1. Western
Scholarship
20th – 21st Century
Prepared by :
1. Samini A.
2. Shareen Lee
3. Thanavathi

2. TIMELINE
Structuralism
20th century
Sassure, Bloomfield
Generativism
Chomsky, Shaumyan
21th century
Functionalism
Simon Dik, Michael Halliday, Robert van Valin

3. Structuralism
When?
• Early 20th century 1920s
1930s – 1960s

4. Father of Structuralism…Ferdinand de Saussure
What?
• Language has a structure
- Language is a structure in which each
element interact
 Swiss Linguist
• Language is a system of signs
 Studied and taught in
University of Geneva


Intellectual ability at 14
Learnt Greek, Latin, - Noise is only language when it
Sanskrit


Born in 1857, died at 55
in 1913
PhD Locative Absolute in
expresses or communicates idea.
• Language operates at two
Sanskrit
 Famous bible “Cours de
linguistique generale”
(1916)
levels: Langue and Parole
- Langue – Abstract system
EUROPEAN STRUCTURALISM
Parole – The actual speech

5. Leonard Bloomfield
What?
• Language is a descriptive science.
-Describe what people say. Not what
people should say.
• The primary form of language is the
spoken one.
- Not every language has a written form.
 Led the development of
structural linguistics in the 1930s
Spoken comes first, then the written.
and 1940s.


Born in 1887, died at 62 in 1949.
Influential textbook, • Language is a system.
Language,published in 1933.
Comprehensive description on - Smaller units are arranged systematically
American structural linguistics.
to form the larger ones.
• Language is observable speech, not
knowledge.
- Language should be based on observable samples
(corpus/corpora).

6. GENERATIVISM

7. GENERATIVISM
Generativism can designate an approach
for relating language to the
intuitive knowledge of speakers and to the
mental capacities of humans at large.
When?
– Mid - Late 20th Century (1960s)
(Robert de Beaugrande)

8. Who?
• Dec 7 1928
• American Linguist,
History Philosopher, Cognitive
Avram Noam Chomsky Scientist, Logician,
Activist
• Highly credited for the
development of
Generativism
What • Has a significant impact
on the intellectual
community since the
mid 20th Century
• Development of the
Theories of generative
grammar
• Classification of formal
Contributions
language properties in the
Chomsky Hierarchy
• Critiques of the school of
Behaviorism

9. GENERATIVE THEORY
What?
explains language as a form of knowledge, a
unique (human) capacity which is part of our
cognitive makeup
. basic form of language Universal Grammar
is a set of universal syntactic rules primary objective
and of the
.
underlies the grammars of all languages discipline of linguistics

10. UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Chomsky’s theories grew out of criticism of Behaviourism.
In learning language,
complex grammars
are acquired rapidly.
Mental grammar is
innate and universal

11. SINS OF GENERATIVISM
confounds the
phonological
Shaumyan level with the
(1987: 30) morphological
level
Generativism
distorts linguistic
reality in the
following ways:
rejects the
phonological
level.
uses fictitious confounds
entities called the
deep structures constituency
and fictitious relations
phonological with linear
representations word order

12. FUNCTIONALISM

13. FUNCTIONAL THEORIES OF GRAMMAR
 approaches to the study of language that see the functions
of language.
 pay attention to the way language is actually used in
communicative context.
 differs significantly from other linguistic theories which
stress purely formal approaches to grammar.
 The structuralist functionalism of the Prague school, was
the earliest functionalist framework developed in the
1920s.

14. Simon Dik – a language is in the
first place conceptualized as an
instrument of social instrument
among human beings.
Danish
functional
grammar – Michael Halliday –
pragmatics linguistics as study
and discourse of “how people
Framework exchange meaning
by ‘languaging’.
Robert Van Valin – Sentence is
formulated in terms of its semantic
structure and communicative
functions.

15. Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. England :
Penguin. p.22
Widdowson, H.G. (2000).Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
oen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_theories_of_gram
mar
owww.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/222121/funct
ionalism
ohttp://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=2008
0625033158AAAD0DY
ohttps://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/
docs/Michael_Halliday.html
ohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism
ohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Bloomfield
ohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure