The descriptivists

Descriptivism:

Descriptive linguistics is the study and analysis of spoken languages.

Descriptive linguists:

a) Begin by listening to native speakers.

b) Gather a body of data. Research on the detailed structure of exotic languages.

c) Analyze to identify distinctive sounds (phonemes).

d) Knowing the function of the morphemes in the sentence enables the linguist to describe the grammar of the language being analyzed (scientific structuralism).

Descriptivists:

Franz Boas

- The founder of the “Descriptive Linguistics” school.

- He challenged the application of conventional methods of language study of native North American languages with no written records. He was an anthropologist.
- He said that descriptive should describe the relationships of speech elements of words and sentences.

- He saw grammar as a description of how human speech in a language is organized.

- He studied the Kwakiutl (Present Canadians).

- One of his conclusions was that no pure race exists and no race is innately superior to any other, since idiolects of a language within one culture depends on the individual’s background.

- Relativism i.e. no ideal language because human languages are diverse (European vs. African languages).

- Boas saw language as the most interesting aspect of culture to study. He says in every language there are certain logical categories which must be expressed whether relevant to a particular message or not. The categories are symmetrical in different languages that are in comparison (Number, gender, tense). Now an individual learn to ignore the differences between allophones of the same phoneme in ones own language, Ex. /t/ aspirated non-aspirated. But we notice them in an alien language because they seem to change the meaning.

Leonard Bloomfield

- He worked on grouping Native American languages.

- He was committed to the point that linguistics in an independent science.

- He insisted on using scientific procedures in analyzing a language.

- He based his work, especially his approach to meaning, on behavioristic principles.

- He promoted structuralism (Language as a system with a highly organized structure).

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the relationship between what is said in communication and what is done in communication. This focus on speaker-meaning and hearer-effects and encompasses the use of linguistic items for the coding of meaning, as a communicative system. It is a two-way system of interaction.

According to Charles Morris pragmatics is the relation of signs to their intepreters. in other words, pragmatics is concerned not with language as a system or product , but rather with the interrelationship between language form, messages and language users.

The London School.

Henry Sweet

The Phonetic study in the modern sense was pioneered by Henry Sweet.

Sweet was the greatest of the few historical linguists whom Britain produced in the ninetteth century to rival the burgeoning of historical linguistics in Germany, but, inlike the German scholars, Sweet based his studies on the workings of the vocal organs.

Daniel Jones

Sweet's general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones, who took the subject up as hobby, suggested to the authorities of University College,London, that they ough to consider teaching phonetics of French. was taken on as a lecturer there in 1907 and built up what became the first university department of phonetics in Britain.

Jones stressed the importance of language study through training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing and reproducing minute distictiond of speech-sound.

He invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels.

John Rupert Firth

John Rupert Firth turned linguistics proper into a recognized distinct academic subject in Britain.
He was Professor of English at the University of the Punjab from 1919-1928. He then worked in the phonetics department of University College London before 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.

Bronisław Malinowski

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics from 1927 onwards.
The most important aspect in Malinowski's theorizing, as distinct from his purely ethnographic work, concerned the functioning of language.
For Malinowski to think of language as a ¨means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener¨was a misleading myth.

Functional linguistics: the Prague School.

The Prague Linguistic Circle or "Prague school" was an influential group of literary critics and linguists in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis during the years 1928–1939. It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. After World War II, the circle was disbanded but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English Firthian — later Hallidean — linguistics). American scholar Dell Hymes cites his 1962 paper, "The Ethnography of Speaking," as the formal introduction of Prague functionalism to American linguistic anthropology.

Saussure: language as a social fact.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure (November 26, 1857 – February 22, 1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid the foundation for many of the significant developments in linguistics in the twentieth century. He is widely considered the "father" of twentieth-century linguistics, and his work laid the foundation for the approach known as structuralism in the broader field of the social sciences. Although his work established the essential framework of future studies, his ideas contained many limitations and fundamental weaknesses as later scholars recognized that underlying structure and rules, while informative, cannot be the sole determinant of meaning and value in any social system.

Contributions to linguistics

The Course of General Linguistics

Saussure's most influential work, the Cours de linguistique générale (Course of General Linguistics), was published posthumously in 1916 by former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye on the basis of notes taken from Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva. The Cours became one of the seminal linguistics works of the twentieth century, not primarily for the content (many of the ideas had been anticipated in the works of other nineteenth-century linguists), but rather for the innovative approach that Saussure applied in discussing linguistic phenomena.
The most revolutionary element in Saussure's work is his insistence that languages do not produce different versions of the same reality, they in effect produce different realities. That different languages conceptualize the world in significantly different ways is demonstrated by the fact that even such "physical" or "natural" phenomena as colors are not the same in different languages. Russian does not have a term for blue. The words poluboi and sinij, which are usually translated as "light blue" and "dark blue," refer to what are in Russian distinct colors, not different shades of the same color. The English word "brown" has no equivalent in French. It is translated into brun, marron, or even jeune depending on the context. In Welsh, the color glas, though often translated as "blue," contains elements that English would identify as "green" or "grey." Because the boundaries are placed differently in the two languages the Welsh equivalent of the English "grey" might be glas or llwyd.

Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis.

Applied Linguistics