What are the stages in the history of linguistics?

I. Traditional Linguistics

(i) Ancient Greek Linguistics

(ii) Ancient Roman Linguistics

II. Historical Comparative Linguistics

(i) Formation of Historical Comparative Linguistics

(ii) Development of Historical Comparative Linguistics

(iii) Young Grammar School

III. Modern Linguistics

(I) Saussure and Structuralist Linguistics

IV. Contemporary Linguistics

(I) Chomsky and Transformative-Generative Linguistics

Expanded:

I. Historical Linguistics in the 19th Century

Jones' discovery inspired the imagination of language researchers. For more than 100 years, all but the comparative study of the history of language has been eclipsed. Scholars wrote mostly on comparative grammar and then began to conceptualize the original Indo-European languages. Under the influence of this trend, linguists in the 19th century were busy with historical comparisons among Indo-European languages and reconstruction of the hypothetical mother tongue. in the mid-19th century, Darwin founded the theory of evolution, which naturally includes the theory of language evolution.

The development of language theory was driven by the emphasis on the historical changes in language, and in the 1870s, a group of linguists centered at the University of Leipzig in Germany believed that there was a regularity to language change, and that phonetic changes in a particular word in a language would affect the changes in many similar sounds in the same environment, and that there were no exceptions to phonological change.

The theory of the "Young Grammar School", as it is called, is now debatable, but their research method, which emphasized objective materials, did bring linguistics one step forward.

The study of language in the 19th century had a great influence on the later generations. Until now, there are still many linguists engaged in the study of the law of change in the history of speech.

Second, the early to mid-20th century description linguistics

In the 20th century, the focus of language research began to shift from language change to language description. The initiator of this shift was the Swiss linguist F. Saussure. In his 1915 "Course of General Linguistics", he repeatedly and clearly emphasized the point of view that no one had ever made before: the purpose of linguistics is to study the relationship between the elements of language, the value of an element of language is determined by its relationship with other elements, and language is a structure that is precisely interwoven by these elements. This led to the creation of structural linguistics.

After Saussure, structural linguistics developed rapidly, and soon different schools were formed: the Prague School, the Copenhagen School, the American School, the London School and the Moscow School. They developed structural linguistics from different perspectives, such as function, phonology, inflection and control. Especially the American school, whose representative figures, such as L. Bloomfield, have established a valuable methodology for the study of language for future generations.

But what followed was that the scope of language study became narrower and narrower, so that it gradually lost contact with other disciplines and became an esoteric subject that outsiders dare not enter. In this way, it is bound to face a revolution.

Three: Transformational Generative Linguistics from the Mid-20th Century to the Recent Past

In 1957, N. Chomsky, a 29-year-old teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published his book Syntactic Structure. This 120-page pamphlet transformed linguistics.

Chomsky argued that the Bloomfield school was too narrow in scope and too ambitious. It was unrealistic to try to discover from a pile of linguistic material a set of methods of analysis and description that could be applied to any language. Linguists should not be concerned with a pile of linguistic material, i.e., linguistic behavior, but with linguistic competence, i.e., the innate ability of the human brain to perceive and generate an infinite number of qualified discourses, and at the same time to recognize erroneous sentences. Linguists should have a presumption and hypothesis about this intrinsic system of language.

The grammar that describes a specific discourse is a descriptive grammar; the grammar that applies a set of rules to generate competent discourse and recognize incompetent discourse is a generative grammar. Chomsky ushered in the era of generative linguistics.

There are several kinds of generative grammars currently being discussed by linguists, among which Chomsky's transformational generative grammar is the most famous. Under Chomsky's influence, his students G. Rykov and R. S. Macaulay established generative semantics; American linguist C. Fillmore established grammars. The current linguistics is a triad of grammars, generative semantics, and transformational generative grammar.

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