THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE 

The discipline of linguistics can be likened to a pathway which is being cut through the dark and mysterious forest of language. Different parts of the forest have been explored at different times.

Nineteenth century: historical linguistics

Before the 19^th century, language in the western world was of interest mainly philosophers. It is significant that the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made major contributions to the study of language. Plato, is said to have been the first person to distinguish between noun and verbs. 1786 is the year which many people regard as the birthdate of linguistics. This emphasis on language change eventually led to a major theoretical advance.

The influence of the 19^th- century scholars was strong. Even today, one still meets members of the general public who expect the cataloguing of linguistic changes and the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European to be the central concern of modern  linguistics.

Early-to-mid-20^th century: descriptive linguistics

In the 20^th century, the emphasis shifted from language change to language description.

The term structural linguistics is sometimes misunderstood. It does not necessarily refer to a separate branch or school 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 teams.

In America, linguistics began as an offshoot of anthropology. Around the beginning of the 20^th century, anthropologists were eager to record the culture of the fast-dying American-Indies tribes, and the American-Indian languages were one aspect of this. In 1933 with a publication of Leonard Bloomfield´s comprehensive work entitied simply Language, which attempted to lay down rigorous procedures for the description of any language. Bloomfield considered that linguistics should deal objectively ad systematically with observable data. So he was more interested in the way items were arranged than in meaning.

Mid- to late. 20^th century: generative linguistics and the search for universals

In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. Noam Chomsky, a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of –technology, published a book called Syntactic Structures; this book started a revolution in linguistics. Chomsky, he is the linguistic whose reputation has spread furthers outside linguistics.

Applied Linguistics and Linguistics

Modern linguistics necessarily begins with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and his General course of Linguistics. His systematic structural approach to language has been a foundation for virtually all of linguistics since that time. The central continuing notion is that language is a closed system of structural relations, meanings and grammatical uses of linguistic elements depend on the sets of oppositions created among all the elements within the system.

Current Generative Theory

Chomsky quickly recognized the limitations of early semantic- based approaches, and from the late 1960s to the late 1970s he argued for atheory of grammar that was first known as the “extended standard theory”.

Descriptive Syntax

The descriptivist approach initiated by de Saussure and developed in the United States under Boas did not disappear with the rise of the behavioristically oriented American structural linguistics.

Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics and phonology have undergone a number of changes over the last 25 years and phonology in particular has been subject to major theoretical revisions. 

Morphology

Linguistic research on morphology and on the organization of the lexicon has not initiated any great changes in practical research over the last twenty years. Applied linguistic research on lexicography, terminology development, second- language acquisition and language teaching is still employing descriptive approaches that have been in use for some time.

Semantics and Pragmatics

Semantics particularly the area of lexical semantics has been important to applied linguistics. Research in second- language acquisition and lexicography have both used lexical semantics as a resource for research on how words may be related and on how they differ in various ways.

Pragmatics, a historical development out of semantics, has had a much greater impact on applied linguistics, primarily because issues raised and the theories developed directly inform discourse analysis.

Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis

The most important area of research for applied linguistics is the field of discourse analysis, and the contributions of discourse analysis made by sociolinguists are central. The most powerful foundation for applied research has been the development of the notion of communicative competence.