You Gotta Know These Linguists
- Panini (c. 5th century BCE) was a Sanskrit grammarian, who worked at Taxila, a seat of Vedic learning. He wrote the first known descriptive grammar of any language, the Ashtadhyayi. It explains differences between Vedic and later Sanskrit forms, and provides logical rules for making words from morphemes. These include the Sivasutras, which are phonological classes arrayed in a table and denoted with abbreviations. His work became the principle base for the Vedic tradition of Vyakarana, or grammatical analysis. His work had at least some influence on Leonard Bloomfield and Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as later structuralist linguists, although the extent of his contributions to modern linguistics is a subject of debate.
- William Jones (1746–1794) was a judge and employee of the British East India company, and also a philologist, somebody who studies language through historical and primarily written sources. Most notably, he popularized the idea of a common origin for Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and a variety of other language, which eventually led to the reconstruction of the Indo-European language family and the idea of a Proto–Indo-European language. These ideas also led him to propose a forerunner to the Aryan invasion, or Indo-Aryan migration, hypothesis regarding human migration into the Indian subcontinent. He also founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal while serving there and compiled a grammar of Persian, another Indo-European language, early in his career.
- Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist. He created the theory of structuralism, also called structural linguistics, in which linguists analyze the structures of language and how they relate to each other. Structuralists often focus on synchronic analyses of language, which look at a language at a specific point in time, as opposed to diachronic analyses, which look at how languages change over time and were favored by German Neogrammarians. However, Saussure also contributed to the understanding of Proto–Indo-European by postulating an early version of the laryngeal theory to solve issues with Proto–Indo-European vowels. In this theory, Proto–Indo-European had two or three vowels which were modified by what he called coefficients sonantique, but which were later identified as laryngeals (/h/ sounds), based on evidence from the extinct language Hittite. Students turned his lectures into the book Course in General Linguistics, which set out his theory that words are signifiers with an arbitrary relationship to the concepts being signified, i.e. the arbitrariness of the sign.
- Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) are two linguists best known for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which which the structure of a language shapes how people think. The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is linguistic determinism, where language restricts what people can think of. Whorf supported that with evidence that views of time among the Hopi, a Native American group from Arizona, differ from Western views, but his work is mostly debunked. He also promoted the equally dubious claim that “Eskimo”, or rather Inuit languages, had many more words for snow. However, there is more support for the still-controversial weak version, in which language merely influences how people think. Sapir, a student of the anthropologist Franz Boas and later a teacher of Whorf at Yale University, also documented numerous indigenous languages of North America and wrote Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Whorf, by profession a fire inspector in Hartford, Connecticut, also tried to reconstruct the Uto-Aztecan language family of Mexico and the American Southwest.
- Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949) developed an American school of Saussure’s structuralism, which influenced but was also later displaced by the theories of Noam Chomsky. His textbook Language was particularly influential in emphasizing studying language separately from the psychology and anthropology of its speakers. He first studied phonology (sounds) and morphology (word forms) of the Germanic languages in the Neogrammarian tradition, but later began to work more on the Tagalog language of the Philippines and on the Algonquian language family of eastern North America. His work on identifying morphemes, the smallest linguistic units of meaning, and how phonology affects them—i.e., morphophonemics—was continued by other American structuralists such as Zellig Harris and Bernard Bloch. Bloomfield also was one of the founders of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and contributed to the first issue of its influential journal Language.
- Noam Chomsky (1928–) studied under the structuralist Zellig Harris but went on to develop his own theory of generative grammar. His emphasis on the biological and cognitive bases of language gave rise to his theory of child language acquisition, in which people are born with an innate linguistic capacity of Universal Grammar that is activated by hearing speech. This served as a solution to Plato’s problem, or poverty of the stimulus, of how children learn language so quickly. In his book Syntactic Structures, he used the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” to show that it was possible for an utterance to be syntactically correct but semantically nonsensical. Later his ideas developed into government and binding and the minimalist program, which focuses on the Merge operation for building syntax trees. Chomsky also wrote extensively on politics, critiquing American imperialism and capitalism from a leftist perspective.
- Paul Grice (1913–1988) was a philosopher of language. He functionally invented the linguistic study of pragmatics, how people communicate in context, by putting forth a set of maxims that follow from the assumption that speakers are cooperating with each other, i.e. his cooperative principle. These are the maxim of quantity (giving the amount of information needed), the maxim of quality (being truthful), the maxim of relation (staying relevant), and the maxim of manner (speaking clearly and without ambiguity). However, speakers might violate these maxims covertly or overtly. He also popularized the idea of conversational implicatures, which are meant by the speaker despite not being expressed in the literal meaning. In philosophy, Grice critiqued J. L. Austin’s ordinary language philosophy, as set out in Sense and Sensibilia. His work was collected in Studies in the Way of Words.
- George Lakoff (1941–) is a Berkeley linguist and cognitive scientist. He was a student of Chomsky’s theories of generative syntax, but he later became a leader of generative semantics, as chronicled in Randy Allen Harris’s book The Language Wars. Along with Paul Postal, James McCawley, and Haj Ross, Lakoff argued that meaning precedes syntactic structure in how the brain uses language. Later, Lakoff wrote The Metaphors We Live By with Mark Johnson, which cataloged specific metaphors into larger conceptual metaphors such as LOVE IS A JOURNEY. He later extended that work towards analyses of metaphors in politics, focusing on differences between liberal and conservative ways of thinking in Moral Politics and on the Persian Gulf War in Metaphor and War. In particular, he contrasted a conservative view of the nation as a strict father versus the liberal view of the nation as a nurturant parent.
- William Labov (1927–) is a University of Pennsylvania linguist and student of Uriel Weinreich who pioneered the study of sociolinguistics, looking at how language varies across speakers. This expanded the focus of traditional dialectology to include not only regional variation but also class, race, gender, and similar traits. In one experiment, he recorded whether department store clerks in New York City pronounced the /r/s in “fourth floor” and analyzed whether it varied based on the class of the shoppers at the department stores. He also looked at how speakers’ attitudes about living on Martha’s Vineyard affected their pronunciations of diphthongs (vowels that are a combination of other vowels). Along with Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg, he published many dialect maps in the Atlas of North American English. In his paper “The Logic of Nonstandard English,” he defended African-American (Vernacular) English as a valid linguistic system based on his work documenting it in Black neighborhoods of Philadelphia.
- Steven Pinker (1954–) is a psycholinguist and cognitive psychologist. He analyzed Chomsky’s theories of Universal Grammar in his book The Language Instinct, in which he suggests that language comes from specific brain structures and strongly criticizes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. His book Words and Rules proposed that the increased frequency of irregular verbs is necessary for children to learn them well. He also proposed that, in child language acquisition, children engage in semantic bootstrapping to learn syntactic structures. Outside of linguistics, he posited a general decline in human violence in The Better Angels of Our Nature and advocated evolutionary psychology in The Blank Slate.
This article was contributed by ÎÞÓǶÌÊÓƵ writer Benjamin McAvoy-Bickford.