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Greek philosophers
Plato and Aristotle made contributions to the study of language. -
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William Jones discovered similarities of languages.
(Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic) -
Darwin Published the Evolution of language alongside the evolution of species. -
'Young Grammarians' claimed that language change is 'regular'
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Fernand de Saussure shifted from language change to language description.
His contribution was his explicit and reiterated
statement that alIlanguage items are essentialIy interlinked and his insistence that language is a carefully built structure of
interwoven elements initiated the era of structurallinguistics. -
Saussure died without having written any major work on general linguistics. But his students colIected together his lecture notes after his death. This year was published 'Course in general Linguistics',Which exerted a major influence in Europe. -
Publication of 'Language' by Leonard Bloomfield's which attempted to lay down rigorous procedures for the description of any languages.
Bloomfield had immense influence and the socalIed 'Bloomfieldian era' lasted for more than 20 years. -
The Bloomfieldians laid down a valuable background of
linguistic methodology for future generations. But linguistics
aIso became very narrow. Trivial problems of analysis became
major controversial issues, and no one who was not a linguist
could understand the issues involved. Then linguistics become an abstruse subject of little interests to anyone outside it. -
This year was published 'Syntactic structures' by Chomsky, this started a Revolution in Linguistics.
He was the most
influential linguist of the century.
Chomsky initiated the era of generative linguistics that was a so-called transformational one. He also redirected attention towards Ianguage universaIs and regards it as a major task of linguistics to
explore its make-up. -
He has directed attention towards the language potential of human beings.
Optimality theory and corpus linguistics emerges. -