Advances in American Linguistics: Their Background and Directions

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  • Hayashi Tetsuro
    English Language, College of General Education, Kyushu University : Assistant Professor

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Other Title
  • アメリカ言語学の歩み : その背景と方向
  • アメリカ ゲンゴガク ノ アユミ ソノ ハイケイ ト ホウコウ

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Abstract

A comparative and historical study of Indo-European languages was initiated and developed toward the beginning of the 19th century by Jones, Bopp, Rask, and Grimm, who believed that "Language changes," or “Language has history." Deutsches Wörterbuch and The Oxford English Dictionary were two of the greatest historical dictionaries ever to be compiled. The second period (1875-1925) of the development of modern linguistics is marked by the severe phonelogical method and structural principle of the Jung- Grammatiker, such as Verner, Leskien, and Paul. That "Language is speech," and "Language has variety" were their view of language, by-the principle of which they came to develop a scientific study of speach-sounds and phenemes and linguistic geography. It is usually believed that a descriptive study of American Indian languages was first introduced by Boas, a great anthropologist, and his followers, such as Sapir, Swadesh, Hoijer and Haas. Sapir and Bloomfield, both being fully versed in historical linguistics and descriptive linguistics, were the true founders and pioneers of structural linguistics in America. Its method is inductive, objective and systematic; it works by observations, hypotheses, experiments and inferences. The structuralists suppose that "Language is structured" and "Language has functions." From 1950 on, psycholinguistics and machine-translation and such mathematical linguistics as glottochronology and generative grammars were developed as promising disciplines. The last mentioned field was initiated and cultivated by Harris and Chomsky, and it seems to aim at accounting for the ability of a native speaker to produce a number of new sentences, and to explain a universal linguistic theory underlying natural languages.

Journal

  • 言語科学

    言語科学 2 29-36, 1966-03-05

    The Group of Linguistic Studies General Education Department, Kyushu University

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