Introduction lecture to

linguistics
FROM THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS
• Linguistics as a science of language originated in ancient times, presumably in
the Ancient East, in India, China, and Egypt. Conscious language learning
began with the invention of writing and the emergence of special languages
other than spoken ones.
• Initially, the science of language developed within the framework of private
linguistics, which was caused by the need to teach a written language, i.e.
primarily from the needs of practice.
• The first theoretical experience of describing the language was the grammar
of Sanskrit by the Indian scholar Panini (V—IV centuries BC), which was called
the "Octateuch". It established the norms of Sanskrit, the single literary
language of Ancient India, and gave an accurate description of the language
of the sacred texts (Vedas).
 Sanskrit by the Indian scholar Panini
• Initially, the science of language developed within the framework of
private linguistics, which was caused by the need to teach a written
language, i.e. primarily from the needs of practice.
• The first theoretical experience of describing the language was the
grammar of Sanskrit by the Indian scholar Panini (V—IV centuries BC),
which was called the "Octateuch".
• It established the norms of Sanskrit, the single literary language of
Ancient India, and gave an accurate description of the language of the
sacred texts (Vedas).
Sanskrit by the Indian scholar Panini
• It was the most complete, although extremely concise (most often in
the form of tables) description of spelling, phonetics, morphology,
word formation and elements of Sanskrit syntax.
• Panini's grammar can be called the first generative grammar, since it
taught the generation of speech in a certain sense.
• Giving a list of 43 syllables as a source material, the scientist outlined
a system of rules that make it possible to build words from these
syllables, sentences (utterances) from words.
Sanskrit by the Indian scholar Panini
• The grammar of Panini is still considered one of the most rigorous and
complete descriptions of Sanskrit. It ensured the preservation of the
ritual language in its traditional form, taught to form word forms from
other words, and contributed to the achievement of clarity and
brevity of description.
• Panini's work had a significant impact on the development of
linguistics in China, Tibet, and Japan (phonetics was the main focus in
Chinese linguistics for a long time), and later, when European science
became acquainted with Sanskrit, on all European linguistics,
especially comparative historical linguistics.
The first explanatory dictionary "Er ya"
• The applied nature of ancient linguistics manifested itself in the
interest in interpreting the meanings of words. The first explanatory
dictionary "Er ya" ("Approximation to the right"), which was worked
on by several generations of scientists, appeared in China (III—II
centuries BC).
• This dictionary gave a systematic interpretation of words found in the
monuments of ancient writing. In China, at the beginning of our era,
the first Fangyan dialect dictionary ("Local sayings") appeared.
Plato, describing the grammar of the Greek
language,
• The European linguistic, or rather grammatical, tradition originated in
Ancient Greece. Already in the IV century BC, Plato, describing the
grammar of the Greek language, introduced the term techne
grammatike (literally 'the art of writing'), which defines the main
sections of modern linguistics (hence the term "grammar"). And
today, European grammatical science actively uses Greek and Latin
terminology.
"Grammatical Manual" of Elias Donatus
• The grammatical and lexicographic field of private linguistics was the
leading one in the science of language in the ancient linguistic
tradition, in medieval Europe and especially in the East.
• So, in particular, in the IV century. in Rome, the "Grammatical
Manual" of Elias Donatus appeared, which served as a textbook of the
Latin language for more than a thousand years.
• Mastering this grammar as a symbol of wisdom, a model of
correctness of speech was considered the height of scholarship, and
Latin became the most studied language for a long time.
philologist Sibaweihi created the first
classical grammar of the Arabic language
• In the VIII century, the Arabic philologist Sibaweihi created the first
classical grammar of the Arabic language that has come down to us,
which for the Muslim world was a kind of "Latin".
• In this extensive work (it was called "Al-Kitab", i.e. "The Book"), the
scientist expounded the doctrine of parts of speech, the inflection of
names and verbs, their word formation, described the phonetic
changes that occur during the formation of grammatical forms, talked
about the features of articulation of certain sounds, their positional
options.
Arab scholar Ibn Faris ("Book on lexical
norms", "A brief essay on vocabulary"),
• In the East, by the tenth century, the conceptual apparatus and
terminology of lexicology were being formed, which stood out as an
independent scientific discipline.
• This is evidenced by the works of the Arab scholar Ibn Faris ("Book on
lexical norms", "A brief essay on vocabulary"), which for the first
time raises the question of the volume of the vocabulary of the Arabic
language, classifies its vocabulary in terms of its origin and use,
develops a theory of the word (the problem of the ambiguity of the
word, direct and figurative meanings, homonymies and synonymies).
formation of Jewish linguistics
• Arabic linguistics influenced the formation of Jewish linguistics, which also developed
mainly in two directions — grammatical and lexicographic.
• The first grammar of the Hebrew language appeared at the beginning of the tenth century.
Its author is Saadia Gaon. However, the actual scientific study of the Hebrew language
begins with the works of David Khayyudzh, who in two "Books on Verbs" identified the
main categories of verb morphology and for the first time introduced the concept of root
morpheme.
• This concept is firmly established in Jewish linguistics, as evidenced by the fundamental
dictionary of root morphemes by Samuel Nagid (XI century) "A book that eliminates the
need to refer to other books", which includes all the words and word forms found in the
Old Testament.
• At the turn of the XII—XIII centuries, the grammars of the Hebrew language of the Kimkhid
brothers appeared, which for a long time became classical textbooks of the Hebrew and
Aramaic languages in many Christian universities in Western Europe.
philosophical understanding of language,
• The philosophical understanding of language, the study of it as a means of knowing the
world begins in Ancient Greece, where the comprehension of the laws of language took
place within the framework of philosophy and logic.
• It was philosophy that became the cradle of the science of language. The linguistic interest
of ancient philosophers was focused on such complex problems as the origin of language,
language and thinking, the relationship of words, things and thoughts, etc. Language was
considered as a means of forming and expressing thought.
• Mind and speech were understood as a single logos. Therefore, the doctrine of the word
(logos) was the basis of ancient Greek linguistics. The word in the understanding of ancient
Greek scientists formed the social and sacred experience of man, gave him the opportunity
to comprehend and explain the world around him.
• The word made you think about how the naming of an object of the outside world takes
place. It required careful attention, because it was believed that improper education or the
use of words could disrupt harmony in society.
 theory of naming
• Thus was born the theory of naming, which developed in two
directions.
• Some scientists (for example, Heraclitus circa 540-480 BC) argued that
the name of objects is determined by their very nature (the theory of
physei "fusei", i.e. ‘but nature'), and each name reflects the essence of
the thing being designated, therefore, by studying the words, one can
understand the true essence of the object. According to this theory,
each word either reproduces the sounds made by the object itself,
or(honey, for example, tastes so sweet that the word mel ‘honey’
gently affects a person's hearing).
• conveys the impressions and sensations that it causes in a person
The theory "theseus
• Other scientists (for example, Democritus circa 460-370 BC) believed that
naming occurs by establishing a conditional agreement of people, i.e. by
custom, without any connection with the natural essence of the objects
themselves (these theory "theseus", i.e. 'by position'), since in the world of
nature there are many objects and phenomena that have several names
(the phenomenon of synonymy) or do not have their names at all, since no
object in itself needs a name and can exist in nature without a name.
Names are needed only by a person to express thoughts about a subject,
and therefore they are established by people by conditional agreement. In
addition, the same name can refer to different objects (the phenomenon of
homonymy), which is completely incomprehensible if the connection
between the name and the object is natural.
confrontation between the two directions
• This confrontation between the two directions of ancient linguistics was
reflected in the work-dialogue of Plato (c. 427-347 BC) "Kratylus". Kratylus,
who defends the physei theory, believes that everything that exists in nature
has its own "correct name, innate from nature."
• His opponent Hermogenes defends the thesei theory and believes that no
name is innate by nature, but is established by people according to their laws
and customs.
• Socrates opposes these two points of view in the dialogue, who says that the
connection between the subject and his name was not accidental at first, but
over time it was lost in the linguistic consciousness of native speakers, and
the connection of the word with the subject was fixed by social tradition,
custom.
Aristotle and theory of semantic syntax
• The most prominent representative of the ancient grammatical tradition is Aristotle
(384-322 BC).
• In his writings ("Categories", "Poetics", "On Interpretation", etc.), he outlined the
logical and grammatical concept of language, which was characterized by an
undifferentiated perception of syntactic and formal morphological characteristics of
language units.
• Aristotle was one of the first ancient philosophers who developed the doctrine of
parts of speech (and distinguished the name and verb as words expressing the subject
and predicate of a judgment) and the syntax of a simple sentence.
• Further development of these problems was carried out by scientists of Ancient Stoia,
the largest philosophical and linguistic center of Greece (the so-called Stoics)[1], who
improved the Aristotelian classification of parts of speech and laid the foundations of
the theory of semantic syntax, which is actively developing at the present time.
• The philosophical study of language reaches its peak in the XVI—XVII
centuries, when the need for a means of interethnic and scientific and
cultural communication is acutely realized.
• The development of linguistics in this period takes place under the banner of
the creation of the so-called grammar of a philosophical language, more
perfect than any natural language. The birth of this idea was dictated by the
time itself, the needs and difficulties of interlanguage communication and
learning.
• In the works of Western European scientists F. Bacon (1561-1626), R.
Descartes (1596-1650) and V. Leibniz (1646-1716) substantiates the project
of creating a single language for all mankind as a perfect means of
communication and expression of human knowledge.
• So, in particular, F. Bacon in his essay "On the merits and improvement
of sciences" put forward the idea of writing a kind of comparative
grammar of all languages of the world (or at least Indo-European).
This, in his opinion, would make it possible to identify similarities and
differences between languages, and subsequently create, on the basis
of the identified similarities, a single language for all mankind, free
from the shortcomings of natural languages.
• This language would be a kind of "library" of human knowledge. In
fact, it was about developing a language like Esperanto as a perfect
means of communication.
 Comparative historical linguistics
• Comparative historical linguistics is also being formed within the
framework of the general theory of language, in which the
comparison of languages is a method, and the historical approach to
language is the main principle of research.
• Its roots go back to ancient times: the first observations on the
relationship of languages, in particular, Hebrew and Arabic, are found
in Jewish linguistics in the work of Isaac Barun "The Book of
Comparison of the Hebrew language with Arabic"
 comparative historical linguistics
• Thus, comparative historical linguistics has received support from the natural
sciences.The comparative historical study of languages was based on the following
principles:
• • 1) Each language has its own distinctive features that distinguish and contrast it with
other languages;
• • 2) it is possible to identify these signs by comparative study of languages;
• • 3) Comparative analysis reveals not only differences, but also similarities of languages;
• • 4) Related languages form a language family;
• • 5) differences in related languages are the result of their historical changes;
• • 6) the phonetic system of a language changes faster than other language systems;
phonetic transformations within one language family are carried out with a strict
sequence that knows no exceptions.
 comparative historical approach
• The comparative historical approach to the study of languages contributed to
the development of their genealogical classifications. The first linguist to
propose such a classification was the German scientist A. Schleicher (1821-
1868).
• Rejecting the possibility of the existence of a single proto-language for all
languages of the world, he put forward the idea of historical kinship of
related languages.
• Languages originating from the same base language form a language genus
(or "language tree"), which is divided into language families. These language
families are differentiated into languages. Individual languages further break
up into dialects, which over time can separate and turn into independent
languages.
comparative historical research
• In parallel with comparative historical research, general and
theoretical linguistics continues to develop, and new directions in
language learning are being formed.
• Thus, in particular, a psychological trend is emerging in the depths of
comparative historical linguistics, the founders of which were German
scientists V. von Humboldt (1767-1835), G. Steinthal (1823-1899) and
the Russian philosopher-linguist A. A. Potebnya (1835-1891).
Humboldt's linguistic concept
• In their works, they tried to clarify the principles of the evolutionary
development of language, the relationship between language and
thinking, language and mentality of the people.
• V. Humboldt's linguistic concept was based on an anthropological
approach to language, according to which the study of language
should be conducted in close connection with human consciousness
and thinking, his spiritual and practical activities.
comparative historical research
• Each language, denoting phenomena and objects of the external
world, forms its own picture of the world for the people who speak it.
Thus, thought and language become interdependent and inseparable
from each other.
• The words of any language are organized as a systemic whole, each of
them is backed by the entire language with its semantic and
grammatical structure.
• The differences between languages are not related to differences in
sounds, but to differences in speakers' interpretation of the world in
which they live and in their understanding of this world.
• Developing the ideas of V. Humboldt, representatives of the
psychological direction considered language as a phenomenon of the
psychological state and human activity.
• Language, according to A. A. Potebni, is a stream of continuous verbal
creativity, and therefore it is a means of revealing the individual
psychology of the speaker.
• Hence the desire to study the language in its real use, relying
primarily on social psychology, folklore, mythology, and the customs
of the people, which find their expression in various speech forms
(proverbs, sayings, riddles).
Psycholinguistics
• Psycholinguistics studies the processes of speech formation, as well as speech
perception in their correlation with the language system.
• She develops models of human speech activity, its psychophysiological speech
organization in the process of human adaptation to language: psychological and
linguistic patterns of speech formation from linguistic elements, as well as recognition of
its linguistic structure.
• Psycholinguistics studies issues such as the assimilation of a language (native or foreign)
by children and adults, the generation of an utterance by the speaker and its perception
by the listener.
• She seeks to interpret language as a dynamic system of human speech activity. Hence
the attention to such issues as the ways of generating text (conscious or unconscious),
the stages of speech generation (motivational, semantic, semantic and linguistic), ways
of perceiving text, in particular, signs that allow the listener to identify linguistic units.
cognitive linguistics
• On the basis of psycholinguistics, a new direction in linguistics was
born: cognitive linguistics (or cognitology) — the science of
knowledge and cognition, about the results of perception of the
world and subject-cognitive activity of a person, fixed in language. The
object of the study of cognitive linguistics is the mental activity of a
person, his mind, thinking and those mental processes that relate to
them.
• Cognitive processes are related to language, because without
language, human intellectual and spiritual activity is impossible.
Therefore, it is language that is in the focus of attention of cognitive
scientists.
• Сognitive linguistics is the study of language in its cognitive function, where cognitive refers
to the crucial role of intermediate informational structures in our encounters with the world.
• Cognitive linguistics is based on the belief that language is closely connected with all human
thought and cognitive processes, with memorization, with the extraction of data from
memory, with the transfer of information from one brain to another.
• And the language component in this complex complex is just one of many. Therefore,
cognitive linguistics is open to contact with neighboring sciences - psychology,
neurophysiology, philosophy, artificial intelligence. Cognitive linguistics grew out of the work
of a number of researchers active in the 1970s who were interested in the relation of
language and mind, and who did not follow the prevailing tendency to explain linguistic
patterns by means of appeals to structural properties internal to and specific to language.
The most influential linguists working along these lines and focusing centrally on cognitive
principles and organization were Wallace Chafe, Charles Fillmore, George Lakoff, Ronald
Langacker, and Leonard Talmy.
• Ethnolinguistics is a field of linguistic anthropology which studies the language of a
particular ethnic group. Ethnolinguistics is frequently associated with minority
linguistic groups within a larger population, such as the Native American languages or
the languages of immigrants. Ethnolinguistics, as part of anthropological linguistics
concerned with the study of the interrelation between a language and the cultural
behaviour of those who speak it. Several controversial questions are involved in this
field: Does language shape culture or vice versa? What influence does language have
on perception and thought? How do language patterns relate to cultural patterns?
These questions, which had been posed earlier by the German scholars Johann
Gottfried von Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt and their followers emerged again
in the United States as a result of the discovery of the vastly different structure of
American Indian languages, They noticed, for example, that Eskimo has many words
for snow, whereas Aztec employs a single term for the concepts of snow, cold, and ice.
 Psycholinguistics
• Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental aspects of language and speech.
• It is primarily concerned with the ways in which language is represented and processed in the brain. A
branch of both linguistics and psychology, psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science.
Adjective: psycholinguistic. The term psycholinguistics was introduced by American psychologist Jacob
Robert Kantor in his 1936 book, "An Objective Psychology of Grammar." The term was popularized by one
of Kantor's students, Nicholas Henry Pronko, in a 1946 article "Language and Psycholinguistics: A Review."
The emergence of psycholinguistics as an academic discipline is generally linked to an influential seminar
at Cornell University in 1951. According to Friedmann Pulvermüller in "Word Processing in the Brain as
Revealed by Neurophysiological Imaging," "Psycholinguistics has classically focused on button press tasks
and reaction time experiments from which cognitive processes are being inferred. The advent of
neuroimaging opened new research perspectives for the psycholinguist as it became possible to look at
the neuronal mass activity that underlies language processing. Studies of brain correlates of
psycholinguistic processes can complement behavioral results, and in some cases...can lead to direct
information about the basis of psycholinguistic processes." Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive
processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary
and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances,
words, text, etc.
 Areal linguistics

• Areal linguistics (Latin area 'area, space’) is engaged in the study of the spread of
linguistic phenomena in space in interlanguage and inter-dialect interaction.
• The task of areal linguistics is to localize, characterize and interpret the area of a
particular linguistic phenomenon in order to study the history of language, the
process of its formation and development (comparing, for example, the territory of
distribution of mapped linguistic phenomena, it is possible to determine which of
them is more ancient, how one of them replaced the other, i.e. to determine
archaisms and innovations).
• The term "areal linguistics" was introduced by the Italian scientist M. Bartoli. The
theory of areal linguistics is developed on the material of various languages —
Indo-European (E. A. Makaev), Slavic (R. I. Avanesov, S. B. Bernstein, N. I. Tolstoy, P.
Ivich, T. I. Vendina), Germanic (V. M. Zhirmunsky), Romance (M. A. Borodina), Turkic