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Charles Francis Hockett was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralist linguistics. He represents the post-Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism often referred to as "distributionalism" or "taxonomic structuralism". His academic career spanned over half a century at Cornell and Rice universities. Hockett was also a firm believer of linguistics as a branch of anthropology, making contributions that were significant to the field of anthropology as well.
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.
In linguistics and specifically phonology, a phoneme is any set of similar phones that, within a given language, is perceptually regarded as a single distinct unit, a single sound, and helps distinguish one word from another.
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:
André Martinet was a French linguist, influential due to his work on structural linguistics. In linguistic theory, Martinet is known especially for his studies on linguistic economy and double articulation.
In linguistics and especially phonology, functional load, or phonemic load, is the collection of words that contain a certain pronunciation feature that makes distinctions between other words. Phonemes with a high functional load distinguish a large number of words from other words, and phonemes with a low functional load distinguish relatively fewer words from other words. The omission or mishearing of features with a high functional load thus leads to more confusion than features with a low functional load.
Louis Trolle Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family, Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris. In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structuralist theory of language which he called glossematics, which further developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is characterized by a high degree of formalism. It is interested in describing the formal and semantic characteristics of language in separation from sociology, psychology or neurobiology, and has a high degree of logical rigour. Hjelmslev regarded linguistics – or glossematics – as a formal science. He was the inventor of formal linguistics. Hjelmslev's theory became widely influential in structural and functional grammar, and in semiotics.
A tagmeme is the smallest functional element in the grammatical structure of a language. The term was introduced in the 1930s by the linguist Leonard Bloomfield, who defined it as the smallest meaningful unit of grammatical form. The term was later adopted, and its meaning broadened, by Kenneth Pike and others beginning in the 1950s, as the basis for their tagmemics.
In linguistics, a segment is "any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech". The term is most used in phonetics and phonology to refer to the smallest elements in a language, and this usage can be synonymous with the term phone.
In linguistics, glossematics is a structuralist theory proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and Hans Jørgen Uldall. It defines the glosseme as the most basic unit of language.
Articulatory gestures are the actions necessary to enunciate language. Examples of articulatory gestures are the hand movements necessary to enunciate sign language and the mouth movements of speech. In semiotic terms, these are the physical embodiment (signifiers) of speech signs, which are gestural by nature.
Figurae are the non-signifying constituents of signifiers (signs). For example, letters of the alphabet are the figurae that comprise a written word (signifier). In the semiotic language of Louis Hjelmslev, the coiner of this term, figurae serve only to distinguish elements of the expression plane from each other, independently from the content plane. That is, the letter B, in the written word expression "bat", distinguishes "bat" from the word "sat", but neither B nor S bears meaning on its own. On the other hand, the constituents "foot" and "ball" both bear their own individual meanings, such that in the word "football", they cannot be considered figurae, although their individual letters can. Hjelmslev states that in a given language a "legion of signs" can be constructed with a "handful of figurae" through ever new arrangements of them. Linguists often use the terms phonemes and morphemes to refer, respectively, to the figurae and the signifiers of human languages.
Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, which define units syntactically and lexically, respectively, according to their contrast with the other units in the system. Other key features of structuralism are the focus on systematic phenomena, the primacy of an idealized form over actual speech data, the priority of linguistic form over meaning, the marginalization of written language, and the connection of linguistic structure to broader social, behavioral, or cognitive phenomena.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.
Relational Network Theory (RNT), also known as Neurocognitive Linguistics (NCL) and formerly as Stratificational Linguistics or Cognitive-Stratificational Linguistics, is a connectionist theoretical framework in linguistics primarily developed by Sydney Lamb which aims to integrate theoretical linguistics with neuroanatomy. It views the linguistic system of individual speakers, responsible for language comprehension and production, as consisting of networks of relationships which interconnect across different "strata" of language. These relational networks are hypothesized to correspond to neural maps of cortical columns or minicolumns in the human brain. Consequently, RNT is related to the wider family of cognitive linguistic theories. Furthermore, as a functionalist approach to linguistics, RNT shares a close relationship with Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).
Panchronic phonology is an approach to historical phonology. Its aim is to formulate generalizations about sound changes that are independent of any particular language or language group.
Hockett's Design Features are a set of features that characterize human language and set it apart from animal communication. They were defined by linguist Charles F. Hockett in the 1960s. He called these characteristics the design features of language. Hockett originally believed there to be 13 design features. While primate communication utilizes the first 9 features, the final 4 features are reserved for humans. Hockett later added prevarication, reflexiveness, and learnability to the list as uniquely human characteristics. He asserted that even the most basic human languages possess these 16 features.
A phememe is a hypothesized speech sound with an abstract gestural meaning, proposed by the linguist Mary LeCron Foster.
Distributionalism was a general theory of language and a discovery procedure for establishing elements and structures of language based on observed usage. The purpose of distributionalism was to provide a scientific basis for syntax as independent of meaning. Zellig Harris defined 'distribution' as follows.
“The DISTRIBUTION of an element is the total of all environments in which it occurs, i.e. the sum of all the (different) positions of an element relative to the occurrence of other elements[.]”
References
- 1 2 Trask, R.L. (1999). Language: the basics. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-20089-X.
- ↑ Occasionally also "double segmentation".
- ↑ Martinet, André (1960). Éléments de linguistique générale (1st ed.). Colin.
Revised edition: Martinet, André (2008). Éléments de linguistique générale (5th ed.). Colin. ISBN 9782200354473. OCLC 942996561. - ↑ Martinet, André (1964). Elements of General Linguistics. Translated by Elisabeth Palmer. Faber & Faber. ASIN B003SZ9CJO. ISBN 9780571090792.
- ↑ Hockett, Charles Francis 1916-2000 (1970). A course in modern linguistics. Macmillan. OCLC 1072556808.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ↑ Ladd, D. Robert (December 2012). "What is duality of patterning, anyway?". Language and Cognition. 4 (4): 261–273. doi:10.1515/langcog-2012-0015. ISSN 1866-9808. S2CID 147433105.
- ↑ Sedivy, Julie (22 September 2014). "The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn't Exist". Nautilus. Retrieved 23 September 2014.