Why did scholars make repeated attempts to group languages according to their origin?
How many languages are there in the world?
Is the number of them growing or diminishing?
How do they differ from one another?
What scholars were the first to develop the idea of language relationship?
In connection with what studies was the historical comparative linguistics created?
What stimulated the appearance of the historical comparative method in linguistics?
Who was the first to put forward a scientific hypothesis that Sanskrit was related to some European languages?
How did Sir William Jones ground his ideas?
What was the principal line of European linguistics in the 19th century?
Who continued to develop the historical comparative method in the 19th and 20th centuries?
What are the aims of the historical comparative method?
* * *
What lingual elements are called "prehistoric"?
What is meant by the term 'reconstruction'?
For what other purposes is the historical comparative method used besides reconstructing prehistorically forms?
How do families of related languages arise?
What causes the splitting of languages?
What epoch in the history of peoples is characterized by language divisions?
What language is called the 'parent language'?
Can the parent language continue to exist in living speech after a family of languages has arisen out of it?
Do all the kindred languages survive after the splitting of the parent language?
What features of resemblance between languages prove their kinship?
Why is the arbitrary character of the lingual sign so important for the historical comparative method?
What resemblances between languages do not evidence their kinship?
* * *
Why must we compare the elements of the basic word stock and grammatical affixes to prove that the languages are kindred?
Give examples of related native words in the Indo-European languages.
Why is it important for the comparative study of languages to note the uneven character of language development?
Why do languages develop unevenly?
How are reconstructions formed?
What notation is used to represent historical changes in scientific treatises?
Give examples.
What are the main limitations of the historical comparative method?
What material is analisable by the historical comparative method?
Are all the common features of related languages inherited directly from the parent language?
What is dangerous in elaborating reconstructions?
Can the historical comparative method be applied to spoken languages?
Is the historical comparative method antiquated?
What other families of languages besides the Indo-European are being studied by the comparative linguistics?
Lecture № 3
Developing of ideas and schools in modern linguistics.
The main method of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century was the historical comparative method. It was for the scientific study of languages, it had definite shortcomings and limitations.
The historical comparative method gave no exact definition of the object of linguistics as an independent science. As Louis Hjelmslev pointed out, "The linguistics of the past-even of the recent past—has concerned itself with the physical and physiological, psychological and logical, sociological and historical precipitations of languages, not of the language itself."
The study of numerous languages of the world was neglected.
It was mainly the historical changes of phonological and morphological units that were studied. Syntax hardly existed.
As a reaction to the atomistic approach to language a new theory appeared.
The first linguists to speak of language as a system or a structure of smaller systems were de Courtenay, Fortunatov and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de-Saussure.
The work that came to be most widely known is de-Saussure's. Course in General Linguistics, posthumously compiled from his pupils' lecture-notes between 1906 and 1911.
De-Saussure's main ideas are as follows:
1. Language is understood as a system of signals, interconnected and interdependent. It is this network of interdependent elements that form the object of linguistics as an independent science.
2. Language as a system of signals may be compared to other systems of signals, such as writing, alphabets for the deaf-and-dumb, military signals, symbolic rites, forms of courtesy, etc. Thus, language may be considered as being the object of a more general science—semeiology—a science of the future which would study different systems of signals used in human societies.
3. Language has two aspects: the system of language and the manifestation of this system in social intercourse—speech. The system of language is a body of linguistic units— sounds, affixes, words, grammar rules and rules of lexical series. The system of language enables us to speak and to be understood since it is known to all the members of a speech community. Speech is based on the system of language, and it gives the linguist the possibility of studying the system.
De-Saussure gave the following diagram to illustrate his theory of the associative series of the system of language
Educate
| education | instruct | relate | debate |
| educates | teach | locate | prelate |
| etc. | enlighten | translate | etc. |
| etc. | etc. |
4. The linguistic sign is bilateral.. It has both form and meaning. We understand the meaning of the linguistic sign as reflecting the elements (objects, events, situations) of the outside world.
5. The linguistic sign is 'absolutely arbitrary1 and 'relatively motivated'. This means that if we take a word 'absolutely' disregarding its connections to other words in the system, we shall find nothing obligatory in the relation of its phonological form to the object it denotes. This fact becomes evident when we compare the names of the same objects in different languages, e.g.:
| English: | ox | hand | winter |
| French: | boeuf | main | hiver |
| Russian: | бык | рука | зима |
The 'relative motivation' means that the linguistic sign connections with other linguistic signs of the system both in form and meaning These connections are different in different languages and show the difference of ' the segmentation of the picture of the world'.
6. Language is to be studied as a system in the 'synchronic plane', at a given moment of its existence, in the plane of simultaneous coexistence of elements. We understand the synchronic plane as a given moment of the historical development of the language studied.
7. The system of language is to be studied on the basis of the oppositions of rare units. The linguistic elements can be found by means of segmenting the flow of speech and comparing the isolated segments, e.g. in 'the strength of the wind' and in 'to collect one's strength' we recognize one and the same unit 'strength' in accord with its meaning and form; but in 'on the strength of this decision' the meaning is not the same and we recognize a different linguistic unit.
* * *
There were three main linguistic schools that developed these new notions: the Prague School that created Functional linguistics, the Copenhagen School which created Glossematics, and the American School that created Descriptive linguistics.
The Prague school
The Prague School was founded in 1929.
The main contribution of there linguistics to modern linguistics is the technique for determining the units of the phonological structure of languages. The basic method is the use of oppositions of speech-sounds that change the meaning of the words. The basic definitions are given by Trubetzkoy:
Point 1: If in a language two sounds occur in the same position and can be substituted for each other without changing the meaning of the word, such sounds are optional variants of one and the same phoneme.
Point 2: If two sounds occur in the same position and cannot be substituted for each other without changing the meaning of the word, these two sounds are phonetic realizations of two different phonemes.
Point 3: If two similar sounds never occur in the same position, they are positional variants of the same phoneme.
Trubetzkoy developed an elaborate set of contrast criteria for the identification and classification of phonological oppositions. The most widely known is the binary opposition in which one member of the contrastive pair is characterized by the presence of a certain feature which is lacking in the other member. The element possessing the feature in question is called the 'marked' (strong) member of the opposition, the other is called the 'unmarked' (weak) member of the opposition. A phoneme is distinguished from all the other phonemes by a set of distinctive features, e.g. [p] is distinguished from [b] as a voiceless sound, from [t] as a bilabial, from [m] as having no nazalisation, etc. Thus any phoneme is defined as a set or 'bundle' of differential (distinctive) features.
He has stressed the fact that his technique of analysis may be used in other domains of linguistics. The method of oppositions has been successfully extended to grammar and semantics.
* * *
The principle of binary oppositions is suitable for describing morphological categories. As I. B. Khlebnikova points out, " binary relations penetrate practically every plane of language-phonological, morphological, and syntactic, but are especially evident on the morphological level, which reflects the structural organization of a particular language ".
The principle of privatize oppositions has been used by Roman Jakobson for describing the morphological categories. Jakobson proposed the following three distinctive features: A—direction, B — objectiveness, C—periphery. The result is represented in the following table:
 Distinctive features
Cases
| A | B | C |
| Nominative …………………………... | - | - | - |
| Generative …………………………… | - | + | - |
| Dative ………………………………… | + | - | + |
| Accusative …………………………… | + | - | - |
| Instrumental …………………………. | - | - | + |
| Prepositional …………………………. | - | + | + |
where + (plus) means the presence of the feature in question, thus characterizing the corresponding case as the marked member of the opposition, and — (minus) indicates the absence of the feature in question, thus characterizing the corresponding case as the unmarked member of the opposition. Thus the three rather abstract distinctive features proposed by Jakobson form 'bundles' one and only one of which is typical for each of the 6 Russian cases.
The principle of privative oppositions can be easily applied to English morphology.
The most general case is that system of tense-forms of the English verb. The tense-forms of the English verb are divided into two halves: that of the tense-forms of the present plane, and that of the tenses of the past plane. The former comprises the Present, Present Perfect, Present Continuous, Present Perfect Continuous, and the Future tense-forms; the latter includes Past, Past Perfect, Past Continuous, Past Perfect Continuous and the Future-in-the-Past. The second half is characterized by specific formal features—either the suffix -ed (or its equivalents) appear, or a phonetic modification of the root. The past is thus a marked member of the opposition 'present—past' as against the present sub-system, which is the unmarked member.
It was pointed out that "the opposition between perfect and non-perfect forms is shown to be that between a marked and an unmarked item, the perfect forms being marked both in meaning (denoting precedence) and in morphological characteristics ('have + second participle'), and the non-perfect forms—unmarked both in meaning and in morphological characteristics.
The obvious opposition within the category of voice, is that between active and passive. A few pairs of parallel forms involving different categories of aspect, tense, correlation, and mood illustrate the opposition of active/passive, namely:
| invites | - is invited |
| is inviting | - is being invited |
| invited | - was invited |
| has invited | - has been invited |
| should invite | - should be invited |
"From the point of view of form, the passive voice is the marked member of the opposition: its characteristic is the pattern 'be + second participle', whereas the active voice is unmarked: its characteristic is the absence of that pattern."
* * *
The principle of privative oppositions has been recently used to represent the traditional sentence-parts of the basic two-member sentence type. The parts of such a sentence type are defined by their position in the structure of the sentence: the subject to the left of the verb-predicate, the object to the right of the verb, the adverbial modifier to the right of the object; the attribute, that may appear as an optional sentence-part, occupies the position in contact to the noun. The syntactic relations of the sentence parts are characterized by three distinctive features: A — subordination, B—predicativeness and C— objectiveness —feature connected, but not without reservation, with the possibility of changing the active to the passive construction. Thus we have:
| Distinctive features Sentence parts |  A
| B | C |
| Subject............................................... ………… | - | - | - |
| Predicate.............................................. ………… | - | + | - |
| Attribute.............................................. ………… | + | - | - |
| Object.............................................. ………… | + | + | + |
| Adverbial modifier..………. | + | + | - |
An application of the oppositions method has also been extended to describe different types of simple sentences in Modern English. The steps are as follows:
Step 1. Different sentence-types are those that cannot be substituted for each other without changing the structural meaning of the sentence. Here belong:
(a) two-member sentences as against one-member sentences, e.g. "John worked" as against "John!" or "Work!";
(b) sentences differing in the arrangement of the main constituents in basic sentences, e.g. "We saw a river there" as against "There is a river there";
(c) sentences differing in the case-form of the subject-noun, e.g.: "Mary was a happy girl" as against "Mary's was a happy life".
Step 2. Variants of one and the same sentence-type are those that can be substituted for each other without changing the structural meaning of the sentence or distorting it beyond recognition. The following variants are recognized:
(a) positional variants—context sensitive sentences in which one or more elements are left out but can be unambiguously inferred from the preceding sentence. There are two kinds of positional variants:
Included positional variants —such as can be placed in the position occupied in the preceding sentence by a question word or a word which is repeated in the positional variant, e.g.: "Who gave you that?—Soames." "Where did she see him?—In the park." "What do you think I am made of? Leather?" "Soames gave it her."—"Who?" etc.
Adjoined positional variants —such as can be optionally added to the preceding sentence, e.g. "I am leaving. Tonight. Immediately."
(b) Optional variants —extended sentences as against unexpended sentences. The unextended sentences being understood as having objects, etc. in accord with the valence of the verb, e.g. "She saw him" and "She saw him yesterday in the park"; "Put these things on the table" and "Put these things on the table immediately", etc.
(c) Stylistic variants, which may be:
emotional: " I saw him!" "She is such a darling!"
colloquial: "You done it." "You going to work here again'?" "Father in town?" "Lost my job, Vic." "Ever had practice?", etc.
Step 3. Sentence-types in which one or more elements seem to be left out but cannot be unambiguously inferred from the context are different sentence-types, e. g.:
There is nothing to complain of
Nothing to complain of
We (I) have nothing to complain of
There is a change coming.
A change coming.
A change is coming.
There are two windows lighted.
Two windows lighted.
Two windows are lighted.
There are no objections.
No objections.
We (I) have no objections.
It is cold.
Cold.
I feel cold.
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