What are the stages in the development of linguistics?

(I) Ancient Greek Linguistics

The study of language in written form can be traced back to Ancient Greece more than two thousand years ago. At that time, the study of language was carried out within the scope of philosophical research, belonging to a branch of philosophy. Around the fifth century B.C., the Greeks engaged in two famous debates on language. The first one was between the "naturalists" and the "conventionalists". It centered on the relationship between form and meaning in language. The "naturally occurring school" believed that the form of words reflected the nature of things, that is to say, the names of things were determined by the nature of the things themselves. They base their conclusion that language is naturally occurring on the use of onomatopoeia in language. The "Conventionalists" believe that the names of things are agreed upon by people in practice and are not necessarily related to the nature of things. There are very few onomatopoeic words in language, and even without them, language communication will not be affected. As a result, they argued that language was a product of convention. This polemic went on for a long time. Though nothing came of it, it promoted the study of etymology, generated interest in the categorization of the various relations of words, and may be said to have pioneered the study of grammar within the general framework of philosophy.

It is worth mentioning that Xun Zi (335-255 BC) at the end of the Warring States period had pointed out in his "The Book of Correcting Names" that "Names are not solidly appropriate, and appointments are made by order; conventions are said to be appropriate, and deviations from them are said to be inappropriate. The name is not solid, the appointment of the order, the agreement is called the real name." It can be seen, as early as the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period, our scholars hold similar views with the "convention school".

The second debate is closely related to the first. It was fought between the "change school" and the "analogical school". The debate centered on the question of whether grammatical structures are regular. According to the "variant school", since language is naturally occurring, it is also irregular, and many irregularities in language are used as the basis for their argument. On the other hand, the "analogy school" believes that the operation of the sun and the moon and the rotation of the seasons in the universe are regular, and that all things in the world are governed by laws, and language is no exception. Language is no exception. Although it has irregularities, it is generally regular. Since the Greek language has both regular and irregular elements, neither side of the polemic could convince the other. However, both sides contributed a great deal to the emergence of grammatical theory. The contribution of the "variantists" was that they identified the main grammatical categories; the contribution of the "analogists" was that they determined the main forms of inflectional change.

Early Greek scholars focused on the study of language in three main areas: etymology, phonology, and grammar. Of these, the most prominent achievements were made in grammar, which had a great influence on the development of traditional linguistics. The philosopher Plato (428-348 B.C.E.) took a neutral stance in the debate between the "naturalists" and the "conventionalists". He believed that some words directly reflect the nature of things, but that there are many words whose phonetic form has no discernible connection with their meaning. In analyzing the relationship between words and their meanings, he divided words into two categories: subject and declarative (roughly equivalent to nouns and verbs), and was the first scholar to classify words in the history of Western linguistics.

Plato's student Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a staunch De Conventionalist. He believed that language was conventional and that there were rules to follow. He built on Plato's dichotomy of word classes by grouping words that were neither subject nor declarative (roughly equivalent to what we would call conjunctions today) into a category of their own. He also noted such structural features as grammatical changes in nouns and tense changes in verbs, and defined words for the first time.

The Stoic School, a later "theory of change", further divided words into articles, nouns, verbs, and conjunctions on the basis of Aristotle's three categories of words. Later on, they divided nouns into proper nouns and common nouns. They also made a careful study of the tenses of verbs and the grammars of nouns, etc., and concluded that there are main grammars, object grammars, with grammars, all grammars and call grammars for nouns.

One of the greater contributors to traditional linguistics during the Ancient Greek period was Trachs of The Alexandrian School (c. first century BC). In his pamphlet of only 15 pages, entitled Skills of Reading and Writing, he divided words into eight categories: nouns, verbs, participles, articles, pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions. This pamphlet had such an impact on subsequent generations that for almost two thousand years thereafter, European grammarians continued to classify words into the eight categories when analyzing other languages, albeit using slightly different terminology.

Trachs's study of grammar centered on lexicography. The earliest comprehensive description and analysis of Greek syntax was by Diskeroux, who wrote in Alexandria in the second century AD. He started with the relationship between nouns and verbs, and then analyzed and depicted other word classes in relation to nouns and verbs. At the same time, the relationship between the verb and the noun or pronoun in terms of agreement in person and number, and the relationship of substitution of one type of word in place of another were also studied. His syntactic analysis and depiction laid the foundation for the later distinction between subject and object, between subject-subordinate structures, and so on.

(II) Ancient Roman Linguistics

From the third century BC to the second century BC, the dominance of Greece was gradually replaced by the Roman Empire. By the first century A.D., the rule of the Roman Empire had become quite firm. During the years when the Roman Empire ruled the world of Western civilization, the air was more active in the study of languages, and had become acquainted with the two famous great polemical battles of ancient Greece, and with the views of the Alexandrian and Stoic schools on the problem of languages and their results. Varro (116-27 B.C.) had given a detailed account and explanation of the views of the "Variants" and "Analogists", as well as an extensive analysis of Latin grammar. He divided the study of language into three major parts: etymology, morphology and syntax. In the history of Western linguistics it was he who first distinguished between derivational and flexion structures, and found that Latin nouns have a take-over case in addition to the five cases of Greek nouns.

Quintilian (35-95 A.D.) was a scholar who was more concerned with education, and who wrote on grammar. He believed that the correct use of language should be reasoned, should be modeled on authority, and should cite scripture. In the development of vocabulary, meaning is much more important than its form, so the choice of vocabulary should follow the basic principle of natural logic and analogy, i.e., it should be reasoned. To determine whether current usage is correct, one should turn to educated authorities to see if one can obtain their approval. If there is disagreement among scholars about a usage, one should look for evidence in the ancient classics. These propositions have undoubtedly had a great influence on later traditional linguists, especially in the formulation of grammatical rules, which always apply, consciously or unconsciously, when a usage is made rigid.

Of all the Latin grammarians, those who had a greater influence on later generations were Donatus (c. fourth century AD) and Priscian (c. fifth century AD). The 18-volume grammar by Priscian can be regarded as a masterpiece of Latin grammar. In this monumental work, Priscian utilized the theoretical systems and methods of Trachs and Apollonius to provide a more comprehensive analysis and portrayal of Latin grammar. He basically borrowed the grammatical system of the Greek scholars wholesale, only changing it to exclamations due to the absence of the coronal in Latin, and not even the derivational and reflexive structures distinguished by Varro were accepted by him. In general, the vast majority of Latin grammarians, like Priskian, focused on analyzing Latin grammar in the mode of Greek grammar and contributed little to grammatical theory. Their greatest contribution to linguistics was the establishment of Latin grammar.

Priscian's Latin grammar, though it had no unique insights, did much to spread traditional grammar. Latin grammar followed this pattern for centuries to come. During the Middle Ages, grammar books for other languages were produced, and by the mid-12th century there were already Hebrew grammars, Arabic grammars, and Old Irish grammars. By the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century, almost all European languages had their own grammars. But all these grammars were modeled on Greek or Latin grammars.

II. Historical Comparative Linguistics

(I) The Formation of Historical Comparative Linguistics

To discuss the achievements and development of Historical Comparative Linguistics, we must not neglect the important role of the study of the languages of ancient India in the comparative study of history. The study of languages in ancient India flourished and was productive as early as the fourth century BC. Banini's (ca. fourth century B.C.) Sanskrit grammar, the Book of Eight Chapters, is a masterpiece of this period, and its depth of discussion of the issues, its own systematic nature, and the conciseness of its presentation are incomparable to other grammar books. After Banini, the study of language in ancient India flourished, and more than a dozen schools of grammar emerged, although they were more or less marked by Banini's grammatical writings. There are two aspects of language study in ancient India that are beyond the reach of traditional Western linguistics: first, the study of phonological problems; and second, the study of the internal structure of words. Although it was not until the end of the 18th century that Western scholars began to have access to the linguistic research of ancient Indian scholars in large numbers, it was precisely because of the accurate and exhaustive portrayal of the phonology of Sanskrit by ancient Indian scholars that comparisons of Sanskrit with Latin, Greek, and other Germanic languages became possible.

Although the 19th century is recognized in linguistics as the period of historical comparative study of languages, as early as the 12th century, an unnamed scholar in Iceland conducted a comparative study of languages based on similarities in word forms to determine the relationship between Icelandic and English, and at the beginning of the 14th century, Dante's Treatise on the Vulgar Tongue, a work by the famous Italian poet Dante, was published. Although this is a work that discusses the issue of dialects, it also addresses the question of the origin of languages: different languages are the result of the same source language over time and the migration of speakers.Scaliger (1540-1609) in the 16th century and Leibniz (1646-1716) in the 17th century were both interested in the language were interested in the question of the origin of languages and attempted to classify languages into different language families. By the 18th century, there were already people collecting various linguistic materials that would help in comparative studies, such as the German Pallas's Comparative Vocabulary of the World's Languages.At the end of the 18th century, Western scholars began to come into contact with and master the ancient Indian language, Sanskrit. Through comparative studies, they found that Sanskrit and several major European languages had striking similarities in certain lexical levels and grammatical structures. Among these, the paper read by the English scholar Sir W. Jones (1746-1794) at the Asiatic Society in 1786 had the most significant impact. In this paper, he asserted, on the basis of similarities in verb roots and grammatical forms between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, that the three languages originated from the same primitive language. Thus a new page in the history of linguistics was officially opened.

(II) The Development of Historical Comparative Linguistics

The nineteenth century was the century of historical comparative linguistics. 1808, Schlegel (1772-1829) published a scholarly paper entitled "On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians". He emphasized the study of the internal structure of languages, pointed out that Sanskrit and Latin, Greek, Germanic languages had affinities in lexical and grammatical relations, and used the term "comparative grammar" for the first time. Among the scholars engaged in the comparative study of language history at the beginning of the 19th century, the most famous were Lasker (1787-1832) of Denmark and Grimm (1785-1863) and Pauper (1791-1867) of Germany. Lasker published a grammar book discussing Old Norse in 1811 and another on Old English in 1830. In these two books he used phonetic correspondences for the first time to compare etymological forms in different languages. The correspondences in the later "Grimm's Law" were in fact first proposed by Lasker and demonstrated with examples. Grimm's Grammar of the German Language (second edition), published in 1822, devoted a large portion of its discussion to the alphabet, describing the phonological correspondences between German and the other Indo-European languages. The phonetic correspondence he discovered is known as "Grimm's Law". The purpose of Pauper's linguistic research was to find out the original grammatical structure of languages. In his book Comparative Grammar, he declared that his purpose was to make comparative descriptions of the languages in question, and to explore the laws that governed them and the origins of their flexion and change. It was in the process of exploring the original grammatical structures that he discovered the principles of comparative grammar. It was in the process of exploring the structure of primitive grammars that he discovered the principles of comparative grammar, and it was thought that his discovery was comparable to Columbus' discovery of the New World.

Almost all the linguists of the mid-19th century used the comparative method to study language, and the most famous and influential of them was Schleicher (1821-1868). Among his many writings, the most important is the Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages. Published in 1861 and subsequently reprinted four times, it had a great influence on the development of historical comparative linguistics. Schleicher categorized languages into different language families according to their ****entity, and used genealogical tree diagrams to represent the historical origin and system of languages. Influenced by Darwin's theory of biological evolution, he believed that the life of language, like the life of plants and animals, has a period of growth and a period of aging, and that therefore the changes in speech occur in strict accordance with the laws, which are not essentially different from the laws of nature. The task of a linguist is to study the history of language development and the law of change of speech. In the Compendium of Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages, he devoted about one-third of his work to the study of speech. His influence of this view on the later school of young grammar is particularly obvious.

(C) Young Grammar School

The Young Grammar School arose at the end of the 19th century and dominated the linguistic world at that time. Its representatives include Rieschen (1840-1916), Osthoff (1847-1909), Brueggemann (1849-1919), Werner (1846-1896), Delbrück (1842-1922) and others. 1842-1922) and others. The Young Grammarians believed that there were no exceptions to the laws of phonological correspondence between languages, and that the so-called exceptions were due to the cross-application of different laws or to other factors. Werner published an article in 1875 devoted to the exceptions to Grimm's Law, arguing that they were in fact due to variations in stress. His law of phonetic variation became known as Werner's Law. The Young Grammarians also believed that phonological and morphological changes were due to the role of analogy. They emphasized the study of modern languages and their dialects. The views and research of the Young Grammarians contributed to the development of linguistic research methods and had a great influence on their contemporaries and later generations.

Third, modern linguistics

At the end of the 19th century in linguistics, most people thought that the study of language had reached its peak, and that the scientific method of language study was the historical-comparative method.

At the beginning of the 20th century, linguistics underwent a great turn and entered the period of modern linguistics.

(I) Saussure and Structuralist Linguistics

The Swiss linguist Saussure (1857-1913) is the founder of modern linguistics. Although Saussure rose to prominence in the world of linguistics through his major contributions to historical comparative linguistics, especially Indo-European comparative linguistics, it was his course on "General Linguistics" for students at the University of Geneva, which he organized from 1906 to 1911, that really gave him the title of "Father of Modern Linguistics. After his death in 1913, two of his colleagues compiled a monumental work, Linguistische Gesellschaft für Gesellschaft für Gesellschaft für Linguistische Gesellschaft (Lectures in General Linguistics), based on notes taken by his students and the lectures he had left behind, and it was published in 1916.

Saussure advocated a distinction between two different concepts, language and speech. He believed that language is an abstract system of grammatical rules and vocabulary, which is latent in people's consciousness, is a social product, and is not subordinate to a particular person. Speech is what is spoken or written, and therefore people who use the same language rarely have the same speech. Speech is the result of the organization of linguistic units by an individual through the application of grammatical rules, thus speech is a concrete manifestation of language, while language is an abstraction of speech. Although speech is directly accessible material, the object of linguistic study should be language.

He advocates a distinction between internal and external linguistics. Though he admits that factors such as the history of society and civilization have a great deal to do with the development of language, he argues that these factors do not touch the internal system of language. It is not at all necessary for internal linguistics, which studies the internal system of language, to know under what conditions language developed. Thus in his opinion, linguistics is a science that studies the internal system of language.

He advocated a distinction between the study of ****temporality and the study of ephemerality. Before him, people tended to study language by tracing the history of language vertically and explaining linguistic phenomena from a historical point of view, and some people even believed that only ephemeral research is scientific. Saussure believed that the ****temporal study of language, i.e., making a static depiction of language, was also a science, and was also superior to the ephemeral study, because for the speaking public, historical changes were seldom taken into account.

Saussure believed that linguistic symbols exist in two kinds of relations in constituting a system of relations, i.e., combinatorial and aggregative. The combinatorial relation is consistent with a linear ordering of linguistic components, while the aggregative relation is conditional on the selection of certain components of a linguistic item.

Saussure believed that language is a form rather than an entity, that is to say, language is a system of rules rather than a concrete material. The system of rules is relatively fixed, agreed upon, and is the object of linguistic study.

Saussure's contribution to modern linguistics also lies in the fact that he established the characteristics necessary for linguistics to be an independent discipline. He concludes his Course of General Linguistics by stating, "The only true object of linguistics is language and the study of language for language's sake." Although the latter part of this concluding remark is still controversial in the linguistic community, it defines the object of linguistic study and the corresponding method of study, and specifies the characteristics necessary for linguistics to be a discipline. Saussure made an indelible contribution to the development of linguistics at the time of ***, and the various doctrines and schools of thought that emerged later were directly or indirectly influenced by these views of his.

Four Contemporary Linguistics

(A) Chomsky and Transformational-Generative Linguistics

In the late 1950s of this century, the American linguist Chomsky's (1928- ) Syntactic Structures came out in the field of linguistics and set off a new revolution, which gave rise to a new school of thought---Transformational-Generative. A new school of thought has emerged as a result -- the Transformational Generative School. The transformational school was born on the soil of the American structuralist school, and grew up in the process of breaking with and challenging structuralism.

Chomsky believed that the study of language should be devoted to exploring the inherent linguistic capacity of human beings, and should not be satisfied with the observation and depiction of such superficial phenomena as speech acts. Whereas the structuralist study of language aims at a categorical depiction of language, for Chomsky the study of language aims at a formalized system of deduction, a finite set of grammatical rules. This set of rules is capable of both generating an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences and explaining the grammatical relations and semantic ambiguities within various sentences. Since the purposes of the study are different, the materials and methods of the study are very different.

The material for the structuralist study of language is a large number of randomly collected sentences. According to Chomsky, the randomly collected sentences are very limited, while the number of sentences is infinite, and it is impossible for people to collect all the sentences completely, so the study of language should not be about people's speech behavior, but about people's inherent linguistic ability, because it is the linguistic ability that enables people to constantly produce and understand new sentences. In terms of research methodology, structuralism involves collecting linguistic material, then analyzing the material and identifying rules through a set of discovery procedures, and finally using the resulting rules to explain linguistic phenomena. According to Chomsky, since linguistic material cannot be collected completely, the rules discovered from sporadic linguistic material must be incomplete and cannot explain all linguistic phenomena. Therefore, the method of linguistic research should be the same as that used in the natural sciences, i.e., to make hypotheses based on observations, then to test or prove the hypotheses in practice, and to modify the hypotheses in response to the actual situation. This is repeated many times until the sentence structure can be correctly interpreted.

On the issue of language acquisition in children, structuralism accepts the philosophical view of the English philosopher Locke's (1632-1704) "tabula rasa". Locke believed that the primitive state of the human mind was a tabula rasa, and that all knowledge and ideas were acquired later from experience. As a result, the structuralists believed that a child's language was acquired by repeated imitation and memorization, making it a habit. Chomsky believed that the "blank slate" view could hardly explain two phenomena: firstly, why animals could not master language after repeated training; secondly, no matter how many sentences for the child to imitate, but after all, they are limited, so how could the child be able to comprehend and produce an infinite number of sentences that had never been heard before. Chomsky favors the 17th century French philosopher Descartes' (1596-1650) idea of "innate conception", and therefore believes that there is an innate "language acquisition mechanism" in the human brain, which is triggered by a specific language environment. He therefore believed that there is a "language acquisition mechanism" in the human brain, and that once this mechanism is triggered by a particular language environment, children are naturally able to acquire a language.

Chomsky also believed that structuralism only cuts and describes the surface of language structure, so they cannot explain why sentences with the same structure have very different meanings and other linguistic phenomena. The study of language should pay attention not only to the surface structure, but also to its deep structure.

Chomsky, in the process of developing his own theory of language, advocated the distinction between linguistic ability and speech acts. And tried to account for the linguistic capacity of man, tried to use the study of language to account for mental activity, and therefore, he believed that linguistics should be a branch of psychology.

Transformational generative linguistics has been modified many times during its development, and has gone through four stages: early theory, standard theory, expanded standard theory, and modified expanded standard theory. The linguistic theoretical model of the most recent stage consists of three main parts: syntactic, phonological and semantic. The syntactic part consists of the base part, the transformational part and the lattice part. The base part generates the deep structure, then the transformational part generates the shallow structure, and then the lattice part becomes the shallow structure with lattice markers. The shallow structure with lattice markers can be expressed phonetically through the phonological part and semantically through the semantic part.