Rasulova Astinat SI-4

PROMINENT SCIENTISTS CONTRIBUTED TO THE GENERAL

LINGUISTICS
Language is the history of the people.
Language is the path of civilization and culture…
Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin
The language originated in ancient times in the process of people working together.
He helped people understand each other, work together, and share their
accumulated experience and knowledge. Since then, language has always played a
big role in the life of society.
Firstly, it is used in all spheres of human activity, people cannot do without it
either in everyday life, in school and work, or in politics. Language serves society,
serves as a means of communication. With his pomopeople share their thoughts
and feelings with each other, they can do something together.
Secondly, language helps to study the world around us, with its help there is a
cognition of reality. We think, we come to some conclusions with the help of
language.
Finally, he preserves the experience of the people, accumulates knowledge and
passes it on from generation to generation. So, language provides a connection of
tenses.
Thus, we have great opportunities: to think, to exchange information, to learn, to
use the knowledge accumulated by our ancestors. And all this is thanks to the
language.
The science of learning a language is called general linguistics.
General linguistics is a philological science that studies the natural language of a
person and its implementation in the form of specific languages.
Linguistics is divided into private and general. Private linguistics deals with
specific languages (Russian studies, Chinese studies) or groups of languages united
by a common origin (Slavic studies, Germanic studies, Roman studies, Turkology,
etc.), as well as cultural-historical or geographical community (Balkanistics).
General linguistics deals with the general laws of the structure of the language
system and human speech activity in relation to their implementation in specific
languages.
This means that the general or universal laws of the structure of language and its
use in society are established on the basis of theoretical analysis and comparison of
the facts of specific languages. On the other hand, scientific research of an
individual language or a group of languages is possible only on the basis of general
categories and universal methods applicable to any language, therefore general
linguistics uses deductive and inductive research methods. The tasks of general
linguistics also include the analysis of the methodology of scientific research of
language - the meta-theory of the science of language.
There are many directions and schools in linguistics that describe the fundamental
general structure of any language or the "individual" structure of a particular
language on the basis of a different conceptual basis (a different system of
concepts and a different understanding of the relations between them). Therefore, it
is difficult to give a general description of the linguistic approach to the
interpretation of speech activity. A concise description of the main antinomies (the
most general categories opposed to each other in pairs) of modern linguistics is
contained in Leontiev, 1974 Let us list these antinomies here: 1. Language -
speech; 2. Ethical - emic; 3. System - norm; 4. Syntagmatics - paradigmatics; 5.
Synchrony - diachrony; 6. Active - passive; 7. Descriptive - prescriptive; 8. Oral -
written; 9. General language - dialect; 10. Literary - non-literary.}. The most
complete and at the same time qualified presentation of all the problems of general
linguistics is given in the book "General Linguistics", 1983.
(A. A. Leontiev, Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics, 1997)
But at the beginning of the XX century, especially after the appearance in 1916 of
the famous "Course of General Linguistics" by the Swiss scientist Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857-1913), published after the author's death, priorities changed. The
systematic study of languages without reference to history (synchronous, according
to Saussure's terminology), first of all in their current state, began to be considered
as the main task of linguistics, and historical studies faded into the background.
This was the case in structural linguistics, which flourished in the 1920s and
1960s. This was preserved in the generative linguistics that replaced it, created by
the American scientist Noam Chomsky, no less famous than Saussure, in the
1950s and 1960s. He considered that "there does not seem to be any variability
within the species. We are talking about a uniform system, which means that there
has been no significant evolution since its appearance." That is, there was only one
significant event in language history – the appearance of language, and since then
the "uniform system" has not changed fundamentally.
These and other scientists, which we will consider below, have made a great
contribution to the study of the language.
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE
Swiss linguist, the only one of the founders of modern linguistic science, and
besides structuralism as a scientific ideology and methodology. Saussure's
theoretical works marked the turn of linguistics from the historical and
comparative study of languages in their development (i.e., diachrony) to the
analysis of linguistic synchrony, i.e., the structure of a particular language at a
given moment in time. Saussure was the first to consistently distinguish between
synchronic and diachronic approaches to language. His appeal to synchronicity
revolutionized linguistics. For all the significance of the new theories and methods
that have appeared since then , the very type of synchronous structural descriptions
he proposed played a defining role in linguistic research for almost the entire 20th
century.
Saussure was born on November 26, 1857 in Geneva (Switzerland) in a family of
French immigrants. At the age of 18 he entered the Leipzig University in Germany,
in 1880 he received a doctor's degree. Then he moved to France, in 18811891 he
taught Sanskrit at the School of Higher Studies in Paris. In the same years,
Saussure served as secretary of the Paris Linguistic Society and in this capacity
had a terribly significant impact on the formation of linguistics. Later, from 1906
to 1911, he lectured on comparative grammar and general linguistics at the
University of Geneva. Saussure died in Vuflan (canton of Vaud, Switzerland) on
February 22, 1913.
While still a student in Leipzig, Saussure published a memoir on the original vowel
system in Indo-European languages (Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles
dans les langues indo-europ ennes). The memoir (written in 1878), although it
remained the only work published by Saussure, immediately put him in the ranks
of the leading authorities in linguistics of that time. Based on purely structural
considerations, he suggested that in the Indo-European proto-language, the
reconstructed ancestor of many languages of Europe and Asia, there were special
phonemes that disappeared in the daughter Indo-European languages (such as
Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Latin). This hypothesis, known as the laryngeal
system (the lost phonemes were then conditionally called laryngals), helped to
explain many problems in the study of the evolution of the Indo-European
phonological system. Although many of its provisions are not indisputable, the
very fact of the existence of laryngeal phonemes in the Proto-Indo-European
language today no one doubts. In the Hittite language deciphered after Saussure's
death, laryngal phonemes were revealed, the presence of which he assumed for the
Proto-Indo-European language.
Another important work of Saussure, the Course of General Linguistics (Cours de
linguistique generale) was published in 1916, after the death of the scientist. This
book, in which not a single line belongs to the pen of Saussure himself, is a
reconstruction of the course compiled from the students' notes by the linguist's
students Charles Bally and Albert Seshe. It was thanks to the publication of the
Course that Saussure's views on the nature of language and the tasks of linguistics
became widely known. Among the numerous theoretical provisions of the Course,
the distinction between diachronic (historical and comparative) and synchronic
(descriptive) linguistics is especially important. Saussure argues that diachronic
study should be based on meticulously executed synchronic descriptions. The
scientist believed that the study of changes occurring in the historical development
of the language is impossible without careful synchronous analysis of the language
at certain moments of its evolution. The comparison of two different languages is
likely only on the basis of a preliminary thorough synchronous analysis of each of
them. Finally, according to Saussure, linguistic research is only adequate to its
subject when it takes into account both diachronic and synchronic aspects of
language.
The second most important point of Saussure's theory is the distinction between the
knowledge of a language by its native speaker and the use of language in everyday
situations. Saussure emphasized that linguists should distinguish the set of units
that form the grammar of a language and are used by all its speakers when
constructing phrases in a given language from specific utterances of specific
speakers, which are variable and unpredictable. A common set of units for all
speakers, Saussure called language (la langue), and specific statements of
individual native speakers were called speech (la parole). It is language, not
speech, that is the true object of linguistics, because an adequate representation of a
language should reflect a system of elements known to all its speakers.
Although now the need to distinguish between synchronic and diachronic language
learning is as obvious to a linguist as the distinction between the knowledge of a
language by its native speaker and the latter's use of this knowledge, there was no
such clarity in the era of Saussure. These distinctions, like many other ideas of the
scientist, stimulated the revision of traditional linguistic methods and, according to
the famous American linguist Leonard Bloomfield, laid the theoretical foundation
for a new direction of linguistic research.
LEONARD BLOOMFIELD
American linguist, born April 1, 1887 in Chicago (Illinois). After graduating from
Harvard University (19031906) and postgraduate studies at the Universities of
Wisconsin (19061908) and Chicago (19081909), he taught at the Universities of
Cincinnati (19081909) and Illinois (19101913). After a year of further studies in
Leipzig and Göttingen, he worked for eight years at the University of Illinois. In
1914 he published the work Introduction to the Study of Language (Introduction to
the Study of Language). At the University of Illinois, Bloomfield for the first time
began to study an exotic language (Tagalog, the one that is currently one of the
official languages of the Republic of the Philippines) by directly recording texts
and analyzing the material obtained in this way; the results of these studies are
presented in the book Tagalog Texts (1917). In 1921, Bloomfield moved to the
Ohio State University, and in 1927 to the University of Chicago. To this period
belongs the beginning of his studies in Indian languages, in the first order of the
Central Algonquian group (Cree, Menominee, Fox, Ojibwa), and his second
general exposition of linguistics, the book Language (Language, 1933). In 1940,
Bloomfield moved to Yale University. During the Second World War, he was one
of the main inspirers of the application of linguistics to language teaching, engaged
in both creating theoretical foundations and writing educational texts (in German,
Russian). Bloomfield died on April 18, 1949.
Bloomfield's scientific activity mainly covered three areas: Indo-European
languages, Native American languages and general linguistics. He contributed to
the study of Filipino languages and applied linguistics, especially to the theory of
language teaching (Outline Guide for the Practical Study of Foreign Languages,
1942) and to the teaching of reading. An excellent book for reading for beginners,
compiled by Bloomfield for the first and second grade, was successfully used in
the classroom, but remained unpublished.
Bloomfield's greatest contribution to linguistics as a science is contained in the
rigor of the methodology that he applied to all branches of linguistics. Before the
appearance of his book Language, linguistics was considered a humanitarian
science, which can be terribly fruitful, but in which a technique involving
postulates, hypotheses and their verification is not applicable, as in the natural
sciences. Bloomfield was the first to demonstrate the probability and concrete
ways of a unified scientific approach at all levels of linguistic analysis:
phonological, morphological, syntactic, descriptive (descriptive) and historical. In
the first part of the book, Language Bloomfield outlines a descriptive technique; in
the second, the methodology of historical language study. Bloomfield's work
served as a starting point for subsequent research in the field of linguistic analysis,
especially descriptive linguistics.
Some features of Bloomfield's initial positions and methods prevented their wide
dissemination. The desire to define linguistics on a severely scientific basis
prompted him to abstract from what is called thinking and develop a mechanistic
(non-fundamentalist) approach to the analysis of language. For the same reason,
his starting point in linguistic analysis was a formal architecture, not a role.
Nevertheless, Bloomfield's original works and the systematization and synthesis of
knowledge about language in general undertaken by him represent an impressive
contribution to the linguistics of the 20th century.
BAUDOUIN DE COURTENAY
He comes from an old French aristocratic family, which originates from King
Louis VI and counts in its ranks the crusader Baldwin of Flanders, then the
Emperor of Constantinople.
Having entered the "preparatory courses" for the Warsaw Main School, Baudouin,
under the influence of professorial methodology and the encyclopedia of academic
sciences Plebansky, decided to devote himself to linguistics and especially Slavic
languages.
Baudouin de Courtenay was one of the most influential linguists of Russia in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries . Many of his ideas were very innovative in
nature and were significantly ahead of their native time; the point of view of him as
a kind of Eastern European Saussure is very widespread, which was facilitated by
his image in creating phonology of one of the most structuralist sections of the
science of language. Baudouin's ideas are scattered in numerous small articles
dealing with diverse problems of linguistics, at one time the entire general
linguistics and Slavic studies.
Baudouin considered linguistics as a psychological and social science; taking the
position of psychologism, he considered the language of the individual to be the
only reality, while at the same time striving for an objective approach to language,
one of the first to pose a question motive about exact methods in linguistics,
proposed to distinguish words based on strict procedures. For the first time in
modern science , he divided phonetics into two disciplines: anthropophonics,
which studies the acoustics and physiology of sounds, and psychophonetics, which
studies the concepts of sounds in the human psyche, i.e. phonemes; later, these
disciplines began to be styled according to phonetics and phonology, although
some of Baudouin's direct students tried to preserve his terminology. He
introduced the terms phoneme and morpheme in their modern understanding into
the science of language, combining the concepts of root and affix in the general
concept of morpheme as the minimum significant unit of language. One of the first
refused to think of linguistics only as a historical science and studied modern
languages. He researched the interrogative motive about the causes of language
changes, was engaged in sociolinguistics, writing theory, participated in the
development of the reorganization of Russian orthography, carried out in
19171918. Edited and supplemented the dictionary of V.I. Dahl. He argued with
the logical approach to language, the young-grammatical concept of sound laws,
and the use of the metaphor of the organism in the science of language.
GEORGE LAKOFF
Lakoff was born in 1941 in a family far from the scientific elite. In 1962 he
received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and English literature from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1965 he received a doctorate in
linguistics from Indiana University. He taught at Harvard (until 1969) and at the
University of Michigan (until 1972). From 1972 to the present, Professor of the
Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lakoff gained fame in the late 1960s as the only one of the creators (along with
J.McCauley, J.Ross, P.Postal, etc.) of the generative semantics of the semantic
description model opposing the so-called interpretive approach. Her main idea was
to deny the idea of an autonomous syntax responsible for generating a purely
formal deep structure, which later only becomes filled with some semantic content
(interpreted). Instead, a concept was proposed according to which the generation of
natural language expressions begins with a certain semantic structure. The most
significant works of Lakoff of this period are the articles Linguistics and Natural
Logic (1970) and On Generative semantics (1971). The term natural logic has
gained popularity in an extended sense to denote the logic of everyday reasoning,
different from Aristotelian syllogistics and formal logic.
Since the mid-1970s, Lakoff has come to the conclusion that the postulates of
formal grammar based on traditional concepts of truth and reference are
incompatible with his desire for generalizations and the desire to link knowledge
about language with knowledge about the structure of human thinking and the
brain. Having noticed in the article Linguistic Gestalts (1977) that linguistic
theories differ, in particular, in how much of a person's linguistic abilities they tend
to read as derivatives of his other abilities, Lakoff attributed Chomsky's
generativism to one of the poles and associated himself with theories that gravitate
to the opposite pole.
Since the late 1970s, Lakoff began to develop the cognitive theory of metaphor,
which brought him wide fame outside of linguistics proper. In 1980, together with
the philosopher M. Johnson, he published the book Metaphors by which We Live,
which became an intellectual bestseller.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Noam Chomsky (Avram Noam Chomsky) was born on December 7, 1928 in
Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) in a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian
Empire. His father, William Chomsky, is a well-known Hebraist, teacher and
author of a number of works on the history of Hebrew. Noam has also been
studying this language since childhood.
After the end of World War II, Noam Chomsky entered the University of
Pennsylvania, where he majored in linguistics, philosophy and logic (graduated in
1951). In 1955 he received his doctorate. He was a student of the famous American
linguist Zellig Harris, who, being a supporter of the socialist Zionism movement,
influenced not only his scientific, but also his political views.
In 1951-1955 he worked at Harvard University. Since 1955 - at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where he is currently an honorary professor. Throughout
his career, he has lectured at major universities in the United States and other
countries.
In 1957, Chomsky published the book "Syntactic Structures", which focuses on
identifying the principles of language underlying speech activity. Its publication is
considered to be the starting point of generative linguistics. Thus, according to
Chomsky, language is a mechanism capable of generating an infinite number of
sentences using a limited set of grammatical means. At the same time, according to
Chomsky, any person has an innate ability to master the language. These
innovative ideas led to a change of direction in linguistics (vol. N. "the Chomskian
revolution"), having pushed aside structuralism and behaviorism that prevailed
earlier (according to the latter, language proficiency is the result of learning). The
theory was developed in the further works of Chomsky ("Aspects of the theory of
syntax" 1966, "Language and Thinking" 1968) and brought him wide fame, both in
the United States and abroad. She had a great influence on the development of not
only the science of language, but also psychology, philosophy, and computer
science.
Over time, Chomsky's theory evolved (so that his theories can be spoken of in the
plural), but its fundamental position, from which, according to the creator, all
others are derived - about the innate nature of the ability to speak a language -
remained unshakable. It was first expressed in Chomsky's early work "The Logical
Structure of Linguistic Theory" in 1955 (reprinted in 1975), in which he introduced
the concept of transformational grammar.
The theory considers expressions (sequences of words) corresponding to abstract
"surface structures", which, in turn, correspond to even more abstract "deep
structures". (In modern versions of the theory, the differences between surface and
deep structures have largely been erased.) Transformational rules together with
structural rules and principles describe both the creation and interpretation of
expressions. With the help of a finite set of grammatical rules and concepts, people
can create an unlimited number of sentences, including creating sentences that
have not been previously expressed by anyone. The ability to structure our
expressions in this way is an innate part of people's genetic program. We are
practically unaware of these structural principles, just as we are unaware of most of
our other biological and cognitive features.
The works of Noam Chomsky have had a significant impact on modern
psychology. From Chomsky's point of view, linguistics is a branch of cognitive
psychology. His work "Syntactic Structures" helped establish a new connection
between linguistics and cognitive psychology and formed the basis of
psycholinguistics. His theory of universal grammar was perceived by many as a
critique of the established theories of behaviourism at that time.
EMILE BENVENISTE
BENVENISTE, EMILE (1902 - 1976), French linguist. Born on March 27, 1902 in
Aleppo (Aleppo, sovr. Syria). He studied at the Sorbonne, then at the Paris Higher
School of Practical Studies with A. Meyer. Since 1937, professor at the Collège de
France (inherited the chair of A. Meyer). From 1959 to the end of his life, he was
the permanent secretary of the Paris Linguistic Society, of which he became a
member in 1920. Honorary member of many academies and scientific societies.
Benveniste died in Paris on March 3, 1976.
As an Indo - European , Benveniste sought to synthesize the traditions of classical
science of the 19th century . and the ideas of structuralism, striving for a
systematic approach (in a conversation shortly before his death, Benveniste noted
that there could be no other linguistics besides structural, by definition). Author of
works on nominal word formation and root structure in Indo-European languages.
Many of Benveniste's studies are devoted to Iranian languages, Indo-Aryan and
Hitto-Luwian languages. Benveniste is the author of a two-volume Dictionary of
Indo-European Social Terms (Dictionary of Institutions of Indo-European Peoples,
1970).
In the field of general linguistics, Benveniste published relatively small works,
mostly collected in the book Problems of General Linguistics (Problems de
linguistique generale, 1966, rus. trans. 1974). Without striving to create a
comprehensive linguistic theory, Benveniste limited himself to considering certain
important problems (classification of languages, the structure of the level model of
language, the architecture of relative sentences, subjectivity in language and the
structure of others).
Benveniste did not agree with a number of provisions of F. de Saussure, in
particular, on the arbitrariness of the sign, pointing out that arbitrariness has a
location only from the point of view of naming a non-linguistic reality, but the
tangency between the two sides of the sign and between the signs in the system is
not arbitrary. Agreeing with glossematics and descriptivists that linguistics should
formulate its concepts in its own terms, without borrowing them from other
sciences, Benveniste fixed the psychological significance of the basic concepts of
linguistics, including phonemes. He considered it necessary, without limiting
himself to the study of the linguistic form, to investigate the linguistic function:
The form receives the character of the structure precisely due to the fact that all the
components of the whole perform one or another function. These ideas of
Benveniste bring him closer to the Prague Linguistic Circle.
In the article Categories of Thought and categories of language (Catagories de
repse et catagories de langue, 1958), Benveniste emphasized that a prerequisite for
the realization of thought is its linguistic form; at the same time, it is not allowed to
believe that language is only a form of thought and that there are some general
categories of thinking independent of language (substance, number, time, etc.).
According to Benveniste, many such categories, highlighted by Aristotle, really
reflect the features of the structure of the ancient Greek language: ideas about time
are associated with the existence of a grammatical category of time in this
language, Aristotelian logic is nothing but schematized Greek syntax, etc.;
although, in fact, many of these categories are peculiar not only to ancient Greek,
but to Indo-European languages in general.
EVGENY POLIVANOV
POLIVANOV, EVGENY DMITRIEVICH (1891-1938), Russian linguist. Born on
February 28 (March 12), 1891 in Smolensk. In 1912 he graduated from the St.
Petersburg University and the Practical Oriental Academy. In 1913-1921 he taught
at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, then at the Faculty of Social Sciences of St.
Petersburg University, since 1919 professor.
In 1914-1916 he was on scientific trips to Japan. From 1917 he actively
participated in revolutionary activities, in late 1917 and early 1918 he headed the
Eastern Department of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Being an
outstanding polyglot, he successfully fulfilled a government assignment to
translate and publish secret treaties of the tsarist government with other states. A
participant in the Civil War, since 1919 a member of the Communist Party
(membership was suspended in 1926 due to Polivanov's drug addiction), in 1921
he worked in the Comintern.
In 19211926 he was a professor at the Central Asian University in Tashkent, in
1926-1929 he was head of the linguistic department of the Russian Association of
Scientific Institutes of Social Sciences in Moscow. In 1929, he made a public
speech at the Communist Academy with a report directed against the new teaching
about the language of N.Ya.Marr, after which he was subjected to harassment and
was forced to move to Central Asia once again. He conducted scientific and
pedagogical work in Samarkand (1929-1931), Tashkent (1931-1934), Frunze (now
Bishkek) (1934-1937). In August 1937, he was arrested, declared a Japanese spy
and shot in Moscow on January 25, 1938.
Polivanov is a linguist of a wide profile, he has studied many languages, primarily
Russian, Japanese, Uzbek, Dungan, etc., and a wide variety of problems of
linguistics. A student of I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay, Polivanov saved his
comprehension of phonology as psychophonetics. He worked a lot on the problems
of stress, in particular, back in the 1910s, for the first time in modern science, he
determined the nature of Japanese stress. A general outline of phonology and stress
in the languages of the world is contained in Polivanov's book Introduction to
Linguistics for Oriental Universities (1928; the second volume of the Introduction
remained unpublished and was lost). He described the structure of Japanese
dialects for the first time.
Actively studying modern languages, Polivanov sought to identify patterns of
historical changes in the language, developing the ideas of I.A.Baudouin de
Courtenay and (indirectly) N.V.Krushevsky and putting forward, in particular, the
principle of saving sound efforts, further developed by R. Jacobson and A.Martine.
He sought to create a general theory of language development, which he called
linguistic historiology, and developed its fragment theory of phonological
convergence and divergence. At the same time, he posed the problem (which still
remains largely unsolved) of linguistic forecasting, predicting the future
development of languages.
At the end of his life, he compiled the second dictionary of linguistic terms in the
USSR after this dictionary by N.N.Durnovo, published only in 1991. Many of
Polivanov's works have not been published and have not been preserved.