MGA SANGAY NG

LINGGUWISTIKA
 SINKRONIKONG LINGGUWISTIKA (SYNCHRONIZED
LINGUISTICS)

INILALARAWAN NITO ANG AKTWAL NA GAMIT AT

BALANGKAS NG WIKA SA ISANG TIYAK NA
PANAHON. DITO PINAG-AARALAN ANG
PONOLOHIYA(PAG-AARAL NG MGA TUNOG NG ISANG
WIKA), MORPOLOHIYA (PAG-AARAL NG MGA
MORPEMA) AT SINTAKS ( PAG-AARAL NG UGNAYAN
NG MGA SALITA UPANG MAKABUO NG
PANGUNGUSAP).
 DIYAKRONIKONG LINGGUWISTIKA
(DIACHRONIC LINGUISTICS)

DITO GUMAGAWA NG PAG-AARAL SA MGA

PAGBABAGO NG WIKA. KILALA RIN ITO
SA TAWAG NA HISTORIKAL NA
LINGGUWISTIKA DAHIL PINAG-AARALAN
DITTO ANG PINAGMULAN AT EBOLUSYON
NG WIKA.
SOSYOLINGGUWISTIKA

ITO ANG SANGAY NG LINGGUWISTIKA NA

NAG-AARAL SA SOSYAL NA ASPETO NG
WIKA. INAALAM DITO AT SINUSURI ANG
UGNAYAN NG TAO, WIKA AT LIPUNAN.
A P P LIED L ING UIST I CS

A NG T EOR YA SA “ A P PL IED”NA L INGGUWISTIK A AY NA GL AYONG M A SOL USYONAN A NG

M G A P R OBLEM ANG H I NA H A HAR AP NG AT I NG M UNDO L A LO ’ T H I G I T SA L A R A NG NG
W IK A NA G INA G A MI T SA EDUK A SY O N . H A L I MB AWA , A NG L I NG G UW I ST I K A AY
M A A R ING IL A PAT A NG K A NI L A NG K A A L AM AN NG M G A B ATA AT M ATATANDA SA
DESENY O A NG EP EK T IB ONG M G A H A K B ANG IN UPA NG SUB UK I N A NG P R O G RES O NG
M G A M A G A ARAL . A NG M G A ED U K A D OR AY M A A R ING G A M I T I N A NG K A NI L A NG M G A
NAT UT UH A N UPA NG M A K A SIGURADO NA A NG K A NIL A NG SIL ID AY H INIH A NDA A NG
M G A M A G - A AR AL SA L A H AT NG UR I K A NI L A NG K I NA B I BI L ANG AN .

( A P P LIED L ING UI ST I CS USES L I NG UI ST I C T H EO R Y T O SO LVE R EA L - WORLD P R O BL EMS,

M OST OFT EN IN T H E FI EL D O F L A NG UA GE EDUCAT I O N. FO R EX A M PLE, L I NG UI ST S CA N
A P P LY W H AT T H EY K NO W A B O UT H O W CH I L DR EN A ND A DULT S L EA R N L A NG UA G ES T O
DESI G N EDUCAT IONAL M ATERIALS A ND L ESSONS FOR TEA CH ING SECOND L A N GUA GES
A ND T O DESIG N EFFECT I VE M ET H O DS O F T EST I NG ST UDENT P R O G RESS. EDU CAT O R S
CA N USE W H AT T H EY K NO W A B O UT H O W P EO P LE A CT UA L LY USE L A NG UA G E T O M A K E
SUR E T H EIR CL A SSES P R EPARE ST UDENT S FO R T H E K I NDS O F EX CH A NGES T H EY A R E
M OST L IK ELY T O ENCO UNT ER . )
SOCIOL ING UIST ICS

A NG SOSY OL I NG GUWISTIK A AY URI NG L INGGUWISTIK A AY M A L A PIT SA

SOSY OLOH IYA , A NG PA G - A ARA L NG L I P I
NG M G A TA O . A NG SO SY O L I NG GUW IST I K A AY SUM I SI YA SAT K UNG PA A NO NG A NG
W IK A AY UM IIR A L SA
P OP UL ASY ON SA PA R EHO NG PA G PAPAK AHUL UGAN NG K UNG SA EP EK T O NG W I K A AT
K UNG PA A NO NG A NG
P OP UL ASY ON AY NA K A K A APEK TO SA WIK A . ITO R I N AY PA G - A ARAL K UNG PA A NONG
A NG IY ONG PA NA HO N AT
L UG A R NA P INA G M UL AN AT A NG SA M A H ANG PA NL I PUNA N NA I Y O NG K I NA B I B IL ANGAN
AY NA G IG ING SA L I K SA
M G A SA L ITA NA I Y O NG G I NA G A MI T AT K UNG PA A NO M O SI L A B I NI B I G K AS .

(SOCI OL I NG UI STICS IS A K IND OF L INGUISTICS CLOSELY TIED TO SOCIO LOGY, TH E

ST UDY OF G R OUP S O F P EO P LE.
SOCIOL ING UIST S I NVEST I G AT E H O W L A NG UA GES FUNCT I O N W I T H I N P O P UL AT IO NS I N
T ER M S OF BOT H H O W
L A NG UA G E A FFECT S T H E P O P UL AT I ON A ND H O W T H E P O P UL AT I ON A FFECT S T H E
L A NG UA G E. SOCIOL INGUISTS
ST UDY H OW Y OUR T I M E A ND P L A CE O F O R I G I N A ND T H E SO CI A L G R O UP S T O W H I CH
Y OU BELONG A FFECT T H E
W OR DS Y OU USE A ND H O W Y O U P R O NO UNCE T H EM . )
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

A N G “ P S Y C H O L I N G U I S T I C S ” AY M A L A P I T N A N A K A B I G K I S S A A G H A M N G “ C O G N I T I V E ” , A N G P A G -
AARAL NG
U G N AYA N N G W I K A AT N G P A G - I I S I P. M A A R I N G M U K H A N G P I S I K A L N A A S P E K T O K U N G P A A N O N G A N G
MGA
W I K A AT S Y N TA X AY N A N AT I L I AT K U N G P A A N O N G AT B A K I T I Y O N T I N A W A G N A G A N O O N . A N G M G A
“ P S Y C H O L I N G U I S T S ” AY T I N I T I G N A N A N G M G A K O N S E P T O S A P A G - A A R A L N G L I N G G U W I S T I K A . S A
KANILANG
P A G - A A R A L , B I N I B I G YA N D I N N I L A N G P A N S I N A N G M G A M AY K I N A L A M A N K U N G P A A N O N G A N G I S I P
AY
N A B AT I D A N G B A L A R I L A , K U N G P A A N O N G A N G W I K A AT M G A I N I I S I P AY M A G K A U G N AY, K U N G
PA ANONG ANG
W I K A AY B U M U B U O N G M G A K O N S E P T O N G P A N G - G R U P O AT K U N G P A A N O A N G M G A “ M E TA P H O R S ” AY
NAKAKAAPEKTO SA KARUNUNGAN.

( P S Y C H O L I N G U I S T I C S , C L O S E LY T I E D T O C O G N I T I V E S C I E N C E , S T U D I E S T H E R E L AT I O N S H I P B E T W E E N
LANGUAGE
AND THE MIND. PSYCHOLINGUISTS ARE INTERESTED IN HOW THE MIND ACQ UIRES AND PROCESSES
LANGUAGE.
T H E Y L O O K AT B O T H P H Y S I C A L A S P E C T S O F H O W W O R D S A N D S Y N TA X A R E S T O R E D A N D H O W A N D
WHY THEY
A R E C A L L E D U P O N . P S Y C H O L I N G U I S T S A L S O L O O K AT T H E C O N C E P T U A L S T U D Y O F L I N G U I S T I C S .
WITHIN THEIR
S T U D Y, T H E Y A L S O L O O K AT T O P I C S L I K E H O W T H E M I N D A C Q U I R E S G R A M M A R , H O W L A N G U A G E A N D
THOUGHT
A R E R E L AT E D , H O W L A N G U A G E C R E AT E S C O N C E P T U A L G R O U P S A N D H O W M E TA P H O R S A F F E C T
U N D E R S TA N D I N G . )
C O M P U TAT I O N A L L I N G U I S T I C S

A N G “ C O M P U TAT I O N A L “ N A L I N G G U W I S T I K A AY G U M A G A M I T N G M G A “ C O M P U T E R S ” U P A N G B U M U O
NG
M O D E L O N G M G A W I K A . A N G M G A M O D E L O N A I T O AY M A A R I N G G A M I T I N U P A N G I P A L I W A N A G A N G
MGA
M A H I H I R A P N A G A B AY S A I S T R U K T U R A N G W I K A . A N G M G A M O D E L O AY G I N A G A M I T D I N N A N G M A S
M A L A L I M A N S A I N D U S T R I YA N G “ C O M P U T E R ” U P A N G M A S M A I N G AT K U N G P A A N O TAY O
N A K I K I P A G D A U P A N G P A L A D S A T E K N O L O H I YA S A M A S M A K A B U L U H A N G P A G T U T U R O N G “ C O M P U T E R ”
N G M G A W I K A N G TA O .
H I N A H AYA A N N I T O N A M A G B A S A AT S U M A G O T S A A N U M A N G U R I S A P A R A A N G AT I N G T I N AT Y P E AT
MARINIG
TAY O K A P A G TAY O ’ Y N A G S A S A L I TA AT S U M A G O T.

A N G L I N G G U W I S T I K A N G “ C O M P U TAT I O N A L ” AY I S A N G P W E R S A S A L I K O D N G M G A “ S E A R C H E N G I N E S ” ,
“ V O I C E R E C O G N I T I O N ” , “ T E X T- T O - S P E E C H ” AT M G A A R T I P I S YA L N A K A R U N U N G A N .

( C O M P U TAT I O N A L L I N G U I S T I C S U S E S C O M P U T E R S T O B U I L D M O D E L S O F L A N G U A G E S . T H E S E M O D E L S
CAN BE
U S E D T O E X P L A I N S U B T L E P AT T E R N S I N A L A N G U A G E ' S S T R U C T U R E . T H E M O D E L S A R E A L S O U S E D
E X T E N S I V E LY I N
T H E C O M P U T E R I N D U S T R Y T O I M P R O V E H O W W E I N T E R A C T W I T H T E C H N O L O G Y B Y E S S E N T I A L LY
TEACHING
C O M P U T E R S H U M A N L A N G U A G E S . T H I S A L L O W S T H E M T O R E A D A N D R E P LY T O W H AT W E T Y P E A N D T O
HEAR US
W H E N W E S P E A K A N D T O S P E A K B A C K . C O M P U TAT I O N A L L I N G U I S T I C S I S A D R I V I N G F O R C E B E H I N D
SEARCH
E N G I N E S , V O I C E R E C O G N I T I O N , T E X T- T O - S P E E C H A N D A R T I F I C I A L I N T E L L I G E N C E . )
HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

A N G L I N G G U W I S T I K A N G P A N G K A S AY S AYA N AY P A G - A A R A L N G K A S AY S AYA N N G I S A N G E S P E S I P I K O N G W I K A AT
A N G P A N G U N A H I N G K AT A N G I A N N G P A G B A B A G O S A W I K A . A N G P A G - A A R A L N G P A G B A B A G O S A W I K A AY
MAIHAHALINTUL AD SA “DIACHRONIC LINGUISTICS” ( ANG PAG-A ARAL KUNG PA ANONG ANG ISANG PARTIKUL AR
NA
W I K A AY N A G B A B A G O S A P A G L I P A S N G P A N A H O N ) , N A M A I P A G K A K A I B A S A “ S Y R O N I C L I N G U I S T I C S ” ( I S A N G
P A G - A A R A L N A “ C O M P A R AT I V E ” S A M A S H I G I T S A I S A N G W I K A S A I S A N G B I N I G AY N A P A N A H O N N A W A L A N G
K A U G N AYA N S A M G A N A K A L I P A S N A P A N A H O N . )

A N G P A N G K A S AY S AYA N G L I N G G U W I S T I K A AY K A S A M I S A M G A U N A N G S U M A S A I L A L I M S A L I N G G U W I S T I K A AT
I S A S A M G A L A G A N A P N A D E S I P L I N A N A U R I N G L I N G G U W I S T I K A N O O N G H U L I N G M G A TA O N N G I K A - 1 9 N A
S I G L O . S U B A L I T M AY R O O N G P A G B A B A G O S A “ S Y N C H R O N I C ” N A AT A K E N O O N G B A N D A N G I K A - 2 0 S I G L O K AY
S A U S S U R E N A N A G I N G M A S L A G A N A P S A K A N L U R A N G L I N G G U S T I K A S A M G A G A W A N I N O A M C H O M S K Y.

(HISTORICAL LINGUISTS STUDY THE HISTORY OF SPECIFIC LANGUAGES AS WELL AS GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
OF
LANGUAGE CHANGE. THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE CHANGE IS ALSO REFERRED T O AS "DIACHRONIC LINGUISTICS"
(THE
STUDY OF HOW ONE PARTICUL AR L ANGUAGE HAS CHANGED OVER TIME), WHI CH CAN BE DISTINGUISHED FROM
" S Y N C H R O N I C L I N G U I S T I C S " ( T H E C O M P A R AT I V E S T U D Y O F M O R E T H A N O N E L A N G U A G E AT A G I V E N M O M E N T I N
T I M E W I T H O U T R E G A R D T O P R E V I O U S S TA G E S ) . H I S T O R I C A L L I N G U I S T I C S W A S A M O N G T H E F I R S T S U B -
DISCIPLINES
T O E M E R G E I N L I N G U I S T I C S , A N D W A S T H E M O S T W I D E LY P R A C T I S E D F O R M O F L I N G U I S T I C S I N T H E L AT E 1 9 T H
C E N T U R Y. H O W E V E R , T H E R E W A S A S H I F T T O T H E S Y N C H R O N I C A P P R O A C H I N T H E E A R LY T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y
WITH SAUSSURE, AND BECAME MORE PREDOMINANT IN WESTERN LINGUISTIC S WITH THE WORK OF NOAM
C H O M S K Y. )
ECOLINGUISTICS

A N G “ E C O L I N G U S T I C S ” AY T U M ATA L A K AY S A G A M P A N I N N G W I K A S A P A G P A PA N AT I L I N G
I N T E R A K S Y O N N G TA O
AT N G I B A P A N G M AY B U H AY AT S A P I S I K A L N A K A L I K A S A N . A N G U N A N G L AY U N I N N I T O AY M A D E B E L O P
ANG
M G A T E O R YA N G L I N G G U W I S T I K A K U N G S A A N A N G M G A TA O AY H I N D I L A N G B I L A N G B A H A G I N G
LIPUNAN
BAGKUS ISANG BAHAGI RIN NG MAS MAL AKING SIKLO NG “EXOSYSTEM” NA DINEDEPENDAHAN NG
WIKA. ANG
P A N G A L A W A AY N A G L A L AY O N AY N A G P A P A K I TA K U N G P A A N O N G A N G L I N G G U W I S T I K A AY M A A R I N G
GAMITIN
U P A N G M A B I G YA N G P A N S I N A N G I S Y U N G “ E C O L O G I C A L ” , M U L A S A P A G B A B A G O S A K L I M A AT
“ B I O D E R V E R S I T Y ” AY N ATATA L O S A H U S T I S YA N G P A N G K ATA R U N G A N .

( E C O L I N G U I S T I C S E X P L O R E S T H E R O L E O F L A N G U A G E I N T H E L I F E - S U S TA I N I N G I N T E R A C T I O N S O F
HUMANS, OTHER
S P E C I E S A N D T H E P H Y S I C A L E N V I R O N M E N T. T H E F I R S T A I M I S T O D E V E L O P L I N G U I S T I C T H E O R I E S
WHICH SEE
H U M A N S N O T O N LY A S P A R T O F S O C I E T Y, B U T A L S O A S P A R T O F T H E L A R G E R E C O S Y S T E M S T H AT L I F E
DEPENDS ON.
THE SECOND AIM IS TO SHOW HOW LINGUISTICS CAN BE USED TO ADDRESS KEY ECOLOGICAL ISSUES,
FROM
C L I M AT E C H A N G E A N D B I O D I V E R S I T Y L O S S T O E N V I R O N M E N TA L .
Submit

COMPARATIVE LINGGUISTICS

• Comparative linguistics, formerly Comparative Grammar, or Comparative Philology, study of the relationships or correspondences
between two or more languages and the techniques used to discover whether the languages have a common ancestor. Comparative
grammar was the most important branch of linguistics in the 19th century in Europe. Also called comparative philology, the study was
originally stimulated by the discovery by Sir William Jones in 1786 that Sanskrit was related to Latin, Greek, and German.

• An assumption important to the comparative method is the Neogrammarian principle that the laws governing sound change are regular
and have no exceptions that cannot be accounted for by some other regular phenomenon of language. As an example of the method,
English is seen to be related to Italian if a number of words that have the same meaning and that have not been borrowed are
compared: piede and “foot,” padre and “father,” pesce and “fish.” The initial sounds, although different, correspond regularly according to
the pattern discovered by Jacob Grimm and named Grimm’s law (q.v.) after him; the other differences can be explained by other
regular sound changes. Because regular correspondences between English and Italian are far too numerous to be coincidental, it
becomes apparent that English and Italian stem from the same parent language. The comparative method was developed and used
successfully in the 19th century to reconstruct this parent language, Proto-Indo-European, and has since been applied to the study of
other language families.
D E V E L O P M E N TA L L I N G U I S T I C S

A N G L I N G G U W I S T I K A N G “ D E V E L O P M E TA L ” AY P A G - A A R A L N G P A G B A B A N Y U H AY N G L I N G G U W I S TA S A
B A W AT
I N D I B I D W A L P A R T I K U L A R K A U G N AYA N N G W I K A N O O N G P A N A H O N N G K A B ATA A N . A N G I L A N S A M G A
TA N O N G
N G T I N I T I G N A N N G M G A L I N G G U W I S TA AY K U N G P A A N O N G N AT U T U T O A N G M G A B A W AT N G I B A ’ T
IBANG WIKA,
K U N G P A A N O N G A N G M G A M ATATA N D A AY N AT U T O N G G U M A M I T N G I K A L A W A N G W I K A AT A N G
PROSESO NG
P A G K AT U T O S A W I K A .

( D E V E L O P M E N TA L L I N G U I S T I C S I S T H E S T U D Y O F T H E D E V E L O P M E N T O F L I N G U I S T I C A B I L I T Y I N
INDIVIDUALS,
P A R T I C U L A R LY T H E A C Q U I S I T I O N O F L A N G U A G E I N C H I L D H O O D . S O M E O F T H E Q U E S T I O N S T H AT
D E V E L O P M E N TA L
L I N G U I S T I C S L O O K S I N T O I S H O W C H I L D R E N A C Q U I R E D I F F E R E N T L A N G U A G E S , H O W A D U LT S C A N
ACQUIRE A
S E C O N D L A N G U A G E , A N D W H AT T H E P R O C E S S O F L A N G U A G E A C Q U I S I T I O N I S . )
NEUROLINGUISTICS

A N G N E O R O L I N G U I S T I C S AY P A G - A A R A L N G E S T R U K T U R A S A U T A K N G T A O AT K U N G P A A N O N G U M I I R A L S A
B A L A R I L A AT P A K I K I P A G K O M U N I K A S Y O N . A N G M G A M A N A N A L I K S I K AY N A S A I B A ’ T I B A N G L A R A N G N G
I M P O R M A S Y O N , K U N G S A A N N A G B U B U N S O D N G B A R AY T I N G M G A E S T I L O N G E K P E R E M E N T A L AT N G M A S
M A G PA PA L AWA K N G M G A P E R S P E K T I B O N G E KS P E R I M E N TA L . A N G M A L A K I N G G I N A G A M PA N A N S A
N E O R O L I N G U I S T I K S AY M AY K I N A L A M A N S A M O D E L O S A “ P S Y C H O L I N G U I S T I C S ” AT “ T H E O R E T I C A L L I N G U I S T I C S ”
AT N A K AT U O N S A P A G - A A R A L K U N G P A A N O N G A N G U T A K AY K AYA N G M A G S A B I N G P R O S E S O N A T H E O R E T I C A L AT

P S Y C H O L I N G U S I T I C S N A M A S A S A B I N G M A H A L A G A N G P A G B I G AY AT P A G T U O N S A W I K A . A N G N E O R O L O G U I S T S
AY P I N A G - A A R A L A N A N G M E K A N I S M O N G P H Y S I O L O G I C A L K U N G S A A N A N G U T A K AY N A G P O P R O S E S O N G M G A
I M P O R M A S Y O N N A M AY K I N A L A M A N S A W I K A AT K U N G P A A N O S I N U S U R I A N G L I N G G U W I S T I K A AT T E O R YA N G
P S Y C H O L I N G U I S T I C G A M I T A N G A P H A S I O L O G Y, P A G L A L A R A W A N N G U T A K , E L E C T R O P H Y S I O L O G Y AT M O D E L O N G
C O M P U T E R . S A M G A N A B A N G G I T N A E S T R U K T U R A N G U T A K AY M AY K I N A L A M A N S A M E K A N I S M O N G
N E O R O L I N G U I S T I C S , N G C E R E B E L L U M N A N A G T AT A M O N G P I N A K A M A R A M I N G N E O R O N S N A M AY R O O N G
M A B I G AT N A G A M P A N I N S A “ P R E D I C T I O N S R E Q U I R E D ” S A P R O D U S K Y O N N G W I K A .

( N E U R O L I N G U I S T I C S I S T H E S T U D Y O F T H E S T R U C T U R E S I N T H E H U M A N B R A I N T H AT U N D E R L I E G R A M M A R A N D
C O M M U N I C AT I O N . R E S E A R C H E R S A R E D R A W N T O T H E F I E L D F R O M A V A R I E T Y O F B A C K G R O U N D S , B R I N G I N G
A L O N G A V A R I E T Y O F E X P E R I M E N T A L T E C H N I Q U E S A S W E L L A S W I D E LY V A R Y I N G T H E O R E T I C A L P E R S P E C T I V E S .
MUCH WORK IN NEUROLINGUISTICS IS INFORMED BY MODELS IN PSYCHOLIN GUISTICS AND THEORETICAL
L I N G U I S T I C S , A N D I S F O C U S E D O N I N V E S T I G AT I N G H O W T H E B R A I N C A N I M P L E M E N T T H E P R O C E S S E S T H AT
THEORETICAL AND PSYCHOLINGUISTICS PROPOSE ARE NECESSARY IN PRODU CING AND COMPREHENDING
L ANGUAGE. NEUROLINGUISTS STUDY THE PHYSIOLOGICAL MECHANISMS BY WHICH THE BRAIN PROCESSES
I N F O R M AT I O N R E L AT E D T O L A N G U A G E , A N D E V A L U AT E L I N G U I S T I C A N D P S Y C H O L I N G U I S T I C T H E O R I E S , U S I N G
A P H A S I O L O G Y, B R A I N I M A G I N G , E L E C T R O P H Y S I O L O G Y, A N D C O M P U T E R M O D E L L I N G . A M O N G S T T H E S T R U C T U R E S
O F T H E B R A I N I N V O LV E D I N T H E M E C H A N I S M S O F N E U R O L I N G U I S T I C S , T H E C E R E B E L L U M W H I C H C O N TA I N S T H E
HIGHEST NUMBERS OF NEURONS HAS A MAJOR ROLE IN TERMS OF PREDICTI ONS REQUIRED TO PRODUCE
LANGUAGE.)
DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS

• the study of the description of the internal phonological, grammatical, and semantic structures
of languages at given points in time without reference to their histories or to one another
• the branch of linguistics which describes the structure of a language or languages as they exist,
without reference to their histories or to comparison with other languages

• Source
• Definition of descriptive linguistics from the Collins English Dictionary
ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS

• linguistics: Anthropological linguistics

• The fundamental concern of anthropological linguistics is to investigate the relationship between
language and culture. To what extent the structure of a particular language is determined by or
determines the form and content of the culture with which it is associated remains a…
• Dance movements of the honeybee: (left) round dance and (right) tail-wagging dance.
• language
• Language, a system of conventional spoken, manual, or written symbols by means of which human
beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves. The
functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative expression,
and emotional release.…
ETHNOLINGUISTICS

• Asia: Multiethnic states

• …organize administrative districts on an ethnolinguistic basis; some 100 separate ethnic groups were officially recognized during the
Soviet period, with about 60 occupying ethnic territories with administrative status at major or minor levels. The larger units, such as
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, became separate republics with the dissolution of the Soviet…
• Wilhelm, Baron von Humboldt, oil painting by F. Krüger
• Wilhelm von Humboldt
• …foreshadowed the modern development of ethnolinguistics, which explores the interrelationship of language and culture. He was the
elder brother of Alexander von Humboldt.…
• Edward Sapir
• Edward Sapir, one of the foremost American linguists and anthropologists of his time, most widely known for his contributions to the
study of North American Indian languages. A founder of ethnolinguistics, which considers the relationship of…
• Benjamin Lee Whorf
• Benjamin Lee Whorf, U.S. linguist noted for his hypotheses regarding the relation of language to thinking and cognition and for his
studies of Hebrew and Hebrew ideas, of Mexican and Mayan languages and dialects, and of the Hopi…
MATHEMATICAL LINGUISTICS

• What is commonly referred to as mathematical linguistics comprisestwo areas of research: the study of the statistical structure of texts
and the construction of mathematical models of the phonological and grammatical structure of languages. These two branches of
mathematical linguistics, which may be termed statistical and algebraic linguistics, respectively, are typically distinct. Attempts have been
made to derive the grammatical rules of languages from the statistical structure of texts written in those languages, but such attempts
are generally thought to have been not only unsuccessful so far in practice but also, in principle, doomed to failure. That languages have
a statistical structure is a fact well known to cryptographers.Within linguistics, it is of considerable typological interest to compare
languages from a statistical point of view (the ratio of consonants to vowels, of nouns to verbs, and so on). Statistical considerations are
also of value in stylistics.
• Algebraic linguistics derives principally from the work of Chomsky in the field of generative grammar (see above Chomsky’s grammar).
In his earliest work Chomsky described three different models of grammar—finite-state grammar, phrase-structure grammar, and
transformational grammar—and compared them in terms of their capacity to generate all and only the sentences of natural languages
and, in doing so, to reflect in an intuitively satisfying manner the underlying formal principles and processes. Other models have also
been investigated, and it has been shown that certain different models are equivalent in generative power to phrase-structure
grammars. The problem is to construct a model that has all the formal properties required to handle the processes found to be
operative in languages but that prohibits rules that are not required for linguistic description.
GLOTTOCHRONOLOGY

• Glottochronology, the study of the rate of change occurring in the vocabularies of languages
for the purpose of calculating the length of time (time depth) during which two related
languages have developed independently. Glottochronology rests upon statistical comparison of
the basic vocabulary shared by two or more related languages and on the assumption that the
rate of vocabulary replacement is constant over sufficiently long periods of time. A number of
linguists do not accept the methods or findings of glottochronology, for two reasons: the
difficulty of compiling a culturally unbiased basic vocabulary list and the belief that the rate of
linguistic change is not the same for all languages and is not constant for any single language.
STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS

• Structuralism, in linguistics, any one of several schools of 20th-century linguistics committed to the
structuralist principle that a language is a self-contained relational structure, the elements of which derive their
existence and their value from their distribution and oppositions in texts or discourse. This principle was first
stated clearly, for linguistics, by the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Saussurean structuralism
was further developed in somewhat different directions by the Prague school, glossematics, and other European
movements.
• In the United States the term structuralism, or structural linguistics, has had much the same sense as it has had
in Europe in relation to the work of Franz Boas (1858–1942) and Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and their
followers. Nowadays, however, it is commonly used, in a narrower sense, to refer to the so-called post-
Bloomfieldian school of language analysis that follows the methods of Leonard Bloomfield, developed after
1930. Phonology (the study of sound systems) and morphology (the study of word structure) are their primary
fields of interest. Little work on semantics has been done by structural linguists because of their belief that the
field is too difficult or elusive to describe.
SLANG

• Slang, unconventional words or phrases that express either something new or something old
in a new way. It is flippant, irreverent, indecorous; it may be indecent or obscene. Its
colourful metaphors are generally directed at respectability, and it is this succinct, sometimes
witty, frequently impertinent social criticism that gives slang its characteristic flavour. Slang,
then, includes not just words but words used in a special way in a certain social context. The
origin of the word slang itself is obscure; it first appeared in print around 1800, applied to
the speech of disreputable and criminal classes in London. The term, however, was probably
used much earlier.
SEMANTICS

• Semantics, also called semiotics, semology, or semasiology, the philosophical and

scientific study of meaning in natural and artificial languages. The term is one of a group of
English words formed from the various derivatives of the Greek verb sēmainō (“to mean” or
“to signify”). The noun semantics and the adjective semantic are derived
from sēmantikos (“significant”); semiotics (adjective and noun) comes
from sēmeiōtikos (“pertaining to signs”); semiology from sēma (“sign”) + logos(“account”);
and semasiology from sēmasia (“signification”) + logos.
PRAGMATICS

• Pragmatics, In linguistics and philosophy, the study of the use of natural language in
communication; more generally, the study of the relations between languages and their users. It
is sometimes defined in contrast with linguistic semantics, which can be described as the study
of the rule systems that determine the literal meanings of linguistic expressions. Pragmatics is
then the study of how both literal and nonliteral aspects of communicated
linguistic meaning are determined by principles that refer to the physical or
social context (broadly construed) in which language is used. Among these aspects are
conversational and conventional “implicatures” (e.g., “John has three sons” conversationally
implicates that John has no more than three sons; “He was poor but honest” conventionally
implicates an unspecified contrast between poverty and honesty). Other aspects
include metaphor and other tropes and speech acts.
AUSTROASIATIC

• Austroasiatic languages, also spelled Austro-Asiatic, stock of some 150 languages spoken
by more than 65 million people scattered throughout Southeast Asia and eastern India. Most of
these languages have numerous dialects. Khmer, Mon, and Vietnamese are culturally the most
important and have the longest recorded history. The rest are languages of nonurban minority
groups written, if at all, only recently. The stock is of great importance as a linguistic substratum
for all Southeast Asian languages.
FUNCTIONALISM

• Functionalism, in linguistics, the approach to language study that is concerned with the
functions performed by language, primarily in terms of cognition (relating information),
expression (indicating mood), and conation (exerting influence). Especially associated with
the Prague school of linguists prominent since the 1930s, the approach centres on how
elements in various languages accomplish these functions, both grammatically and
phonologically. Some linguists have applied the findings to work on stylistics and literary
criticism.
BORROWING

• Languages borrow words freely from one another. Usually this happens when some new object
or institution is developed for which the borrowing language has no word of its own. For
example, the large number of words denoting financial institutions and operations borrowed
from Italian by the other western European languages at the time of the Renaissance testifies
to the importance of the Italian bankers in that period. (The word “bank” itself, in this sense,
comes through French from the Italian banca). Words now pass from one language to another
on a scale that is probably unprecedented, partly because of the enormous number of new
inventions that have been made in the 20th and 21st centuries and partly because international
communications are now so much more rapid and important. The vocabulary of
modern science and technology is very largely international.
SEMANTIC CHANGES

• Near the end of the 19th century, a French scholar, Michel Bréal, set out to determine the laws that govern changes in the meaning of
words. This was the task that dominated semantic research until the 1930s, when scholars began to turn their attention to the
synchronic study of meaning. Many systems for the classification of changes of meaning have been proposed, and a variety of
explanatory principles have been suggested. So far no “laws” of semantic change comparable to the phonologist’s sound laws have been
discovered. It seems that changes of meaning can be brought about by a variety of causes. Most important, perhaps, and the factor that
has been emphasized particularly by the so-called words-and-things movement in historical semantics is the change undergone in the
course of time by the objects or institutions that words denote. For example, the English word “car” goes back through Latin carrus to
a Celtic word for a four-wheeled wagon. It now denotes a very different sort of vehicle; confronted with a model of a Celtic wagon in a
museum, one would not describe it as a car.
• Some changes in the meaning of words are caused by their habitual use in particular contexts.The word “starve” once meant “to die”
(compareOld English steorfan, German sterben); in most dialects of English, it now has the more restricted meaning “to die of hunger,”
though in the north of England “He was starving” can also mean “He was very cold” (i.e., “dying” of cold, rather than hunger). Similarly,
the word “deer” has acquired a more specialized meaning than the meaning “wild animal” that it once bore (compare German Tier); and
“meat,” which originally meant food in general (hence, “sweetmeats” and the archaic phrase “meat and drink”) now denotes the flesh of
an animal treated as food. In all such cases, the narrower meaning has developed from the constant use of the word in a more
specialized context, and the contextual presuppositions of the word have in time become part of its meaning.
ETYMOLOGY

• Etymology, the history of a word or word element, including its origins and derivation.
Although the etymologizing of proper names appears in the Old Testament and Plato dealt
with etymology in his dialogue Cratylus, lack of knowledge of other languages and of the
historical developments that languages undergo prevented ancient writers from arriving at the
proper etymologies of words.
TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR

• Transformational grammar, also called Transformational-generative Grammar, a system

of language analysis that recognizes the relationship among the various elements of a sentence and among the
possible sentences of a language and uses processes or rules (some of which are called transformations) to
express these relationships. For example, transformational grammar relates the active sentence “John read the
book” with its corresponding passive, “The book was read by John.” The statement “George saw Mary” is
related to the corresponding questions, “Whom [or who] did George see?” and “Who saw Mary?” Although
sets such as these active and passive sentences appear to be very different on the surface (i.e., in such things as
word order), a transformational grammar tries to show that in the “underlying structure” (i.e., in their deeper
relations to one another), the sentences are very similar. Transformational grammar assigns a “deep structure”
and a “surface structure” to show the relationship of such sentences. Thus, “I know a man who flies planes” can
be considered the surface form of a deep structure approximately like “I know a man. The man flies airplanes.”
The notion of deep structure can be especially helpful in explaining ambiguous utterances; e.g., “Flying airplanes
can be dangerous” may have a deep structure, or meaning, like “Airplanes can be dangerous when they fly” or
“To fly airplanes can be dangerous.”
PHONETICS

• Phonetics, the study of speech sounds and their physiological production and acoustic
qualities. It deals with the configurations of the vocal tract used to produce speech sounds
(articulatory phonetics), the acoustic properties of speech sounds (acoustic phonetics), and the
manner of combining sounds so as to make syllables, words, and sentences (linguistic
phonetics).
STYLISTICS

• The term stylistics is employed in a variety of senses by different linguists. In its widest
interpretation it is understood to deal with every kind of synchronic variation in language
other than what can be ascribed to differences of regional dialect. At its narrowest
interpretation it refers to the linguistic analysis of literary texts. One of the aims of stylistics in
this sense is to identify those features of a text that give it its individual stamp and mark it as
the work of a particular author. Another is to identify the linguistic features of the text that
produce a certain aesthetic response in the reader. The aims of stylistics are the traditional
aims of literary criticism. What distinguishes stylistics as a branch of linguistics (for those who
regard it as such) is the fact that it draws upon the methodological and theoretical principles of
modern linguistics.
APPLIED LINGUISTICS

• In the sense in which the term applied linguistics is most commonly used nowadays it is
restricted to the application of linguistics to language teaching. Much of the expansion of
linguistics as a subject of teaching and research in the second half of the 20th century came
about because of its value, actual and potential, for writing better language textbooks and
devising more efficient methods of teaching languages. Linguistics is also widely held to be
relevant to the training of speech therapists and teachers of the deaf. Outside the field
of education in the narrower sense, applied linguistics (and, more particularly, applied
sociolinguistics) has an important part to play in what is called language planning—i.e., in
advising governments, especially in recently created states, as to which language
or dialectshould be made the official language of the country and how it should be
standardized.
NOAM CHOMSKY

• Noam Chomsky, in full Avram Noam Chomsky, (born December 7,

1928, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.), American theoretical linguist whose work from the
1950s revolutionized the field of linguistics by treating language as a uniquely human,
biologically based cognitive capacity. Through his contributions to linguistics and related fields,
including cognitive psychology and the philosophies of mind and language, Chomsky helped to
initiate and sustain what came to be known as the “cognitive revolution.” Chomsky also gained
a worldwide following as a political dissident for his analyses of the pernicious influence of
economic elites on U.S. domestic politics, foreign policy, and intellectualculture.
LIFE AND BASIC IDEAS

• Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Chomsky attended an experimental elementary school in which he was
encouraged to develop his own interests and talents through self-directed learning. When he was 10 years old, he
wrote an editorial for his school newspaper lamenting the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and the rise
of fascism in Europe. His research then and during the next few years was thorough enough to serve decades later as
the basis of “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (1969), Chomsky’s critical review of a study of the period by the
historian Gabriel Jackson.
• When he was 13 years old, Chomsky began taking trips by himself to New York City, where he found books for his
voracious reading habit and made contact with a thriving working-class Jewish intellectual community. Discussion
enriched and confirmed the beliefs that would underlie his political views throughout his life: that all people are
capable of comprehending political and economic issues and making their own decisions on that basis; that all people
need and derive satisfaction from acting freely and creatively and from associating with others; and that authority—
whether political, economic, or religious—that cannot meet a strong test of rational justification is illegitimate.
According to Chomsky’s anarchosyndicalism, or libertarian socialism, the best form of political organization is one in
which all people have a maximal opportunity to engage in cooperative activity with others and to take part in all
decisions of the community that affect them.
• In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvaniabut found little to interest him. After two years he considered leaving
the university to pursue his political interests, perhaps by living on a kibbutz. He changed his mind, however, after meeting the linguist Zellig S.
Harris, one of the American founders of structural linguistics, whose political convictions were similar to Chomsky’s. Chomsky took graduate
courses with Harris and, at Harris’s recommendation, studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Nathan Salmon and mathematics with
Nathan Fine, who was then teaching at Harvard University. In his 1951 master’s thesis, The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, and especially
in The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT), written while he was a junior fellow at Harvard (1951–55) and published in part in 1975,
Chomsky adopted aspects of Harris’s approach to the study of language and of Goodman’s views on formal systems and the philosophy of
science and transformed them into something novel.
• Whereas Goodman assumed that the mind at birth is largely a tabula rasa (blank slate) and that language learning in children is essentially a
conditioned response to linguistic stimuli, Chomsky held that the basic principles of all languages, as well as the basic range of concepts they are
used to express, are innately represented in the human mind and that language learning consists of the unconscious construction of
a grammar from these principles in accordance with cues drawn from the child’s linguistic environment. Whereas Harris thought of the study of
language as the taxonomic classification of “data,” Chomsky held that it is the discovery, through the application of formal systems, of the innate
principles that make possible the swift acquisition of language by children and the ordinary use of language by children and adults alike. And
whereas Goodman believed that linguistic behaviour is regular and caused (in the sense of being a specific response to specific stimuli), Chomsky
argued that it is incited by social context and discourse context but essentially uncaused—enabled by a distinct set of innate principles but
innovative, or “creative.” It is for this reason that Chomsky believed that it is unlikely that there will ever be a full-fledged science of linguistic
behaviour. As in the view of the 17th-century French philosopher Réne Descartes, according to Chomsky, the use of language is due to a “creative
principle,” not a causal one.
• Harris ignored Chomsky’s work, and Goodman—when he realized that Chomsky would not accept his behaviourism—denounced it.
Their reactions, with some variations, were shared by a large majority of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists. Although some
linguists and psychologists eventually came to accept Chomsky’s basic assumptions regarding language and the mind, most philosophers
continued to resist them.
• Chomsky received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 after submitting one chapter of LSLT as a doctoral
dissertation (Transformational Analysis). In 1956 he was appointed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to a teaching
position that required him to spend half his time on a machine translation project, though he was openly skeptical of its prospects for
success (he told the director of the translation laboratory that the project was of “no intellectual interest and was also pointless”).
Impressed with his book Syntactic Structures (1957), a revised version of a series of lectures he gave to MIT undergraduates, the
university asked Chomsky and his colleague Morris Halle to establish a new graduate program in linguistics, which soon attracted
several outstanding scholars, including Robert Lees, Jerry Fodor, Jerold Katz, and Paul Postal.
• Chomsky’s 1959 review of Verbal Behavior, by B.F. Skinner, the dean of American behaviourism, came to be regarded as the definitive
refutation of behaviourist accounts of language learning. Starting in the mid-1960s, with the publication of Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax (1965) and Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Chomsky’s approach to the study of language and mind gained wider acceptance within
linguistics, though there were many theoretical variations within the paradigm. Chomsky was appointed full professor at MIT in 1961,
Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1966, and Institute Professor in 1976. He retired as professor
emeritus in 2002.
PLATO’S PROBLEM

• A fundamental insight of philosophical rationalism is that human creativity crucially depends on an innate system of concept generation
and combination. According to Chomsky, children display “ordinary” creativity—appropriate and innovative use of complexes of
concepts—from virtually their first words. With language, they bring to bear thousands of rich and articulate concepts when they play,
invent, and speak to and understand each other. They seem to know much more than they have been taught—or even could be taught.
Such knowledge, therefore, must be innate in some sense. To say it is innate, however, is not to say that the child is conscious of it or
even that it exists, fully formed, at birth. It is only to say that it is produced by the child’s system of concept generation and combination,
in accordance with the system’s courses of biological and physical development, upon their exposure to certain kinds of environmental
input.
• It has frequently been observed that children acquire both concepts and language with amazing facility and speed, despite the paucity or
even absence of meaningful evidence and instruction in their early years. The inference to the conclusion that much of what they
acquire must be innate is known as the argument from the “poverty of the stimulus.” Specifying precisely what children acquire and
how they acquire it are aspects of what Chomsky called in LSLT the “fundamental problem” of linguistics. In later work he referred to
this as “Plato’s problem,” a reference to Plato’s attempt (in his dialogue the Meno) to explain how it is possible for an uneducated child
to solve geometrical problems with appropriate prompting but without any specific training or background in mathematics. Unlike
Plato, however, Chomsky held that solving Plato’s problem is a task for natural science, specifically cognitive scienceand linguistics.
PRINCIPLES AND PARAMETERS

• Chomsky’s early attempts to solve the linguistic version of Plato’s problem were presented in the “standard theory” of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and the subsequent
“extended standard theory,” which was developed and revised through the late 1970s. These theories proposed that the mind of the human infant is endowed with a
“format” of a possible grammar (a theory of linguistic data), a method of constructing grammars based on the linguistic data to which the child is exposed, and a device that
evaluates the relative simplicity of constructed grammars. The child’s mind constructs a number of possible grammars that are consistent with the linguistic data and then
selects the grammar with the fewest rules or primitives. Although ingenious, this approach was cumbersome in comparison with later theories, in part because it was not
clear exactly what procedures would have to be involved in the construction and evaluation of grammars.

• In the late 1970s and early 1980s Chomsky and others developed a better solution using a theoretical framework known as “principles and parameters” (P&P), which
Chomksy introduced in Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) and elaborated in Knowledge of Language (1986). Principles are linguistic universals, or structural
features that are common to all natural languages; hence, they are part of the child’s native endowment. Parameters, also native (though not necessarily specific to language,
perhaps figuring elsewhere too), are options that allow for variation in linguistic structure. The P&P approach assumed that these options are readily set upon the child’s
exposure to a minimal amount of linguistic data, a hypothesis that has been supported by empirical evidence. One proposed principle, for example, is that phrase structure
must consist of a head, such as a noun or a verb, and a complement, which can be a phrase of any form. The order of head and complement, however, is not fixed:
languages may have a head-initial structure, as in the English verb phrase (VP) “wash the clothes,” or a “head-final” structure, as in the corresponding Japanese VP “the
clothes wash.” Thus, one parameter that is set through the child’s exposure to linguistic data is “head-initial/head-final.” The setting of what was thought, during the early
development of P&P, to be a small number of parametric options within the constraints provided by a sufficiently rich set of linguistic principles would, according to this
approach, yield a grammar of the specific language to which the child is exposed. Later the introduction of “microparameters” and certain nonlinguistic constraints on
development complicated this simple story, but the basic P&P approach remained in place, offering what appears to be the best solution to Plato’s problem yet proposed.
• The phonological, or sound-yielding, features of languages are also parameterized, according to the P&P approach. They are usually set early in development—apparently
within a few days—and they must be set before the child becomes too old if he is to be able to pronounce the language without an accent. This time limit on phonological
parameter setting would explain why second-language learners rarely, if ever, sound like native speakers. In contrast, young children exposed to any number of additional
languages before the time limit is reached have no trouble producing the relevant sounds.

• In contrast to the syntactic and phonological features of language, the basic features out of which lexically expressed concepts (and larger units of linguistic meaning) are
constructed do not appear to be parameterized: different natural languages seem to rely on the same set. Even if semantic features were parameterized, however, a set of
features detailed enough to provide (in principle) for hundreds of thousands of root, or basic, concepts would have to be a part of the child’s innate, specifically linguistic
endowment—what Chomsky calls Universal Grammar, or UG—or of his nonlinguistic endowment—the innate controls on growth, development, and the final states of
other systems in the mind or brain. This is indicated, as noted above, by the extraordinary rate at which children acquire lexical concepts (about one per waking hour
between the ages of two and eight) and the rich knowledge that each concept and its verbal, nominal, adverbial, and other variants provide. No training or conscious
intervention plays a role; lexical acquisition seems to be as automatic as parameter setting.

• Of course, people differ in the words contained in their vocabularies and in the particular sounds they happen to associate with different concepts. Early in the 20th
century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted that there is nothing natural or necessary about the specific sounds with which a concept may be associated in a
given language. According to Chomsky, this “Saussurean arbitrariness” is of no interest to the natural scientist of language, because sound-concept associations in this sense
are not a part of UG or of other nonlinguistic systems that contribute to concept (and sound) development.
• A developed theory of UG and of relevant nonlinguistic systems would in principle account for all possible linguistic sounds and all possible lexical concepts and linguistic
meanings, for it would contain all possible phonological and semantic features and all the rules and constraints for combining phonological and semantic features into words
and for combining words into a potentially infinite number of phrases and sentences. Of course, such a complete theory may never be fully achieved, but in this respect
linguistics is no worse off than physics, chemistry, or any other science. They too are incomplete.

• It is important to notice that the semantic features that constitute lexical concepts, and the rules and constraints governing their combination, seem to be virtually designed
for use by human beings—i.e., designed to serve human interests and to solve human problems. For example, concepts such as “give” and “village” have features that reflect
human actions and interests: transfer of ownership (and much more) is part of the meaning of give, and polity (both abstract and concrete) is part of the meaning of village.
Linguists and philosophers sympathetic to empiricism will object that these features are created when a community “invents” a language to do the jobs it needs to do—no
wonder, then, that linguistic meanings reflect human interests and problems. The rationalist, in contrast, argues that humans could not even conceive of these interests and
problems unless the necessary conceptual machinery were available beforehand. In Chomsky’s view, the speed and facility with which children learn “give” and “village” and
many thousands of other concepts show that the empiricist approach is incorrect—though it may be correct in the case of scientific concepts, such as “muon,” which
apparently are not innate and do not reflect human concerns.

• The overall architecture of the language faculty also helps to explain how conceptual and linguistic creativity is possible. In the P&P framework in its later “minimalist” forms
(see below Rule systems in Chomskyan theories of language), the language faculty has “interfaces” that allow it to communicate with other parts of the mind. The
information it provides through “sensorimotor” interfaces enables humans to produce and perceive speech and sign language, and the information it provides through
“conceptual-intentional” interfaces enables humans to perform numerous cognitive tasks, ranging from categorization (“that’s a lynx”) to understanding and producing
stories and poetry.
• Chomsky’s theories of grammar and language are often referred to as “generative,” “transformational,” or “transformational-generative.” In a
mathematical sense, “generative” simply means “formally explicit.” In the case of language, however, the meaning of the term typically also includes
the notion of “productivity”—i.e., the capacity to produce an infinite number of grammatical phrases and sentences using only finite means (e.g., a
finite number of principles and parameters and a finite vocabulary). In order for a theory of language to be productive in this sense, at least some
of its principles or rules must be recursive. A rule or series of rules is recursive if it is such that it can be applied to its own output an indefinite
number of times, yielding a total output that is potentially infinite. A simple example of a recursive rule is the successor function in mathematics,
which takes a number as input and yields that number plus 1 as output. If one were to start at 0 and apply the successor function indefinitely, the
result would be the infinite set of natural numbers. In grammars of natural languages, recursion appears in various forms, including in rules that
allow for concatenation, relativization, and complementization, among other operations.
• Chomsky’s theories are “transformational” in the sense that they account for the syntactic and semantic properties of sentences by means of
modifications of the structure of a phrase in the course of its generation. The standard theory of Syntactic Structures and especially of Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax employed a phrase-structure grammar—a grammar in which the syntactic elements of a language are defined by means of rewrite
rules that specify their smaller constituents (e.g., “S → NP + VP,” or “a sentence may be rewritten as a noun phrase and a verb phrase”)—a large
number of “obligatory” and “optional” transformations, and two levels of structure: a “deep structure,” where semantic interpretation takes place,
and a “surface structure,” where phonetic interpretation takes place. These early grammars were difficult to contrive, and their complexity and
language-specificity made it very difficult to see how they could constitute a solution to Plato’s problem.
RULES AND SYSTEMS IN CHOMSKYAN
THEORIES AND LANGUAGE
• In Chomsky’s later theories, deep structure ceased to be the locus of semantic interpretation. Phrase-structure grammars too were virtually
eliminated by the end of the 1970s; the task they performed was taken over by the operation of “projecting” individual lexical items and their
properties into more complex structures by means of “X-bar theory.” Transformations during this transitional period were reduced to a single
operation, “Move α” (“Move alpha”), which amounted to “move any element in a derivation anywhere”—albeit within a system
of robustconstraints. Following the introduction of the “minimalist program” (MP) in the early 1990s, deep structure (and surface structure)
disappeared altogether. Move α, and thus modification of structure from one derivational step to another, was replaced by “Move” and later by
“internal Merge,” a variant of “external Merge,” itself a crucial basic operation that takes two elements (such as words) and makes of them a set.
In the early 21st century, internal and external Merge, along with parameters and microparameters, remained at the core of Chomsky’s efforts to
construct grammars.
• Throughout the development of these approaches to the science of language, there were continual improvements in simplicity and formal
elegance in the theories on offer; the early phrase-structure components, transformational components, and deep and surface structures were all
eliminated, replaced by much simpler systems. Indeed, an MP grammar for a specific language could in principle consist entirely of Merge (internal
and external) together with some parametric settings. MP aims to achieve both of the major original goals that Chomsky set for a theory of
language in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax: that it be descriptively adequate, in the sense that the grammars it provides generate all and only the
grammatical expressions of the language in question, and that it be explanatorily adequate, in the sense that it provides a descriptively adequate
grammar for any natural language as represented in the mind of a given individual. MP grammars thus provide a solution to Plato’s problem,
explaining how any individual readily acquires what Chomsky calls an “I-language”—“I” for internal, individual, and intensional (that is, described by
a grammar). But they also speak to other desiderata of a natural science: they are much simpler, and they are much more easily accommodated to
another science, namely biology.
• In Chomsky’s later theories, deep structure ceased to be the locus of semantic interpretation. Phrase-structure grammars too were virtually
eliminated by the end of the 1970s; the task they performed was taken over by the operation of “projecting” individual lexical items and their
properties into more complex structures by means of “X-bar theory.” Transformations during this transitional period were reduced to a single
operation, “Move α” (“Move alpha”), which amounted to “move any element in a derivation anywhere”—albeit within a system
of robustconstraints. Following the introduction of the “minimalist program” (MP) in the early 1990s, deep structure (and surface structure)
disappeared altogether. Move α, and thus modification of structure from one derivational step to another, was replaced by “Move” and later by
“internal Merge,” a variant of “external Merge,” itself a crucial basic operation that takes two elements (such as words) and makes of them a set.
In the early 21st century, internal and external Merge, along with parameters and microparameters, remained at the core of Chomsky’s efforts to
construct grammars.
• Throughout the development of these approaches to the science of language, there were continual improvements in simplicity and formal
elegance in the theories on offer; the early phrase-structure components, transformational components, and deep and surface structures were all
eliminated, replaced by much simpler systems. Indeed, an MP grammar for a specific language could in principle consist entirely of Merge (internal
and external) together with some parametric settings. MP aims to achieve both of the major original goals that Chomsky set for a theory of
language in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax: that it be descriptively adequate, in the sense that the grammars it provides generate all and only the
grammatical expressions of the language in question, and that it be explanatorily adequate, in the sense that it provides a descriptively adequate
grammar for any natural language as represented in the mind of a given individual. MP grammars thus provide a solution to Plato’s problem,
explaining how any individual readily acquires what Chomsky calls an “I-language”—“I” for internal, individual, and intensional (that is, described by
a grammar). But they also speak to other desiderata of a natural science: they are much simpler, and they are much more easily accommodated to
another science, namely biology.
TALASANGGUNIAN

• https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/descriptive-linguistics
• https://www.theclassroom.com/types-linguistics-5242421.html
• https://www.britannica.com/science/comparative-linguistics
• https://www.britannica.com/science/anthropological-linguistics
• https://www.britannica.com/search?query=branches+of+linguistics&