The Study of Language

The discipline of linguistics can be likened to a parthway which is being cut through the dark and mysterious forest of language. There have been three major directions in linguistics in the past two centuries. 

Nineteenth century: historical linguistics

Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made major contributions to the study of language. Plato is said to have been the first person to distinguish between nouns and verbs. 

Sir William jones, read a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta pointing out that Sanskrit (the old Indian language), Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all had striking structural similarities. So impressive were these likenesses that these languages must spring from one common source, he concluded. 

Early- to mid- 20th century: descriptive linguistics

The term “structural linguistics” is sometimes misunderstood. All linguistics since de Saussure is structural, as “structural” in this broad sense merely means the recognition that language is a patterned system composed of interdependent elements, rather than a collection of unconnected individual items. 

Bloomfield considered that linguisticcs should  deal objectively and 

systematically  with observable data. He concluded, “the weak point in 

language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far

beyond its present state".   

By around 1950 linguistics had lost touch with other disciplines and become an 

abstruse subject of little interest to anyone outside it. It was ready for a

revolution.

Leonard Bloomfield                                               Ferdinand de Saussure

Mid-to late-20th century: generative linguistics and the search for universals

In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. Noam Chomsky, then aged twenty-nine

a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a book called

Syntactic Structures. He has, in the opinion of many, transformed linguistics

from a relatively obscure discipline of interest mainly to PhD students and 

future missionaries into  a major social science of direct relevance to

psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and others.

A grammar which consists of a set of statements or rles which specify which

sequences of a language are possible, and which impossible, is a generative

grammar. 

                                                         Chomsky