Early linguistic scholarship

Early linguistic scholarship was often motivated by the need to preserve sacred and ancient texts for future generations. We owe much of our grammatical meta-language to the descriptions set out for Greek, which were designed to facilitate reading of the Homeric texts, dating from around the eighth century bce; our knowledge of Sanskrit likewise derives largely from descriptions designed to preserve religious texts from the Vedic period (1200–1000 bce). In the Europe of the Middle Ages, the teaching of Classical Latin for liturgical purposes grew in importance as the Romance languages (e.g. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) moved ever further from their Latin parent.

Throughout history, debate has raged between two approaches, which might be labelled empiricism and rationalism. Very broadly, empiricists were (and are) concerned with the recording and analysis of observable facts of language structure as revealed in speech and writing, while rationalists seek to account for language in terms of innate abilities or ideas. Linked to the latter is a concern with finding universals, i.e. features common to all languages rather than just to individual ones. Where the Port-Royal Grammars of the seventeenth century proposed universal linguistic categories on the basis of those found in the Classical languages, the North American Descriptivists of the twentieth century celebrated linguistic relativity, i.e. the view that each language conceptualizes the world in its own way. The pendulum was to swing back in favor of universalism with the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957, heralding the emergence of the generative paradigm, which started from the belief that human beings are innately equipped to learn language, and that therefore at an underlying level all languages must be structurally similar.

Rationalists v. empiricists

Rationalists linked language to innate mental structures, while empiricists denied the existence of these structures and saw language as moulded by sensory experience.

A final important theme is that of linguistics as a science. The scientific model for linguistics has, however, varied over time, from comparisons to geology or natural history in the nineteenth century, with its focus on regularities in sound changes, to an emphasis on ‘mathematical’ descriptive rules in the twentieth. Part of the requirement for treating linguistics as a science, was that language be studied on its own terms: in Saussure’s words, ‘en elle-même et pour elle-même’ (in itself and for itself).

However, it ultimately proved impossible to view language in isolation from other aspects of human life. Language variation, for example, cannot be divorced from social factors such as class or regional origin with which it correlates. Part of speakers’ unconscious knowledge of their mother tongue is clearly of a social nature: English speakers, for example, can make informed judgements about a person’s regional origins or social background on the basis of his/her speech. The relationship between language and society is explored in the subdiscipline of sociolinguistics. Similarly, meaning cannot be properly understood in isolation from context and the knowledge shared by participants in an interaction, which form the subject matter of pragmatics.

The emergent fields of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and biolinguistics all attest to the interaction of linguistic study with other fields of scientific enquiry, while the branch of linguistics known as stylistics uses theories of language to illuminate the study of literature.