzed numerous languages and deduced logical
elements of the evolution of human language.
His thinking was interleaved with his precursive
concepts of biological evolution. Some of
his early concepts have been validated and
are considered correct today. In his The Sanscrit
Language (1786), Sir William Jones proposed
that Sanskrit and Persian had resemblances
to Classical Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Celtic
languages. From this idea sprung the field
of comparative linguistics and historical
linguistics. Through the 19th century, European
linguistics centered on the comparative history
of the Indo-European languages, with a concern
for finding their common roots and tracing
their development.
In the 1820s, Wilhelm von Humboldt observed
that human language was a rule-governed system,
anticipating a theme that was to become central
in the formal work on syntax and semantics
of language in the 20th century. Of this observation
he said that it allowed language to make "infinite
use of finite means" (Über den Dualis, 1827).
Humboldt's work is associated with the movement
of Romantic linguistics, which was inspired
by Naturphilosophie and Romantic science.
Other notable representatives of the movement
include Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel and
Franz Bopp.It was only in the late 19th century
that the Neogrammarian approach of Karl Brugmann
and others introduced a rigid notion of sound
law.
Historical linguistics also led to the emergence
of the semantics and some forms of pragmatics
(Nerlich, 1992; Nerlich and Clarke, 1996).
=== Structuralism ===
In Europe there was a development of structural
linguistics, initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure,
a Swiss professor of Indo-European and general
linguistics, whose lectures on general linguistics,
published posthumously by his students, set
the direction of European linguistic analysis
from the 1920s on; his approach has been widely
adopted in other fields under the broad term
"Structuralism".
=== Descriptive linguistics ===
During the second World War, North American
linguists Leonard Bloomfield, William Mandeville
Austin and several of his students and colleagues
developed teaching materials for a variety
of languages whose knowledge was needed for
the war effort. This work led to an increasing
prominence of the field of linguistics, which
became a recognized discipline in most American
universities only after the war.
In 1965, William Stokoe, a linguist from Gallaudet
University published an analysis [1] which
proved that American Sign Language fits the
criteria for a natural language.
=== Generative linguistics ===
=== 
Other subfields ===
From roughly 1980 onwards, pragmatic, functional,
and cognitive approaches have steadily gained
ground, both in the United States and in Europe.
== See also ==
History of grammar
History of communication
== Notes
