Theoretical grammar

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Theoretical grammar

Конспект лекцій та практичні завдання

Lecture № 1

Beginning linguistics in Europe

The beginning of linguistics is ascribed to Ancient Greece. Though the primary linguistic teaching in Ancient Greece was in many respects naive and speculative, and the native form of speech was the only form studied and) in those times fundamental problems were put forward that ran through ages of analytical linguistic effort up to our days.

In their study of language, the Ancient Greeks considered the four main ranges of questions:

I. The most general, philosophical questions of language, such as the origin of human speech.

2. Questions concerning structural categories in language, including phonetics.

3. Questions concerning usage: selection of words and constructions from the point of view of their 'correctness'.

4. Linguistic questions connected with the study of literal forms and rhetoric.

The central philosophical problem of language in Ancient Greece was the problem of the relation between the words and the things they signify. The discussion of this problem took the form of the controversy about the origin of names. In connection with the controversy philosophers expressed their views about the nature and origin of human speech.

The two philosophers are named as the main figures at the outset of the dispute: Heraclitus and Democritus

According to Heraclitus and his followers', there is a natural connection between words and the things they signify Hence, language is inherent in nature, and is given to people by nature. This conception of language was called -- 'by nature'. It was idealistic. According to the great materialist philosopher Democritus and his followers, the connection between words and the things they signify is the result of human convention. Hence, language was created by the people themselves. This conception of language was called-- 'by convention', 'by law'.

A broad picture of the philosophical linguistic views prevalent in this time was shown by Plato in his famous dialogue about the Correctness of Names. There are three personages in the dialogue: Cratylus, Hermogenes and Socrates. Cratylus defends the doctrine 'by nature' in an argument with Hermogenes, an adherent of the doctrine 'by law'. The arguers ask Socrates to settle their dispute. Socrates exposes the schematism in the two opposite views, at the same lime finding grains of truth in both of them. But he points out the third, and the final, factor among those determining the meaning of the words, namely--usage in people's community.

Apparently in the discourse of Socrates the author's views were expounded. The idea of usage as a factor determining the meaning of the word was one of the most profound linguistic conceptions formulated in Ancient Greece. It was further developed both by philosophers and grammarians.

The criticism of the one-sided approach to the connection between the 'linguistic sign' and the thing is revived in our time by some representatives of modern linguistics

The first explicit grammatical teaching was propounded by Plato's disciple, the great Greek philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle developed, the theory of the sentence and the theory of word classes as notional and functional parts of speech. But, being the founder of logic Aristotle identified the relation of ideas in human thought with the relation of words in speech, and stated grammatical categories in terms of logic. He introduced in grammar the logical notions of subject and predicate. He established three parts of speech: the 'name' and the 'verb' (forms expressing both the subject and the predicate), and the 'conjunction' (forms expressing copulas). Thus, by 'names' he understood, the. nominative case of nouns, adjectives, participles; by 'verbs', the infinitive of verbs: by 'conjunctions', different functional words and forms.

linguistic grammar transformation

Proceeding from this fundamental thesis, he formulated the concept of grammatical ('cases') as deviations from 'names' or 'verbs' due to the logically dependent position in the sentence, incapable of expressing either the subject or the predicate. In the later grammatical tradition the doctrine of 'names' and their 'cases' was developed into the teaching of 'direct' grammatical forms and 'oblique' grammatical forms.

Aristotle was the initiator of grammatical theory. But he lived a long time before the final formation of grammar as a special discipline in Ancient Greece. His original teaching was perfected and reformed by the later scholars.

The grammatical teaching of Ancient Greece was completed in Alexandria, between the-2nd century B.C. and the 2nd century A. D. The development of grammar in Alexandria was stimulated by the interpretations of Homer's poems that were extremely popular, but the language of which had become antiquated. Gradually grammar became a self-dependent discipline taught and studied not by philosophers, but by grammarians.

In the works of the Alexandrian scholars many features of grammar were shaped into the form that the linguists of the 19^th century called 'traditional' grammar. Aristotle's doctrine of 'names' and their 'cases' was reformed. The words of the language were grouped into eight parts speech: inflected (name, verb, participle, article, pronoun) and uninflected (preposition, adverb, conjunction). The chief grammatical categories of the inflected parts of speech were described, such as genders, numbers, cases (the categories of the nominal parts of speech); numbers, persons, tenses, moods, voices (the categories of the verbs). The sentence and the word were considered the chief elements of connected speech. The sentence was defined as 'a combination of words expressing a complete thought'. The word was defined as 'an articulate sound with a certain meaning out of which the sentence is composed, and into which it is decomposed'.

Some progress was made in studying the phonetical structure of speech. Speech sounds ('letters') were classified into vowels, semi-vowels, and non-vowels, the main principle of the classification being the syllable-forming function of the sounds. The Alexandrian scholars described the word accents, some phonetical changes in the process of speaking, the difference between long and short vowels. Observations of the phonetical phenomena were made chief in connection with the study of metrics and prosody.

The weakest point of language study in those times, both with the Greek and the Roman scholars, was the problem of etymology. The etymologies given were absolutely fantastic. The division of words into meaningful component parts was quite arbitrary. Likewise the morphological composition of the word remained alien both to the Greek and to the Roman grammarians.

The Romans who were successors to the culture of Ancient Greece the ceeded also to the Greek linguistic theories and grammatical teaching. Moreover, our knowledge of many linguistic achievements of the Greeks is derived only from Roman sources

On the whole, the Romans did not care as much as the Greeks about general linguistic problems. They constructed their grammar on the Greek model, with some modifications. Much attention was paid in Rome to the problems of style and rhetoric. The most prominent figure in this field was M.T. Cicero, the great Roman orator.

The Middle Ages are characterized as a time of stagnation, due to the domination of Church. The fact of the diversity of languages on the earth was explained by means of the biblical legend about the Tower of Babel: God confused the languages 'of the peoples' to prevent them from reaching heaven. Still, even at that time scholars made some further important observations about Latin grammar. They defined nouns and adjectives as different parts of speech within the class of names and also discovered syntactical categories of concord, government, and apposition.

But the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages saw in the structure of Latin the only natural and logically perfect form of speech in general.

The conception that the structure of different languages is based on the same logical, rational categories was developed further throughout the epoch of the Renaissance and in the 17th century led to the theory of universal grammar based on logical principles, with the same fundamental categories for all languages.

The theory of logical grammar was subjected to severe criticism. It has been stressed that scientific linguistics must form the system of general linguistic categories as a generalization of the study of various languages, and not as pre-conceived formulas. Still, other scientists, especially the propounders of transformational grammar undertake to revise this criticism. They point out that, though the theory of rational grammar was limited by the conditions and views of its time, its basic principles were fruitful and sound; above all, its trend was not only to describe linguistic facts, but to explain them along 'generative' lines, showing how more complex structures of speech are created out of elementary structures.

But the epoch of the Renaissance brought to the field of linguistics not only the idea of general rational grammar. The horizon of linguistics widened. New European languages came to be described in grammar books. The study of Ancient Greek was resumed in Europe, and some scholars began to study Hebrew and Arabic. As a result of geographical discoveries.

This work was crowned towards the end of the 18^th century by compiling polyglot glossaries that contained parallel lists of words translated into as many languages as the editors could gain information of.

Alongside of this work from the epoch of the Renaissance philologists began to collect and publish historical monuments of languages other than Latin or Greek. In this way materials for the future scientific history of languages were prepared.

The scope of all this language study was tremendous. But the scientific foundation of the work was inadequate. Scholars continued to state many linguistic categories in terms of logic, taking no notice of the structural difference between languages. They forced the description of different languages into the traditional scheme of Latin grammar. They had no proper understanding of the difference between sounds and letters. They did not understand the nature of local dialects, considering them to be the 'corruption' of the 'correct' form of language. They had no idea of historical language development. Unscientific views were expressed about the origin of language.

In spite of these drawbacks, the linguistic work done from the time of the Renaissance was of great importance. It demonstrated the actual diversity and multitude of languages on the earth. It disclosed the fact that all the living languages were equally effective as means of social intercourse. Due to the study of different languages materials were gradually collected that were necessary for the creation of modem, scientific linguistics.

Outside the tradition of European linguistics, considerable progress in the study of language was made in Ancient India. The Ancient Hindu scholars are not so highly distinguished for raising general linguistic problems as the scholars in Ancient Greece; but the grammar that they created is in many respects a higher achievement than the grammar of the Ancient Greeks: it gives a much more rigorous and objective description of the structural elements of language.

The factors that gave rise to grammatical teaching in Ancient India were connected in a peculiar way with the interpretations of the old religious texts-- the Vedas, large collections of hymns songs. ('Veda' means 'knowledge'). The oldest of the Vedas, dates from the third--second millennium before our era. Many centuries before they had been committed to writing, the Vedic texts were handed down from generation to generation by an oral tradition. The oral teaching of them was extremely exact, because they were to be preserved unchanged from religious motives. Meanwhile, the living language developed and became more and more different from the old Vedic language. Commentaries appeared interpreting the Vedic passages the meaning of which had been lost or obscured. New works were also added to the texts, the language of the whole Vedic literature becoming more and more heterogeneous as the time went by.

Somewhere about the 6^th century B. C. scholars began to normalise the language of the various late additions to the original texts, taking as their model the form of speech used by the Brahmins, (scholars or court poets). In this way Sanskrit appeared--the 'perfected', 'learned' language of the upper caste. The common language of the people, as opposed to Sanskrit, was termed 'Prakrit' by later scholars ('prakrta' in Old Hindu means 'popular'). The work of describing and normalising Sanskrit was completed in the 4^th century B. C. by the Tamous Hindu scholar Panini, who gave a detailed description of Sanskrit and, partly, of the Vedic language. In the 2nd century B. C. Panini's grammar was supplemented by another prominent grammarian, Patanjali. The grammar of Panini and Patanjali's commentary are the oldest and the best systematic grammatical works of the Ancient Indians that have come down to us.

Panini canonised the forms of Sanskrit as the language of religious worship. But later the use of Sanskrit went beyond these limits, and great secular literature was created in it. The language of this period is called 'Classical Sanskrit', to distinguish it from the Vedic language, or the 'Vedic Sanskrit', as it was called by the European linguists. Classical Sanskrit was used in India throughout the Middle Ages, similar to Latin in Europe.

Panini's grammar is the result of colossal linguistic effort. He has compiled the book:

"Eight Readings"; it consists of eight books, or chapters, containing about 4000 very short grammatical rules--'sutras' given in verses. The 'sutra' form is connected with the fact that it was meant for learning by heart, and chiefly from hearing. Symbolic notation is used in the work, to make the memorising easier. For example, special letters are used to signal the positions of the stress in the words, etc.

Sanskrit was a language with strongly pronounced synthetic features. It was exceptionally rich in inflexions, widely used vowel interchange as grammatical means, and had an extremely developed system of word-building.

One of the main achievements of the Old Hindu grammatical theory was that it discovered the morphological structure of the word: the root, the stem, the suffix. It gave a detailed description of the phonetical form of the root, discovering the different grades of vowel interchange. The words of the language were classified according to formative characteristics, the primary verb roots being considered as the basic source for all the vocabulary. All the types of declination and conjugation were investigated. Syntactical study was also well advanced, being partly combined with the study of word composition.

The phonetical description given in the Old Hindu grammar is especially accurate; it is connected with the purpose of the work: to show how to pronounce the sacred texts without any distortions. The organs of speech were studied carefully; the sounds were described in accord with their articulation, much attention being given to the active organs of speech: the lips, the three parts of the tongue (front, middle, and back), the larynx. Phonetical changes on the borders of words and affixes were also analysed with precision.

Alongside of Sanskrit forms, Panini's grammar described certain forms of the Vedic language, containing elements of comparative language study.

Some knowledge of Sanskrit and of Panini's .grammar reached Europe in the 16^lh and 17^lh centuries. Towards the end' of the IS century it was studied diligently by European scholars-orientalists. At the beginning of the 19^lh century Panini's grammatical treatise Eight Readings was published in Europe.

The Hindu grammar of Panini presented to the European scholars an accurate description of a language based not upon abstract speculation, but upon careful and exact observation. The Hindu grammar helped to formulate one of the most important principles of scientific linguistics: to study the constituent parts of a language without any predetermined conclusions. It was not accidental that Leonard Bloomfield, the father of American Descriptive Linguistics called Panini's grammar 'one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence'.

Apart from this, however, the knowledge of Sanskrit and the Hindu grammar led to a discovery of tremendous significance. The European scholars saw that Sanskrit had a structure very similar to the structure of Latin, Greek, and some 'other European languages, both old and new. The first reaction to this fact was the idea that Sanskrit was the source from which all the European languages had sprung. But this view was later rejected, and it was understood that Sanskrit, being related to Latin and Greek, together with them formed part of a great family of kindred languages.

This discovery, made at the end of the 18^lh century, had a revolutionising effect on linguistics, marking the turning point in its development. The comparative study of Sanskrit and European languages gave rise to the historical comparative linguistics, and led to the completion of linguistics as a science in the full sense of the word.

II. Practical tasks

1. Answer the following questions

In what European country did the study of language begin?

What was the central philosophical problem of language in Ancient Greece?

What two philosophers are named as the main figures in the 'dispute about the correctness of names'?

How did they explain the connection between the words and the things they signify?

What doctrine was called 'by nature'? What doctrine was called 'by law'?

Who described the philosophical linguistic views prevalent in his time in Ancient Greece ?

What linguistic views did Plato express in his works? What grammatical categories were established by Aristotle?

What was the relation between logical and grammatical categories in Aristotle's system?

What parts of speech did he discriminate? What forms did he call 'names' and what forms did he call' cases'?

How was grammar developed in Ancient Greece after Aristotle?

Where was the grammatical teaching of Ancient Greece completed?

Who were the most famous grammarians of the Alexandrian period?

What grammatical observations did they make?

What was their progress in the study of phonetics? What linguistic dispute took place among the Alexandrian scholars?

* * *

What were the weakest points of language study in Ancient Greece?

How did linguistics progress in Ancient Rome?

Who were the most prominent Roman grammarians?

How did the Romans construct their grammatical teaching?

What were their achievements in language study?

How was language study developed in the Middle Ages?

Why are the Middle Ages characterised as a time of stagnation for science?

What language became the universal language of Catholic Church?

How was the structure of languages understood by the scholastic philosophers?

What were the achievements of the study of language from the epoch of the Renaissance up to the 18^th century

What languages came to be studied at the epoch of the Renaissance?

What is the significance of the linguistic work done during that period?

What were the main drawbacks of this linguistic work?

How did grammatical teaching appear in Ancient India?

What old texts needed interpretation in Ancient India? Why?

What is Sanskrit?

Who gave the oldest grammatical description of Sanskrit?

What are the main characteristic features of Panini's grammar?

What accounts for the 'sutra' form of the rules given in the work?

What important grammatical observations did Panini make in his grammar?

How was the phonetical structure of Sanskrit described?

Why was so much attention given to phonetics in the Hindu grammar of Sanskrit?

Why do many scientists consider the Hindu grammar of Sanskrit as the highest linguistic achievement of ancient times?

How did the knowledge of Sanskrit and its grammar influence European linguistics?

When did the Europeans get acquainted with Sanskrit and with Panini's grammar?

In connection with what studies did Panini's grammar influence modern linguistics?

What discovery was made due to the comparison of Sanskrit with some European languages? What was the consequence of this discovery?

Lecture № 2

Development of Linguistics with the half of the historical comparative methods

There are many languages on the earth, both great and small. According to modern calculations, the number of living languages exceeds 2500. Alongside of highly developed national languages with ancient writing and literature, there are languages having no writing and no recorded history: there belong the spoken languages of tribes and small nationalities in America, Asia, Africa. Australia. Many of the spoken languages are dying out together with their peoples-- due to the miserable condition they have been reduced to by the 'higher European civilisation', as is the case with the aboriginal Indian tribes in America or Australia. On the other hand, the number of known languages is still growing as new languages and dialects come to be recorded and studied by science.

Observing the fact that some of the languages are very similar to one another in their forms, while others are quite dissimilar, scholars still long ago expressed the idea that languages revealing formal features of similarity have a common origin. Among the scholars who developed the idea of language relationship we find the names of the great German scientist G.W. Leibnitz, the great Russian scientist M. V. Lomonosov, the great Ukrainian scientists Karaban B.I. Korunets and others.

But a consistently scientific proof and study of the actual relationship between languages become possible only when the historical comparative method of language study was created--in the first quarter of the 19^h century.

The historical comparative method developed in connection with the comparative observation of languages belonging to the Indo-European family, and its appearance was stimulated by the discovery of Sanskrit.

Sir William Jones, a prominent British orientalist and Sanskrit scholar, was the first to point out that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, and some other languages of India and Europe had sprung from the same source which no longer existed. He put forward this hypothesis, basis his views on an observation of verbal .roots and certain grammatical forms in the languages compared.

The relations between the languages of the Indo-European family were studied systematically and scientifically at the beginning of the 19^lh century by Franz Bopp, Rasmus Kristian Rask, Jacob Grimm, and A. Ch. Vostokov. These scientists not only made comparative historical observations of the kinder languages, but they defined, the fundamental conception of linguistic 'relationship', and created the historical comparative method in linguistics. The rise of this method marks the appearance of linguistics as a science in the strict sense of the word.

After that historical and comparative study of the Indo-European languages became the principal line of European linguistics.

The historical comparative method is used to analyse and discover the relationship of different languages and groups of languages, to reconstruct prehistoric lingual elements.

- to reveal the course of historical development of lingual elements in their complex interrelations; by means of the historical comparative method science collects materials for studying general laws of language development.

The following general conceptions of different aspects of language and its development underlie the foundations of the historical comparative method:

- families of languages originate due to historical division of languages:

- lingual signs are arbitrary in the sense that there is no natural connection between their form and the things or ideas they signify:

- the historical development of language is continual, but uneven. We shall consider these fundamental conceptions and their consequences separately.

- The historical comparative method proceeds from the possibility for different languages to have been originated from the same source .The division of one language into two or more languages is brought about by the division of the language-speaking community due to political and economic factors. Since language is always changing historically, the isolation of daughter communities can lead to the growing differences in their language, to the rise of dialects, which, in the process of further change, can develop into totally different languages.

Such division of languages is characteristic of the tribal epoch in the history of peoples. The actual process of language division is very complex. It is connected with repeated mixings, crossings, and accompanied by the disappearance of some languages, and the spread of other languages over vast territories and among originally unrelated communities. One thing, is absolutely straightforward: when the dialects of a language grow into different languages, it means that the parent language has ceased to exist: in its stead a family of languages has arisen. Thus, in the family forming linguistic process we register several stages of differentiation corresponding to the existence of several successive parent languages: the parent language of a family and the intermediary parent languages of further groups and subgroups within the family.

- The actual kinship, or non-kinship of different languages is revealed on the basis of systematic comparison of their forms: since there is no naturally predetermined connection "between lingual forms and the things or ideas they signify. Occasionally resemblance in meaningful forms is purely coincidental.

Other resemblances may be due to the borrowing of words from one language to another, and therefore bear no evidence as to the actual kinship of the languages. E.g. the Georgian [aritmetika] is similar in form and in meaning to the Russian "арифметика", the English "arithmetic", the French "arithmetique",etc., by virtue of the fact that the word is borrowed from Ancient Greek (Gr. "arithmetike").

However, there are such features of resemblance between languages that clearly prove their common origin. These features belong to the most stable component parts of language--to the basic word stock and, above all, to the fund of grammatical affixes, because grammatical forms, as a rule, are never borrowed by one language from another.

Let's compare the native words of Indo-European languages that evidence their kinship:

Russ.:	брат	ты
Eng.:	Brother	Thou
Germ:	Burder	Du
Fr.:	Frere	Tu
Old Slav:	БРАТРЪ	ТЫ
Sanskr.:	bhrata(-r)	tuvan
Lat.:	frater	tu

Let's compare the finite forms of verbs

Sanskr.	Lat.	Goth	Old Slav.
Asmi	sum	im	I-ЕСМЬ
asi	es	is	I-ЕСИ
asti	est	ist	I-ЕСТЬ,etc.

By comparing forms in kindred languages, linguists reveal the system of phonetical correspondences characterizing one language or group of languages within the family in reference to another language or group of languages.

For example, the Indo-European [p], [t], [k ] correspond to the Germanic [f], [ ], [x]; the Indo-European [b], [d], [g] correspond to the Germanic [p]. [t] [k]; the Indo-European [bh], [dh], [gh] correspond to the Germanic [b]. [d]. [g].

Eng.	Germ.
ten	zehn
two	zwei
three	drei, etc.

Such systems of correspondences are the final sign of language kinship, they show both differentiation and unity;

- Language develops unevenly. It concerns all the structural elements of language, and also different languages as compared to each other on the same chronological level. It is connected with the fact that different structural elements of language specifically react to, and reflect, the history of the people. It follows from this that elements no longer existing in one language of a family may be preserved in another kindred language. Thus, comparing different languages and their forms linguists can reconstruct prehistoric elements of languages, and more rigorously formulate the historical changes in languages.

The historical comparative method has certain limitations.

1. It is limited by the material it can use. The facts that ceased to exist in all the compared group or family of languages can hardly be reconstructed.

2. Some common features of living kindred languages can be the product of further development; but in studying the languages comparatively there is a great danger of considering them as characteristics of the parent language.

It is difficult to define the time, and even the relative chronology of lingual changes.

The historical comparative method can be applied to languages with ancient writing.

It is applied only to the comparative study of kindred languages; but, to understand the nature of language, all languages must be studied in comparison, not only kindred. Modern linguistics is developing the typological study of languages, both kindred and non-kindred.

However, these limitations of the historical comparative method cannot testify that the method is antiquated. The historical comparative method has itself undergone a long history. The historical comparative study of languages in the 19^th century was still mixed with psychological and logical pre-conceived ideas. Towards the end of the 19^lh century it concentrated its attention on the history of separate lingual elements. Such approach to language was called "atomistic". Modern linguistics is gradually overcoming this approach, perfecting its analytical and descriptive technique in historical studies. Alongside of the Indo-European family of languages, other families of related languages have been discovered and are being studied, such as the Finno-Ugrian family, the Turkish family, the Caucasian family, and others. Their study brings new scientific results, widening the horizon of the comparative linguistics and contributing to its development.

II. Practical Task

1. Answer the following questions.

Why did scholars make repeated attempts to group languages according to their origin?

How many languages are there in the world?

Is the number of them growing or diminishing?

How do they differ from one another?

What scholars were the first to develop the idea of language relationship?

In connection with what studies was the historical comparative linguistics created?

What stimulated the appearance of the historical comparative method in linguistics?

Who was the first to put forward a scientific hypothesis that Sanskrit was related to some European languages?

How did Sir William Jones ground his ideas?

What was the principal line of European linguistics in the 19th century?

Who continued to develop the historical comparative method in the 19th and 20th centuries?

What are the aims of the historical comparative method?

* * *

What lingual elements are called "prehistoric"?

What is meant by the term 'reconstruction'?

For what other purposes is the historical comparative method used besides reconstructing prehistorically forms?

How do families of related languages arise?

What causes the splitting of languages?

What epoch in the history of peoples is characterized by language divisions?

What language is called the 'parent language'?

Can the parent language continue to exist in living speech after a family of languages has arisen out of it?

Do all the kindred languages survive after the splitting of the parent language?

What features of resemblance between languages prove their kinship?

Why is the arbitrary character of the lingual sign so important for the historical comparative method?

What resemblances between languages do not evidence their kinship?

* * *

Why must we compare the elements of the basic word stock and grammatical affixes to prove that the languages are kindred?

Give examples of related native words in the Indo-European languages.

Why is it important for the comparative study of languages to note the uneven character of language development?

Why do languages develop unevenly?

How are reconstructions formed?

What notation is used to represent historical changes in scientific treatises?

Give examples.

What are the main limitations of the historical comparative method?

What material is analisable by the historical comparative method?

Are all the common features of related languages inherited directly from the parent language?

What is dangerous in elaborating reconstructions?

Can the historical comparative method be applied to spoken languages?

Is the historical comparative method antiquated?

What other families of languages besides the Indo-European are being studied by the comparative linguistics?

Lecture № 3

Developing of ideas and schools in modern linguistics

The main method of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century was the historical comparative method. It was for the scientific study of languages, it had definite shortcomings and limitations.

The historical comparative method gave no exact definition of the object of linguistics as an independent science. As Louis Hjelmslev pointed out, "The linguistics of the past-even of the recent past--has concerned itself with the physical and physiological, psychological and logical, sociological and historical precipitations of languages, not of the language itself."

The study of numerous languages of the world was neglected.

It was mainly the historical changes of phonological and morphological units that were studied. Syntax hardly existed.

As a reaction to the atomistic approach to language a new theory appeared.

The first linguists to speak of language as a system or a structure of smaller systems were de Courtenay, Fortunatov and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de-Saussure.

The work that came to be most widely known is de-Saussure's. Course in General Linguistics, posthumously compiled from his pupils' lecture-notes between 1906 and 1911.

De-Saussure's main ideas are as follows:

1. Language is understood as a system of signals, interconnected and interdependent. It is this network of interdependent elements that form the object of linguistics as an independent science.

2. Language as a system of signals may be compared to other systems of signals, such as writing, alphabets for the deaf-and-dumb, military signals, symbolic rites, forms of courtesy, etc. Thus, language may be considered as being the object of a more general science--semeiology--a science of the future which would study different systems of signals used in human societies.

3. Language has two aspects: the system of language and the manifestation of this system in social intercourse--speech. The system of language is a body of linguistic units--sounds, affixes, words, grammar rules and rules of lexical series. The system of language enables us to speak and to be understood since it is known to all the members of a speech community. Speech is based on the system of language, and it gives the linguist the possibility of studying the system.

De-Saussure gave the following diagram to illustrate his theory of the associative series of the system of language

educate

education	instruct	relate	debate
educates	teach	locate	prelate
etc.	enlighten	translate	etc.
	etc.	etc.

The linguistic sign is bilateral.. It has both form and meaning. We understand the meaning of the linguistic sign as reflecting the elements (objects, events, situations) of the outside world.

The linguistic sign is 'absolutely arbitrary¹ and 'relatively motivated'. This means that if we take a word 'absolutely' disregarding its connections to other words in the system, we shall find nothing obligatory in the relation of its phonological form to the object it denotes. This fact becomes evident when we compare the names of the same objects in different languages, e.g.:

English:	ox	hand	winter
French:	boeuf	main	hiver
Russian:	бык	рука	зима

The 'relative motivation' means that the linguistic sign connections with other linguistic signs of the system both in form and meaning These connections are different in different languages and show the difference of ' the segmentation of the picture of the world'.

6. Language is to be studied as a system in the 'synchronic plane', at a given moment of its existence, in the plane of simultaneous coexistence of elements. We understand the synchronic plane as a given moment of the historical development of the language studied.

7. The system of language is to be studied on the basis of the oppositions of rare units. The linguistic elements can be found by means of segmenting the flow of speech and comparing the isolated segments, e.g. in 'the strength of the wind' and in 'to collect one's strength' we recognize one and the same unit 'strength' in accord with its meaning and form; but in 'on the strength of this decision' the meaning is not the same and we recognize a different linguistic unit.

* * *

There were three main linguistic schools that developed these new notions: the Prague School that created Functional linguistics, the Copenhagen School which created Glossematics, and the American School that created Descriptive linguistics.

The Prague school

The Prague School was founded in 1929.

The main contribution of there linguistics to modern linguistics is the technique for determining the units of the phonological structure of languages. The basic method is the use of oppositions of speech-sounds that change the meaning of the words. The basic definitions are given by Trubetzkoy:

Point 1: If in a language two sounds occur in the same position and can be substituted for each other without changing the meaning of the word, such sounds are optional variants of one and the same phoneme.

Point 2: If two sounds occur in the same position and cannot be substituted for each other without changing the meaning of the word, these two sounds are phonetic realizations of two different phonemes.

Point 3: If two similar sounds never occur in the same position, they are positional variants of the same phoneme.

Trubetzkoy developed an elaborate set of contrast criteria for the identification and classification of phonological oppositions. The most widely known is the binary opposition in which one member of the contrastive pair is characterized by the presence of a certain feature which is lacking in the other member. The element possessing the feature in question is called the 'marked' (strong) member of the opposition, the other is called the 'unmarked' (weak) member of the opposition. A phoneme is distinguished from all the other phonemes by a set of distinctive features, e.g. [p] is distinguished from [b] as a voiceless sound, from [t] as a bilabial, from [m] as having no nazalisation, etc. Thus any phoneme is defined as a set or 'bundle' of differential (distinctive) features.

He has stressed the fact that his technique of analysis may be used in other domains of linguistics. The method of oppositions has been successfully extended to grammar and semantics.

The principle of binary oppositions is suitable for describing morphological categories. As I. B. Khlebnikova points out, "binary relations penetrate practically every plane of language-phonological, morphological, and syntactic, but are especially evident on the morphological level, which reflects the structural organization of a particular language".

The principle of privatize oppositions has been used by Roman Jakobson for describing the morphological categories. Jakobson proposed the following three distinctive features: A--direction, B--objectiveness, C--periphery. The result is represented in the following table:

Distinctive features Cases	A	B	C
Nominative	-	-	-
Generative	-	+	-
Dative	+	-	+
Accusative	+	-	-
Instrumental	-	-	+
Prepositional	-	+	+

where + (plus) means the presence of the feature in question, thus characterizing the corresponding case as the marked member of the opposition, and -- (minus) indicates the absence of the feature in question, thus characterizing the corresponding case as the unmarked member of the opposition. Thus the three rather abstract distinctive features proposed by Jakobson form 'bundles' one and only one of which is typical for each of the 6 Russian cases.

The principle of privative oppositions can be easily applied to English morphology.

The most general case is that system of tense-forms of the English verb. The tense-forms of the English verb are divided into two halves: that of the tense-forms of the present plane, and that of the tenses of the past plane. The former comprises the Present, Present Perfect, Present Continuous, Present Perfect Continuous, and the Future tense-forms; the latter includes Past, Past Perfect, Past Continuous, Past Perfect Continuous and the Future-in-the-Past. The second half is characterized by specific formal features--either the suffix -ed (or its equivalents) appear, or a phonetic modification of the root. The past is thus a marked member of the opposition 'present--past' as against the present sub-system, which is the unmarked member.

It was pointed out that "the opposition between perfect and non-perfect forms is shown to be that between a marked and an unmarked item, the perfect forms being marked both in meaning (denoting precedence) and in morphological characteristics ('have + second participle'), and the non-perfect forms--unmarked both in meaning and in morphological characteristics.

The obvious opposition within the category of voice, is that between active and passive. A few pairs of parallel forms involving different categories of aspect, tense, correlation, and mood illustrate the opposition of active/passive, namely:



invites	- is invited
is inviting	- is being invited
invited	- was invited
has invited	- has been invited
should invite	- should be invited

"From the point of view of form, the passive voice is the marked member of the opposition: its characteristic is the pattern 'be + second participle', whereas the active voice is unmarked: its characteristic is the absence of that pattern."

* * *

The principle of privative oppositions has been recently used to represent the traditional sentence-parts of the basic two-member sentence type. The parts of such a sentence type are defined by their position in the structure of the sentence: the subject to the left of the verb-predicate, the object to the right of the verb, the adverbial modifier to the right of the object; the attribute, that may appear as an optional sentence-part, occupies the position in contact to the noun. The syntactic relations of the sentence parts are characterized by three distinctive features: A--subordination, B--predicativeness and C-- objectiveness--feature connected, but not without reservation, with the possibility of changing the active to the passive construction. Thus we have:

Distinctive features Sentence parts	A	B	C
Subject	-	-	-
Predicate	-	+	-
Attribute	+	-	-
Object	+	+	+
Adverbial modifier.	+	+	-

An application of the oppositions method has also been extended to describe different types of simple sentences in Modern English. The steps are as follows:

Step 1. Different sentence-types are those that cannot be substituted for each other without changing the structural meaning of the sentence. Here belong:

(a) two-member sentences as against one-member sentences, e.g. "John worked" as against "John!" or "Work!";

(b) sentences differing in the arrangement of the main constituents in basic sentences, e.g. "We saw a river there" as against "There is a river there";

(c) sentences differing in the case-form of the subject-noun, e.g.: "Mary was a happy girl" as against "Mary's was a happy life".

Step 2. Variants of one and the same sentence-type are those that can be substituted for each other without changing the structural meaning of the sentence or distorting it beyond recognition. The following variants are recognized:

(a) positional variants--context sensitive sentences in which one or more elements are left out but can be unambiguously inferred from the preceding sentence. There are two kinds of positional variants:

Included positional variants--such as can be placed in the position occupied in the preceding sentence by a question word or a word which is repeated in the positional variant, e.g.: "Who gave you that?--Soames." "Where did she see him?--In the park." "What do you think I am made of? Leather?" "Soames gave it her."--"Who?" etc.

Adjoined positional variants--such as can be optionally added to the preceding sentence, e.g. "I am leaving. Tonight. Immediately."

(b) Optional variants--extended sentences as against unexpended sentences. The unextended sentences being understood as having objects, etc. in accord with the valence of the verb, e.g. "She saw him" and "She saw him yesterday in the park"; "Put these things on the table" and "Put these things on the table immediately", etc.

(c) Stylistic variants, which may be:

emotional: " I saw him!" "She is such a darling!"

colloquial: "You done it." "You going to work here again'?" "Father in town?" "Lost my job, Vic." "Ever had practice?", etc.

Step 3. Sentence-types in which one or more elements seem to be left out but cannot be unambiguously inferred from the context are different sentence-types, e. g.:

Copenhagen school and the main ideas of scholars

The Copenhagen School was founded in 1933. In 1939 the Prague and the Copenhagen Schools founded the magazine Acta Linguistica that had been for several years the international magazine of Structural Linguistics. In the early thirties the conception of the Copenhagen School was given the name of the Copenhagen School of "Glossematics"

In 1943 Hjelmslev published his main work Principles of Linguistics, which was translated into English and appeared in Baltimore in 1953.

Glossematics thought was to give a more exact definition of the object of linguistics. The two sides of the linguistic sign recognised by de-Saussure are considered by Hjelmslev to have both form and substance. This leads to the recognition of a bilateral character of the two planes--'the plane of content' and 'the plane of expression', namely:

The object of the linguistic science is limited to the two inner layers--the form in the plane of content and the form in the plane of expression, i.e., linguistics studies nothing but form.

The form in the plane of content is the segmentation of the picture of the world, which is different in different languages, e.g.

English:	blue	Foot, leg	Hand, arm
Russian:	синий, голубой	нога	рука

Similar differences may be easily found in tense and case-systems, in the expression of genders in different languages, etc.

The two inner layers are connected by the 'law of commutation,' which means that differences in the plane of expression signal differences in the plane of content. There is no simple one-to-one correspondence of the two planes. The units of the planes may be decomposed into smaller components which reveal the correspondences of the two planes.

II. Practical tasks

Do these exercises according to the tasks.

1. Give Ukrainian the following things:

table, chair, book, pencil, horse, dog, dress, hat. boy, girl and give other examples to show that the linguistic sign is absolutely arbitrary

2. Translate into mother tongue: horse, horse and foot, horse-path

top, the top of the class, at the top of one's voice, room at the top hand.

sleeve, tame

word, closing speech, not a syllable, according to his story, in short

Give other examples to show the relative motivation of linguistic signs in different languages.

3. Find the equivalents for the English:

time, tense; table; clock, watch; meal; 24 hours

and the English equivalents for the mother tongue

человек, дерево, дело, сутки

4 Compare the English Conditional Mood with the Ukrainian Subjunctive (сослагательное наклонение) and state the difference in grammatical meanings.

Prove that the English Possessive Case is not equivalent to the Russian Genitive (родительный падеж).

Translate into your mother tongue:

1. He cut his finger. You finger this and find that. 2. He walked round the house. He failed to round the lamp-post. He took his daily round. The ladder has many rounds.

Find the positional variants of simple sentences in the following examples

1. "Tom!"--No answer. 2. She shuddered. "Horrible weather," she commented. 3. "Whatever induced him to do such a dreadful thing"?"-- "The climate." 4. "Water! For Heaven's sake, water!" 5. A knock at the door. "Your hot water." 6. "Do you want roast beef or tongue?"-- "Roast beef." 7. "Who told you that? Harold?"

Find the colloquial variants:

"It's getting dark," she said. "Be dark in half an hour," Harry said. 2. "I've never been there, you know."--"Been in India" 3. "Being noble now. Olwen? You needn't, you know."

...