FIGURE

LINGUISTICS ON
20TH CENTURY
Dita Amelia Wahda Nurazizah
Julyesvicka Gita Darmahatari
Vrizka Nuria Arsita
Ferdinand de Saussure
Birthdate: November 26, 1857
Birthplace: Geneva, Switzerland
Died: February 22, 1913
Known as the father of linguistics,

Ferdinand de Saussure laid down the

concept of semiotics. He distinguished
between parole and langue, leading later
thinkers to explore structuralism. His
only book was his dissertation on vowels
in Indo-European languages, with the
rest being collections of his lectures.
 Ferdinand de Saussure
A Swiss linguist who lived in the 19th century. He had the vision to see a larger role
for linguistics. Despite he became known as the " father of Modern Linguistics", he
never published a major book in linguistics
After his death, his students collected together his lecture notes and published
them with the title " Course de Linguistique generale". The published book was
influential in linguistics.
Saussure was interested in Structural Linguistics. He likened language to a game of
chess where each piece is defined according to its own situation on the board and
its relationship with the other pieces. Saussure discussed the theory of semantic
space.
For example: English has two words ( sheep – mutton) , one for the living animal
and the other is for the cooked object. In French, there is only one word to refer to
both items. This means that the French word occupies more semantic space than
the English word and consequently it has a larger meaning. If English didn't have
the word sheep, possibly the word mutton will expand in meaning to cover the gap.
 Saussure was sure that words:
- keep circulating continuously.
- Define themselves against each other.
- Adjust their value.
Saussure's Concept:
Saussure treated words as signs. Signs have no natural relationship to the things
they represent. The word dog has no intrinsic connection with the animal it refers
to. Any other word could do the same, so the relationship is essentially arbitrary.
This idea became known as Saussure's Principle of Arbitrariness. Later , it
became a basic idea of modern linguistics. It is one of the properties that
distinguishes human language from animals' communication systems.
Saussure's methodology is based upon the binary model of language. His
methodology involves working with two term oppositions. Saussure dealt with
language as a self-enclosed system. " Words are related to each other as signs
and can be strung together in various combinations to form sentences."
 Saussure's Methodology
Saussure imagined sentences as having two axes on which items could be stored in
these ways. The axes of substitution which he termed as paradigmatic and the axis
of combination which he termed syntagmatic.
The other terms that Saussure dealt with are:
Langue/Parole
Langue: (French, meaning "language") and parole (meaning "speech") are linguistic
terms used by Ferdinand de Saussure. Langue describes the social, impersonal
phenomenon of language as a system of signs, while parole describes the individual,
personal phenomenon of language as a series of speech acts made by a linguistic
subject.
Sign- Signifier- Signified
Saussure dealt with the these terms in his study of language to refer to the
combination of a linguistic form with its meaning or function. Saussure argued that
words (signs) comprise two elements: a sound image ( phonetic aspect-
pronunciation form- signifier), and a meaning ( signified)
 Structuralism
It is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for
instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics
with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure ( ), but many French intellectuals perceived it to
have a wider application, and the model was soon modified and applied to other fields,
such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, literary theory and
architecture.
Key notions in structural linguistics are the notions of paradigm, syntagm and value,
though these notions were not yet fully developed in Saussure's thought.
The essence of the approach of Ferdinand de Saussure may be illustrated by the
following scheme:
Psychology: as to the number of its subjects, Saussure applies linguistics.
The social psychology: According to Saussure, linguistics belongs to the jurisdiction of
social psychology minus means insignificant or less significant for rigorous analysis.
Contrasting semi logy: the science of signs: included as part of the disciplines of social
psychology.
John Rupert Firth

Birthdate: June 17, 1890

Birthplace: Keighley, England
Died: December 14, 1960
Commonly known as J.R. FIRTH
An English linguist and a leading figure
in British linguistics during the 1950s
 He was professor of English at the University of The Punjab (1919-1928)
He then worked in the Phonetics Department of University College London
He was moving to the school of Oriental and African studies
Where he became Professor of General Linguistics, a position he held until
his retirement in 1956
Prosody which is emphasised at the expense of the phonemic principle,
prefigured later work in autosegmental phonology
Firth is noted for drawing attention to the context-dependent nature of
meaning with his notion of 'context of situation' and his work on
collocational meaning is widely acknowledged in the field of distributional
semantics
In particular, he is known for the famous quotation "You shall know a word
by the company it keeps" (Firth, J.R. 1957:11)
 Firth, British linguist specializing in contextual theories of
meaning and prosodic analysis. He was the originator of
the "London school of linguistics."

Firth views that meaning and context in an utterance should be the main goal of
linguistic learning. He disagreed with Leonard Bloomfield, an American linguist, who
ruled out meaning in linguistic perfomance. Firth also disagrees with saussure's
dichotomous concept of langue & parole. In fact, his ideas contradict the
competence and perfomance of language popularized by Chomsky.

Based on the book Key Thinkers in linguistic and The Philosophy of language
(2005), Firth's attention to linguistics can be categorized into four focuses, namely
(1) the study of meaning and context; (2) the history of linguistics, particularly in
British territories; (3) Phonology; (4) Decriptive linguistics and an encyclopedia of
languages in India and South Asia.
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday
 Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday/M. A. K. Halliday
Born : April 13, 1925. Leeds, England
Died : April 15, 2018 (aged 93). Australia
Subjects Of Study : Linguistics.

He is a British linguist, teacher, and proponent of neo-Firthian theory who

viewed language basically as a social phenomenon.
He obtained a B.A. in Chinese language and literature from the University of
London
He did postgraduate work in linguistics, first at Peking University and later at
the University of Cambridge, from which he obtained a Ph.D. in 1955.
He did work on intonation (Intonation and Grammar in British English, 1967)
He also did work on discourse analysis (Cohesion in English, 1976).
His another theory is Systemic Linguistics.

 Fundamental Categories
Halliday's first major work on grammar was "Categories of the theory of grammar", in the
journal Word in 1961. In this paper, he argued for four "fundamental categories" in grammar:
unit, structure, class, and system. These categories are "of the highest order of abstraction", but
he defended them as necessary to "make possible a coherent account of what grammar is and
of its place in language". In the articulating unit, Halliday proposed the notion of a rank scale.
Systemic Functional Linguistics was introduced by M.A.K Halliday in 1960s in England;
SFL is an approach linguistic that aims to understand how a text forms its meaning in a
context.
Text refers to all linguistic phenomena, in any medium, that can be understood by people
who know the language used by the text.
To aid its analysis, SFL divides the contexts in which language appears into two types;
1). The context of the situation refers to three things in an act of language: who is involved, what
situation is happening, and what function does language have in that situation.
2). Cultural context in LSF refers to anything that members of a particular culture can use or do
to make meaning, for example through gestures, vocal qualities, facial expressions, etc.
Systemic Linguistics is an approach to linguistics that considers language as a social semiotic
system (Halliday, 1978).
Systemic Functional Linguistics describes the syntactic elements of language. It
consists of;
1). Meaning; Experiential, Interpersonal, Textual.
2). Context; Field, Tenor, Mode.
3). Choice.
Leonard Bloomfield
Born : Chicago 1 april 1887
Notable Works: "Language”
Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) an American
linguist, before adopting the behaviorism of
Watson and weiss, was a mentalist compatible
with the psychological theory of wundt. Then he
challenged mentalism and follow behaviorism. It
is called the Bloomfield stream because it starts
with Bloomfield's idea is called the taxonomic
stream because it analyzes and classifies
language elements based on its hierarchical
relationships.
According to Bloomfield,
language is a collection of
utterances that appear in a
speech community, this
utterance must be studied to
find out its parts. then, for
Bloomfield language is a
collection of data that may
appear in a society. This data is
a teaching that consists of
pieces of behavior arranged in
a linear fashion.
According to Bloomfield,
language consists of signs
in the form of vocal
elements (sounds) called
linguistic forms. Each
form is a sign unit formed
by phonemes.
example :
play is an utterance
playful is an utterance
but suffix 'ful' is not an
uterrance
the phoneme of this is : /p/
/l/ /ei/
From the example above,
it can be seen that every
utterance is a form, but
not all forms are In Bloomfield's linguistic theory
utterances. According to there are several terms that
Bloomfield there are two need to be known, namely the
kinds of forms, that are: following:
free and bound phonemes, morphemes, words,
morpheme
phrases, and sentences.
Noam Chomsky

Name : Avram Noam Chomsky

born : Pennsylvania, 7 December 1928

Chomsky is an American linguist. He was

called the pioneer of the transformation in
the modern linguistic era and the main works
that brought Noam Chomsky to a level known
to people were Syntactic Structure (1957) and
Aspects of Theory of Syntax (1965).

In the world of linguistics he is the
originator of a transformative-
generative theory that criticizes
the linguistic theory of Ferdinand
De Saussure (1857-1913) and
Leonard Bloomfield (1877-1950).
rmative-generative teory
Transfo
1. language acquisition
2. deep structure and surface structure
3. competence and performance
THA NK
YOU