Early- to mid-20th century: descriptive linguistics

In the 20th century, the emphasis shifted from language change to lan­guage description. Instead of looking at how a selection of items changed in a number of different languages, linguists began to concen­trate on describing single languages at one particular point in time.

If any one person can be held responsible for this change of empha­sis, it was the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who is sometimes labelled 'the father of modern linguistics'. Amazingly, he died without having written any major work on general linguistics. But his students collected together his lecture notes after his death and published them under the title Course in General Linguistics (1915), which exerted a major influence on the course of linguistics,

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particularly in Europe.

De Saussure's crucial contribution was his explicit and reiterated statement that all language items are essentially interlinked. This was an aspect of language which had not been stressed before. Nobody had seriously examined the relationship of each element to all the others. As noted earlier, it was de Saussure who first suggested that language was like a game of chess, a system in which each item is defined by its relationship to all the others. His insistence that ian-guage is a carefully built structure of interwoven elements initiated the era of structural linguistics.

The term 'structural linguistics' is sometimes misunderstood. It does not necessarily refer to a separate branch or school of linguistics. 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. Misunderstandings some­times arise because the label 'structuralist' is often attached to the descriptive linguists who worked in the USA between 1930 and 1960. Let us now turn to these.

In America, linguistics began as an offshoot of anthropology. Around the beginning of the 20th century, anthropologists were eager to record the culture of the fast-dying American-Indian tribes, and the American-Indian languages were one aspect of this. Although often interesting, the work of those early scholars was, for the most part, haphazard and lacking cohesion. There were no firm guidelines for linguists to follow when they attempted to describe exotic languages. This state of affairs changed with the publication in 1933 of Leonard Bloomfield's compre­hensive work entitled simply Language, which attempted to lay down rigorous procedures for the description of any language.

Bloomfield considered that linguistics should deal objectively and systematically with observable data. So he was more interested in the way items were arranged than in meaning. The study of meaning was not amenable to rigorous methods of analysis and was therefore, he concluded, the weak point in language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far beyond its present state'.

Bloomfield had immense influence - far more than the European linguists working during this period - and the so-called 'Bloomfieldian era' lasted for more than twenty years. During this time, large numbers of linguists, concentrated on writing descriptive grammars of unwritten languages. This involved first finding native speakers of the language concerned and collecting sets of utterances from them. Second, it involved analysing the corpus of collected utterances by

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studying the phonological and syntactic patterns of the language con­cerned, as far as possible without recourse to meaning. Items were (in theory) identified and classified solely on the basis of their distribu­tion within the corpus.

In the course of writing such grammars, a number of problems arose which could not be solved by the methods proposed by Bloomfield. So an enormous amount of attention was paid to the refinement of analytical techniques. For many, the ultimate goal of linguistics was the perfection of discovery procedures - a set of principles which would enable a linguist to 'discover' (or perhaps more accurately, 'uncover') in a foolproof way the linguistic units of an unwritten language. Because of their overriding interest in the inter­nal patterns or 'structure' of the language, such linguists are some­times labelled 'structuralists'.

The Bloomfieldians laid down a valuable background of linguistic methodology for future generations. But linguistics also became very narrow. Trivial problems of analysis became major controversial issues, and no one who was not a linguist could understand the issues involved. 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.

Mid- to late-20th century: