The essential difference between Chinese and linguistics lies in

Zhang Shilu said: "Linguistics, western languages are' the science of language' or' linguistics', which is a science with language as the research object." (Principles of Linguistics, page 2) [1] Lv Shuxiang said: "The subject of studying language is called linguistics." (Language and Linguistics) Song Zhenhua and Liu Ling said: "Linguistics is a science that specializes in language, and it is a generalization and summary of people's understanding of language phenomena.

(Language Theory, page 1) The Encyclopedia of China Language and Characters says: "Linguistics is a subject that studies human language.

Its exploration scope includes language structure, language application, social function and historical development of language, and other issues related to language departments. "(page 480)

Linguistics is an ancient and young science.

In ancient times, people began to think about the mystery of language and put forward various views on language, which is the bud of linguistics.

Linguistics has a historical development. Today's linguistics is completely different from ancient linguistics, and the rapid development of modern linguistics is a young science.

Therefore, linguistics in different periods has different connotations.

Linguistics can be divided into traditional linguistics and modern linguistics.

It is generally believed that "Cours guistigue Generale was published by F.DE.. Saussure in 19 16 years marked the birth of modern linguistics. " Zhao Shikai's A Collection of Chinese-English Contrastive Grammar (1 page) is also called "philology" in traditional linguistics.

[2]

The word "linguistics" has both broad and narrow meanings.

Linguistics in a broad sense includes traditional linguistics and modern linguistics.

Literature is a part of linguistics.

Linguistics in a narrow sense refers to modern linguistics, not literature in the same language.

Zhang Shilu said: "Linguistics was founded after the 19th century." (Introduction to Linguistics, page 9) In fact, what he called "linguistics" only refers to modern linguistics.

Cen Qixiang said in General Linguistics: "Language has existed since the beginning of human society, but only in the first quarter of the19th century did people use scientific and historical methods to study language facts, making language research a truly complete science.

Before that, most people did sporadic grammar and philology work, rather than linguistic work with a real scientific system. (Page 5) Xu Guozhang said: "Linguistics is a discipline with a history of 200 years, which is quite extraordinary." (Hunan Education Publishing House, "Introduction to Linguistic Series Textbooks") What they are talking about is obviously linguistics in a narrow sense.

In the modern western linguistic tradition, the difference between philology and linguistics is often emphasized.

Wang Li said: "As we all know, there is a difference between philology and linguistics.

The former is the study of characters or signatures, especially focusing on the textual research of documents and the search for old sayings, which is scattered and lacks systematicness; The research object of the latter is the language itself, and the results of the research can lead to a scientific, systematic, meticulous and comprehensive language theory.

Linguistic research in China before the May 4th Movement generally belongs to the category of philology. (Preface to Linguistics in China, Collected Works of Wang Li, vol. 12, p. 4) "Literature has been dominant in language studies in China for two thousand years, and there are still many scholars in this field until today." (6 pages)

After affirming the difference between philology and linguistics in the monograph Language and Language Studies in Encyclopedia of China, Lv Shuxiang concluded with the subtitle "Towards Linguistics": "From philology to linguistics, there have been several changes.

① The research focus has shifted from ancient times to modern times, and from writing to language.

(2) The research scope has expanded from a few languages to many languages.

(3) The scattered knowledge has been systematized.

(4) The study of language is completely free from the fetters of serving the study of literature, history and philosophy.

China's language study is no longer a' primary school' as a vassal of Confucian classics. "(2 pages)

Philology (traditional linguistics) is also called "pre-scientific period" linguistics in modern west.

Literature and Linguistics in the Same Language —— Linguistics in the "scientific period" in the modern sense.

Western and Soviet scholars divide linguistics into "pre-scientific period" and "scientific period" with the first quarter of19th century as the watershed.

[3] The so-called scientific linguistics mainly refers to historical comparative linguistics and general linguistics. In the Outline of Language History (Science Press 1958), Cen Qixiang said: "Language science was founded in1at the beginning of the 9th century.

On the one hand, it produces historical comparative linguistics, on the other hand, it produces general linguistics because of various historical comparative studies.

General linguistics is formed by summarizing and systematizing the historical comparative research results of various linguistics. "(page 232) The difference between the two is that linguistics is a science that takes language itself as the only research object, which is what Saussure said: studying language for the sake of language.

However, philology is often the study of language phenomena for other purposes, such as the interpretation of ancient documents.

Ma Xueliang insisted on distinguishing between China's traditional literature and modern linguistics.

Although they also said: "If language research cannot simply draw the boundary between philology and linguistics from the time period, then any systematic research on one aspect or some aspects of language for a meaningful and valuable purpose should be regarded as an integral part of linguistic research.

Therefore, in this sense, linguistics is both an ancient science and a young science. (Author of General Linguistics, Qu, Huang Bufan, Luo Meizhen and Wang Yuanxin, page 43, 1997) However, they clearly said: "Of course, in a strict scientific sense, there are still obvious differences between linguistics and China literature." (45 pages)

In the fourth quarter of the first chapter of this book, a subtitle is "China Traditional Literature and Modern Linguistics". For China's traditional literature, the author summarizes five characteristics (or shortcomings):

Looking at the study of ancient languages at home and abroad, there are five similarities:

1, the research is limited to one language, and it is often the mother tongue;

2. They all focus on the textual research, interpretation and comments on the classic documents of philosophy, religion, history and literature left by predecessors, so as to help people understand these classic documents;

3. Generally speaking, language is not studied from the perspective of language, but belongs to other disciplines;

Everyone regards spoken English as an unattractive proverb and doesn't attach importance to it;

5. The research method is scattered, static and one-sided, lacking a systematic, comprehensive and developed viewpoint.

Due to the above five characteristics, language studies at that time had not developed into an independent discipline, which was generally called "philology".

(42 pages)

The author puts forward four views on the difference between traditional philology and modern linguistics.

1, from the research object and scope, people began to study language from the perspective of pure language.

2. From the research direction, it is no longer limited to describing some individual and scattered problems in language, or some problems in a certain aspect, but from individual to general, from local to whole, from concrete to abstract, from language practice to language theory.

Language is studied as a formal system and a meaning system.

3. From the research procedure, it is no longer a sporadic empirical research method, but has some characteristics similar to other sciences, especially natural sciences, that is, first observe the facts, then make some assumptions, and then systematically study through verification, put forward a set of theories, and gradually formed a typical linguistic research procedure.

4. From the research method, some basic inferences are made according to the general logical theorem, which are confirmed by observation.

This is a common "hypothesis-deduction method" in linguistics.

In the study of modern linguistics, induction and deduction are the methods that linguists often use.

(Page 44-45)

There are obviously differences between traditional linguistics and modern linguistics.

The problem is that it is called "philology" and "linguistics" respectively, and then linked with "pre-science" and "science", the history of linguistics is somewhat simplified.

The term "pre-scientific period" belittles the achievements of ancient linguistics.

Huang Jingxin criticized in the article "On the Study of Language History" (1958): "First, from the historical facts, the study of ancient linguistics has developed surprisingly vigorously", "Second, judging the linguistics of various countries, especially that of China, according to this stage will inevitably produce a nihilistic attitude towards these linguistic achievements." According to this idea, there was no real linguistics in ancient China, and ancient literature in China was not a real language science.

This is not in line with historical facts.

For example, the phonology of ancient "primary schools" in China did not simply examine the physiology and physics of phonetics, but grasped the identity and opposition of phonetics from the aspects of social functions and mutual relations of phonetics, which was interlinked with modern phonetics and reached a very scientific level.

It cannot be regarded as unscientific or non-linguistic research.

The scientific level of ancient Indian linguistics is also amazing. In some places, even19th century European linguistics has not yet reached it.

The formulation of "pre-scientific period" and "scientific period" is based on the linguistic concepts of Europe19th century, which makes it easy to ignore the linguistic achievements outside Europe.

Modern linguists in China who accept this view often ignore the achievements of traditional linguistics in China when they emphasize the scientific spirit of modern western languages.

Song Zhenhua and Liu Ling criticized in On Language (1983): "In the study of language, some people divide the history of linguistics into two distinct periods: pre-scientific period and scientific period, which is actually unscientific." (Page 1)

The division of "pre-scientific period" and "scientific period" also limits the research field of modern language, ignoring and discarding some linguistic fields.

This concept itself is the product of a stage in the development of linguistics. It attaches importance to the internal structure of language itself and ignores the social function of language. Although it has positive significance in the history of linguistic development, ignoring another aspect of language essence is not conducive to the further development of language science.

In fact, since science is a sport and a historical concept, and there are different sciences in different periods, we can't use the science of future generations to deny the science of the previous generation.

To annotate ...

[1] Zhang Shilu went on to say in Principles of Linguistics: "In the past, the word' philology' originally came from the Greek word' philologos' and contained the meaning of' love of speculation', which can be summarized in any study on the spread of literary ideas to ancient times; Therefore, the terms' philology' and' philology' are easily confused, but for the current linguistics, the name and the reality are not commensurate and have to be abolished.

Linguistics, once translated into "Bo Yan Studies" by the Japanese, seems to have the meaning of learning various languages in the world, which is inconsistent with the original purpose of learning languages, so it was later corrected. "(2-3 pages)

[2] In the first chapter of A Course in General Linguistics, A Glance at the History of Linguistics, Saussure divided his previous western traditional linguistics into three stages: the first stage, the research period of "grammar" founded by the ancient Greeks, "this is a standardized discipline, far from pure observation, and its views are inevitably narrow." (page 1, translated by Pei Wen, Jiangsu Education Press, 200 1) The second issue of China Literature.

The third period is the period of "comparative grammar".

He Jiuying said in the History of Modern Linguistics in China: "Western modern linguistics is relative to the traditional grammar and historical comparison and prediction in19th century." (Introduction, 3 pages) Adhere to Saussure's point of view.

[3] See Cen Qixiang's Summary of Linguistic History, 4-5 pages.

Song Zhenhua and Liu Ling said in On Language: "There is a popular saying in the field of linguistics that linguistics came into being in the19th century, or that there is a real language science.

We might as well take the view of Chekhov in Soviet linguistics as the representative.

In his works in the early 1950s, he thought:' The science of language can be traced back to its origin, so far it is only 150 years'.

The history of linguistics can be divided into' pre-scientific' period and' scientific' period, in which it is written:' The whole history of language research can be divided into two periods, the significance and value of which are completely different: the first period is the pre-scientific period (from ancient times to19th century) and the second period is the scientific period (from19th century). "(Page 3)" The origin of this view can be traced back to the works of former grammarians, and later it was De Saussure who had a great influence. Chekhov is taken as an example here because his views have been widely spread in China since 1950s. In fact, the author's point of view inherits the theory of Saussure and others. " (3 pages)