A Short History of Linguistics: With help from the Wikipedia

Language as a Structural System

Panini (4^th c. BCE), India: First structural linguist, who examined Sanskrit.

Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Method of Reconstruction:

Sir William Jones (1746-1794), England:

"The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure: more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family."

European Structuralism:

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), Switzerland, founder of structural linguistics.

•Abstracting away from diachronic development, proposed that a language can be viewed synchronically (at any slice of time) as a formal system of signs.

•Did a comparative study of Indo-European languages, and predicted the existence of laryngeals at a previous stage. Laryngeals were later discovered to exist in ancient Hittite:

"A sign is the basic unit of language (a given language at a given time). Every language is a complete system of signs. Parole (the speech of an individual) is an external manifestation of language."

"A linguistic system is a series of differences of sounds combined with a series of differences of ideas."

"The connection between the signifier and signified is arbitrary."

"In language there are only differences, and no positive terms."

Americasn Structubralism: Anthropologists and linguists, working in the U.S.A. and Canada, who studied the indigenous languages of North America in the first half of the 20^th century. They proposed that each language can be studied as a system, but were skeptical about importing grammatical notions from the study of European languages into the description of these very different languages.

Franz_Boas (1858-1942), Edward Sapir (1884-1939), Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949)

Generative-Transformational Grammar:

Noam Chomsky (1928- ), U.S.A.: Proposed that language can be modeled as a mathematical system making use of transformational rules linking deep structures (D-structure) to surface structure (S-structure). Proposed that the capacity for and structural organization of human languages is an innate endowment of the human species (Universal Grammar), so that young children can easily learn any language of the world that they are confronted with, by figuring out based on experience with their language how to set the "parameters" that distinguish different languages. Emphasizes how similar different languages are to each other, and emphasizes that language is essentially a mental phenomenon.