miércoles, 29 de febrero de 2012

London School of Linguistics


The London School of Linguistics had three main representatives:
Henry Sweet (1845 - 1912). English philologist and phonetician. An authority on Anglo-Saxon and the history of the English language, Sweet was also a pioneer in modern scientific phonetics. His History of English Sounds (1874) was a landmark in that study. In 1901 he was made a reader in phonetics at Oxford. Among his other writings are A Handbook of Phonetics (1877), A New English Grammar (2 parts, 1892–95), The History of Language (1900), The Sounds of English (1908), and works on Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and Icelandic. Sweet was the model for Professor Higgins in G. B. Shaw's play Pygmalion.
Daniel Jones (1881 - 1967). British phonetician. He was involved in the development of the International Phonetic Alphabet from 1907 and went on to invent the system of cardinal vowels and produce the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917).

J. R. Firth (1890 - 1960): professor of English at the University of the Punjab, Lahore (1920-1928), senior lecturer at University College London (1928-1938), then senior lecturer, reader and Professor of General Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1938-1956). An important figure in the foundation of linguistics as an autonomous discipline in Britain; known for his original ideas on phonology and the study of meaning.
The London School of Harry Sweet (1845-1912) and Daniel Jones (1881-1967) stressed the practical side of phonetics, and trained its students to perceive, transcribe and reproduce each minute sound distinction very precisely — far more than the American behaviourists, for example, and of course the Chomskians, who are extending models rather than testing them. And this phonetic competence was much needed when J.R. Firth (1891-1960) and others at the School of Oriental and African Studies helped to plan the national languages and their writing systems for the new Commonwealth countries. Overall, the School has been very far ranging — noting, for example how stress and tone co-occur with whole syllables, and developing a terminology to cope: a basis for poetic metre. Firthian analysis also finds a place for aesthetic considerations and develops a system of mutually exclusive options, somewhat like Saussure but more socially and purposively orientated.
Firth himself tried to base a theory of meaning on such choice-systems, but the approach has not been generally accepted. Not only was it rather simplistic, but confused the scientific invariance of linguistic rules with the unregimented and creative way that human beings get their meaning across.
The London approach to phonology has bequeathed many fruitful ideas to current theorizing and the theory of syntax known as systemic grammar also owes its origins to the London School.


Bibliography

Chapman, S. & Routledge, P. (eds) (2005) Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pp 80-86.

Encyclopedia: Sweet, Henry. (s.f.). Recuperado el 29 de febrero de 2012, de Infoplease: http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0847401.html
Jones, Daniel. (s.f.). Recuperado el 29 de febrero de 2012, de Oxford Dictionary: http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/Jones,+Daniel
Linguistics: a brief history. (s.f.). Recuperado el 29 de febrero de 2012, de Textetc: http://www.textetc.com/theory/linguistics.html

miércoles, 15 de febrero de 2012

Prague School summary

PRINCIPAL IDEAS ABOUT THE PRAGUE SCHOOL
The hallmark of Prague School linguistics was that it saw language in terms of function. I mean by this not merely that members of the Prague School thought of language as a whole as serving a purpose, which is a truism that would hardly differentiate them from others, but they analysed a given language with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language.
The analyst seems to take much the same attitude to the linguistic structure as one might take to a work of art, in that it does not usually occur to him to a particular element and ask ''What's that for?''.
Prague linguistics, on the other hand, looked at languages as one might look at a motor, seeking to understand what the jobs various components were doing and how the nature of one components determined the nature of others.
'Functional Sentence Perspective' by recent writers working in the Prague tradition (or, at least , many) sentences are uttered in order to give the hearer some information.
According to Mathesius, the need for continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts (which , may be, very unequal in length) : the theme ,which refers to something about which the hearer already knows (often because it has been discussed in immediately preceding sentences) , and the rheme, which states some new fact about the given topic.
A related point is that many Prague linguistics were actively interested in questions of standardizing linguistics usage.
There have been certain developments whose roots lie in Prague School thought but which have come to be fairly clearly scientific in their nature. The first of these may be called the therapeutic theory of sound-change.
The Prague School argues  for system in diachronic too, and indeed it claims that linguistic change is determined by, as well determining, synchronic état de language.
Jakobson was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He spent much of the Second World War at the Ecole Nobre des Hautes Études which was established in New York City as home for refugee scholars from Europe. Jakobson's intellectual interests are broad and reflect those of Prague School as a whole; he has written a great deal , for instance, on the structuralism approach to literature.
One of the characteristics of the Prague approach to language was readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative 'systems', 'registers' , or 'styles', where American Descriptivists tended to insist on a trating a language as a simple unitary system.
A Prague linguist would be ready, indeed eager, to say that English has a system of native phonemes which excludes even though that sound may occur in a subsidiary stock of borrowed words ,and that if the phonology of rapid English differs their respective from that English spoken slowly then their respective grammars should be kept distinct rather than merged together.
Labov's work is based on recorded interviews with sizable samples of speakers of various categories in some speech-community, the interviews being designed to elicit examples of some linguistic form.
Saussure stressed the social nature of language and he insisted that linguistics as a social science must ignore historical data because for the speaker ,the history of this language does not exist- a point seemed undeniable. The Prague School, and now Labov are among the linguistics who have taken the social dimension of language most seriously ;and they have ended by destroying Saussure0s sharp separation between synchronic and diachronic study.

sábado, 11 de febrero de 2012

Search The Words!






 1.    Linguistics: The scientific study of language; also called linguistic science. Linguistics covers different approaches and different areas of investigation such as sounds systems, sentence structure, and etcetera.

 2.    Semantics: A major branch of linguistics devoted to the study of meaning in language. The term is also used in philosophy and logic, but not with the same range of meaning or emphasis as in linguistics.

 3.    Prescriptive linguistics: A term used by linguistics to characterize any approach which attempts to lay down rules of correctness as to how language should be used. Prescriptivism aims to preserve imagined standards by insisting on norm of usage and criticizing departures from these norms.

 4.    Descriptive linguistics: It concentrates on establishing the facts of a particular language system. Its aim is to describe the facts of linguistic usage as they are, and not how they ought to be, with reference to some imaginated ideal state.

 5.    Ethnography: The study of life and culture of a society or ethnic group, especially by personal observation.

 6.    Ethnolinguistics: A branch of linguistics which studies language in the relation to the investigation of ethnic types and behavior.

 7.    Sociolinguistics: A branch of linguistics which studies all aspect of the relation between language and society.

 8.    Generative grammar: A set of rules whereby permissible sentences may be generated from the elements of a language.

 9.    Universal grammar: A theory which claims to account for the grammatical competence of every adult no matter what language he or she speaks.
10.   Neurolinguistics: The study of the function the brain performs in language learning and language use.

miércoles, 1 de febrero de 2012

Welcome!


We are a group of students of linguistic sciences trying to pass a subject named Linguistic Theory 2 ;) anyway...
In this blog you'll find a lot of information about linguistics =)
Through games you'll learn about the history of linguistics, some famous linguists, vocabulary, grammar, etc.. etc..
We hope you like it and comment about the topics mentioned here! (or... whatever you want!)


Enjoy!!