General LInguistic V

General LInguistic V

Modern Linguistics was influenced in the studies developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in the nineteenth century, this student of the subject left clear and precise the concept and distinction of language, as a mechanism, a system to talk which is the use that is gives the apparatus (muscle) to make the relationship that underlies Linguistics, I also interpret the use of the linguistic sign. Already in the twentieth century, the renowned linguist Noam Chomsky added a fundamental aspect to the subject, developing what is known as current of generativism, this new perspective of linguistics is based on the fact that speech is a mental process, and as such, the individual must be trained in its growth to develop speech skills. as the father of modern linguistics: Ferdinand de Saussure. Among many others, the linguistic sign and the laryngeal theory that raises:

• language and speech

• synchrony and diachrony

• Syntagmatic (or linear) relations and paradigmatic (or associative) relations.

From the Prague school we see Trubetzkoy, the father of structural phonology and morphology and a phonological and phonological one, and Jakobson, important for his theory of distinctive features and the concept of marking.

we briefly review Bloomfield's American structuralism, which sees language as a chain of stimuli and reactions. And Noam Chomsky (in his facet of linguist) and the generative school. Undoubtedly, one of the most important things is the theory of universal grammar and how language goes in our DNA, the only possible answer to the question of the poverty of the stimulus.

 The nontraditional approach of modern linguistics has several sources. One of the most important is the Neogrammatiker, which inaugurated historical linguistics and introduced the notion of law in the context of linguistics and in particular formulated various phonetic laws to represent linguistic change. Another important point is the terms of synchrony, diachrony and the structuralist notions popularized by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and the Cours de linguistique générale (inspired by his lessons). From that time the use of the word "linguistics"

The objective of theoretical linguistics is the construction of a general theory of the structure of natural languages ​​and the cognitive system that makes it possible, that is, the abstract mental representations that a speaker makes and that allow him to make use of language. The objective is to describe the languages ​​characterizing the tacit knowledge that the speakers have of the same ones and to determine how they acquire them.

The goal of applied linguistics is the study of language acquisition and the application of the scientific study of language to a variety of basic tasks such as the development of improved methods of language teaching. linguistics is a social science, since only humans use languages, or a natural science because, although it is used by humans Noam Chomsky points out that linguistics should be considered part of the field of cognitive science or human psychology , since linguistics has more to do with the functioning of the human brain and its evolutionary development than with social organization or institutions, which are the object of study of the social sciences.

 Modern linguistics has opted for some of the parts of the dichotomies Saussure presented. The first established that linguistics should study language, not speech, because language is the general system, a social heritage, while speech is every particular and individual performance of the system. The second duality recommended to focus on a synchrony, that is, bounded in a short space in which a language presents a certain homogeneity with respect to the variations that suffers over time. The Genevan teacher knows that the reality of language is diachronic (that is, changing over time), but he needs to make this methodological abstraction to use the structuralist scalpel.

Ferdinand de Saussure: was a Swiss linguist, born on November 26, 1857 in Geneva.

He studied science at the University of Geneva before resuming his linguistic studies at Leipzig in 1876. His ideas served to initiate and further develop the study of modern linguistics in the twentieth century.

His most important work was the Mémoire (on the Proto-Indo-European vowel system), printed in 1879. He worked in philology and was a professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Grammar at the University of Geneva. Recognized by the Cours de Linguistique Générale (General Linguistics Course, 1916) he made The Real Revolution in the theoretical linguistics of his work in reaction to the neogrammarians. In 1891 his disciples were C. Bally and A. Séchehaye who could.

Already in the 1940s, structuralism is the dominant current in linguistic studies. Within this theory arise two variants: the European and the American. Within the European one we find as main reference the own Saussure, whose disciples Martinet and Alarcos would be the representatives of the French and Spanish school respectively. In the North American variant, however, the main reference is Bloomfield, along with his followers Harris, Hockett and Fries. In conclusion, we have to say that the study of the different linguistic currents is a very dense and complex subject, about the biography of a key character for the development of this scientific discipline and about the theoretical current that he promoted. Ferdinand de Saussure died in Geneva, Switzerland, on February 22, 1913.

NOAM Abraham Chomsky, Philadelphia, 1928. He was introduced to linguistics by his father, who specialized in historical linguistics of Hebrew. Is a linguist, philosopher and American political analyst, of Jewish-Ukrainian origin. He is considered the "father of modern linguistics" for being the author of Generative Grammar (GG), a new model of language description. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his doctorate in 1955 with a thesis on transformational analysis, developed from the theories of Z. Harris, of whom he was a disciple. He was a pioneer in raising the innate, genetic, language character, which allowed the development of cognitive sciences according to this approach, and that of linguistic science, expanding its field of study towards lines of interdisciplinary research: He then entered to be a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he taught since 1961. He is a great critic of capitalism, especially with the foreign policy of the United States. He married in 1949 with Carol Schatz Doris, with whom he stayed until 2008, the year of her death. With this relationship he had three children. It was in 1967 when he began his foray into political activism, totally opposing the participation of the United States in the Vietnam War. From this he took out his essay book entitled "The responsibility of the intellectuals", for which he obtained a great recognition. He is the author of a fundamental contribution to modern linguistics, with the theoretical formulation and development of the concept of transformational or generative grammar, whose main novelty lies in the distinction of two different levels in the analysis of sentences: on the one hand, the «Deep structure», a set of rules of great generality from which the «superficial structure» of the phrase is «generated» by means of a series of transformation rules. This method allows us to give a reason for the deep structural identity between superficially different sentences, as happens between the active and passive mode of a sentence. Chomsky considered that the only way to understand the learning of a language was to postulate a series of innate grammatical structures which would be common, therefore, to all of humanity. Three of his iconic works, which revolutionized the scientific study of language, are: Syntactic Structures (1957); Aspects of syntactic theory (1965); and Minimista Program (also called Minimalista) (1995).

Apart from his activity in the linguistic field, he has often intervened in politics, provoking frequent polemics with his denunciations of US imperialism since the beginning of the Vietnam War and his repeated criticisms of the political and economic system of the United States.