American linguistics

From Whitney to Greenberg

El Mouatamid Ben Rochd

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2022
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9782322419265
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

THIS BOOK is an overview of American linguistics ever since its earliest beginnings, with its different trends: ANTHROPOLOGY (Franz Boas), ETHNOLOGISTS (Edward Sapir), BEHAVIORISM (Leonard Bloomfield), GENERATIVISM (Noam Chomsky), COGNITIVISM (Ronald Langacker), SOCIOLINGUISTICS (William Labov), BIBLE TRANSLATORS (Kenneth Pike), and LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS (Joseph Harold Greenberg). Das E-Book American linguistics wird angeboten von Books on Demand und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Sapir, Bloomfield, Chomsky, Greenberg, Whitney

Aristotle

[Chomsky has been called the new Aristotle]

Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander the great he was born in Macedonia in the year 384 BC and together with Plato is one of the greatest philosophers of all times. He was a true academic. He dealt with physics, astronomy, rhetoric literature, political sciences and history. His principles are considered as the premises of modern scientific thought.

He was a philosopher but philosophy meant all fields of knowledge as previously mentioned. It was referred to as wisdom. He was renown for his logic essentially and set its foundations in his book known as the Organon. This helped him in organizing the way of correct thought so as to answer the sophists who were diverting thinking as they could defend the thing and its opposite and deny reality more than the abstract as to deny the existence of God and the dogma of creation by accident.

Generative Morphology

Generative grammar is interested in providing a precise and explicit characterization of “what it is that you know when you know a language?” The same thing holds true for the domain of morphology.

Morphology deals with word structure and word formation. It is part of that knowledge of language which linguists regard as properly linguistic. Thus morphology is something which linguistic theory has to account for, in the same way that it accounts for knowledge phonological patterns and knowledge of syntactic structures.

From the word morphology, we extract the word morpheme: it is the minimal meaning full unit/element in language. It anti and ism tend to be used like words, and probably are words (in addition of being morphemes). The word, establish is also a morpheme (in addition of being a word) what unites all these entities is that:

(i) they seem to contribute some sort of meaning or at least function, to the word of which they are a compound and,

(ii) (ii) they can themselves be decomposed into smaller morphemes.

It is useful to distinguish those morphemes which are also words in their own right from those which only appear as a proper subpart of a word. The forms are called free morphemes and the latter bound morphemes (see Bloomfield 1933)

TYPES OF MORPHEMES

Root: is the irreducible core of a word, with absolutely nothing else attached to it. It is the part that is always preset, possibly with some modification.

Free morphemes

Lexical morphemes Function words: thy

They are nouns, verbs designate grammatical information

Adjectives, prepositions or logical relations in a

Or adverb sentence. Typical function

Such morphemes carry words include the following:

Most of the ‘semantic articles, demonstratives,

Content’ of utterances pronouns, conjunctions.

Infix

Is an affix inserted into the root itself. Infixes are very common in Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew. Infixes are rare in English.

Stem

It is that part of the word that is in existence before any inflectional affixes have been added. Consider the examples below:

Noun Plural

cat -s

worker -s

In the word form cats, the plural inflectional suffix –s is attached to the simple stem cat, which is a bare root. In workers the same inflectional suffix comes.

Typically, a morphologically complex (or polymorphy) word will contain a central morpheme, which contributes the basic meaning, and collection of other morphemes serving to notify this meaning in various ways. Consider the word disagreements in English, we dissect a basic morpheme which is agree and three bound morphemes which are dis-, -ment and -s. we call agree the root and the other (bound) morphemes) affixes. Dis- which comes to the left of the root is a prefix, while the morphemes –ment and –s which come to the right are suffixes. The whole word disagreements is called a stem.

One of the facts about morphemes in linguistics theory is that they leave a physical (i.e. phonetic and phonological) form and also z meaning or function within the grammatical system.

Consider the plural endings in the words below:

(1)

Cats

Dogs

Horses

The regular plural ending (which is regarded as a morpheme) is realized in three different pronunciations s z and iz, since these three elements all represent a morpheme they are called morphs. These are the realizations (i.e. alternative forms) of a single morpheme which we can represent as _z. we say that the morphs s, z, iz are allomorphs of –z and that the plural morpheme exhibits allomorphy. The allomorphy in(1) is conditioned entirely by phonology. By this I mean that the choice of the allomorph for the plural suffix depends solely on the pronunciation of the stem.

(Allomorphy, e.g. good better best go went , park-ed, miss-ed, clean-ed. It should be observed that the morpheme (-ed) is realized in three different shapes depending on the nature of the last consonant of the base).

Types of morphological operations word building process. By morphological operation, we mean the different ways in which the phological form of words are obtained.

Traditional grammarians usually distinguished between two main types of morphological operations: inflectional (i.e. boys), and

Derivation (change the meaning of the base e.g. kind un-kind-ly]

Generative Phonology

The ‘Phoneme’ was the target of the American Descriptivists. By all means “discovery procedures’ were made to decipher this meaningful ‘atom’ of language from the continuum stretch of sounds of alien (Native American) languages, under study.

‘For Chomsky, on the other hand, it might well be claimed that syntax is the heart of linguistic science.’ (see Samson 1980). Still Chomsky states that Phonology is more interesting to study as it is easier to reach conclusions in it than in syntax. Chomsky’s grammar defines or rather ‘generates’ (in the mathematical jargon) well formed sentences. Generative phonology is the creation of Morris Halle of MIT, himself a student of Jakobson.

Bloomfield, and many of his co-workers believed that the ‘phoneme’ was the ultimate unit in the building of language. Rather, the new approach is based on the ‘distinctive parameter bundles’. We do indeed find many examples of alternations that affects ‘natural classes’ of sounds rather than single ones. So phonology must be dealt with in terms of phonetic features rather than in terms of unitary segments.

Consider the pair ‘Obstruants/sonorant’ those interrupting the air flow and those permitting the free air way. Both behave as a natural class. Final voiced obstruants are devoiced e.g. German word final [d] becomes [t] as in [Bad] pronounced [bat], as well as the rest [b], [d], [g] becoming [p], [t] and [k] respectively (Jakobson). Therefore, the phonological information must be dealt with in terms of Binary-Distinctive-features.

This approach applies neatly across languages. Samson states “distinctive features might have more direct meaning in acoustic than in articulatory term did not survive subsequent advances in acoustic research. In any case, even if the acoustic or perceptual effect of labialization were similar or even identical to that of pharygalization, say, nevertheless a complete description of Arabic would have to state that speakers use the latter rather than the former articulation, and vice versa in Twi.” (see Sampson 1980)

Generative Semantics

Generative semantics is a trend of thought advanced within generative grammar, by George Lacoff (), James McCawley (), Paul Postal (), Haj Ross (), and others that considers the deep structure of a sentence as the semantic component, from which the surface (PF) can be derived.

Their analysis starts by giving the sentence its proper semantic representation; you state the conditions of derivation and then move to the generation of the surface structure i.e. the real actual utterance. There no intermediate level between semantic representation and final output of the transformational operation, i.e. surface structure.

This goes indeed against Chomsky’s (EST) hypothesis, which consists of saying that you need two deep structures, so to speak before you try and reach the surface structure. Three levels for Chomsky: semantic, deep and surface structures, semantic and surface structures for the Generative semanticists. And, hence the Linguistics wars that ensued (see Newmeyer 1980).

The term ‘generative’ is more constrained in this theory.

Generative Syntax

Syntax is another sub-branch of Linguistics which deals with how words are combined into sentences vs. morphology.

Word classes (parts of speech) are very important in a syntactic analysis...

Table of contents

• Pages de titre
• PrefaceLanguage & LinguisticsWhitneyBoasSapirWhorfBloomfieldJakobsonHockett HarrisChomskyLangackerGreenberg MontagueLabovPikeGricePierce Conclusion  Appendices  GlossaryBibliography
• To Noam Avram Chomsky
• Preface
• LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS
• WHITNEY
• BOAS
• SAPIR
• WHORF
• BLOOMFIELD
• JAKOBSON
• HOCKETT
• HARRIS
• CHOMSKY
• Langacker
• GREENBERG
• MONTAGUE
• LABOV
• PIKE
• GRI
• PIERCE
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDICES
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Copyright