Broadly defined as the scientific study of language (according to Merriam Webster: “the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language”), linguistics has been a discipline of study for over two millennia. It endeavours to answer the questions “what is language?”, “what is the origin of speech?” and tries to explain how language is represented in the mind.
Linguistics originated in ancient Greece and has always been closely connected with philosophy, psychology and anthropology. Its main purpose was to clarify various aspects of the language, to establish a certain interpretation for words and thus prevent misunderstanding and ease the communication between people.
Linguistics is a complex discipline dealing with grammar (morphology and syntax), semantics, phonetics and phonology. In encompassing all the above, linguistics studies the human language and the process of creation through language, a process that is based on the human being’s ability to speak – the linguistic competence.
The foundations of linguistics as a science go back to the beginning of the 19th century when Sanskrit, the classical language of India and Hinduism, was discovered and similarities with Greek and Latin led to the hypothesis of a common origin.
Important names in the history of linguistics are: Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky.
Humboldt was the first to make the distinction between language and speech, noticing that speech gives life to language, while language is the necessary condition of any speech act. In his opinion, language, as an intermediary between individuals and reality, mirrors the psychological, cognitive and artistic values of a community. His views enabled the development of ethnical psychology and of “informal psychologism”.
Saussure’s work marks the foundation of structuralism and his main contribution to the development of linguistics was the defining of the linguistic sign as an arbitrary sign. He also defined language as a system of linguistic signs among other categories of signs that people use in order to communicate. Hence the necessity of founding a new discipline which would study the life of signs in human collectivities. This new science, a branch of social-psychology (as he thought), was called semiology.
Bloomfield’s view on language was influenced by behaviourism. In his attempt to reconstruct language he introduced the concepts of linguistic form, grammar form, lexical form, taxeme and sememe.
Chomsky’s greatest contribution to the development of linguistics reefers to the definition of two basic concepts for human communication: competence and performance. The former is the ability of humans to create meaningful utterances in accordance with their internalised knowledge of a language. The latter defines the evidence of language competence – the representation of language knowledge.
It is only natural for linguistics as a discipline to evolve in concordance with the changes in language, therefore new theories and opinions are bound to occur frequently and thus further develop and revolutionise this science.
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