THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE

1. Nineteenth century : historical linguistics

It is significant that the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made major
contributions to the history of language. Plato was the first one to distinguish between
nouns and verbs.
Sir William jones pointed out that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all
had striking structural similarities.
A group of scholars around Leipzig and nicknamed the young Grammarians
claimed that language change is regular.

2. Early – to mind-29th century : descriptive linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure is sometime labelled “the father of modern linguistics”.
His crucial contribution was that all language items are essentially interliked. Language is
carefully built structure of interwoven elements initiated the era of structural linguistics.
Leonard Bloomfield said “ the weak point in language study, and will remain so
until human knowledge advances very far beyond its present state”.
“Bloomfield era” lasted for more than twenty years. In this time linguistics
concentrated on writing descriptive grammars of unwritten languages.

3. Mid- to late 20th century : generative linguistics and the search for universal.
Noam Chomsky published a book called “ syntactic structures”, with this
influential linguist of The century.
A grammar which consists of a set of statements or rules which sequences of
language are Chomsky has not only initiated the are of generative grammars. He has also
redirected attention towards language universals.