Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The approach is also closely linked with evolutionary anthropology, cognitive linguistics and biolinguistics. Studying languages as the products of nature, it is interested in the biological origin and development of language. Evolutionary linguistics is contrasted with humanistic approaches, especially structural linguistics.
Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).
In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.
Generative grammar, or generativism, is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistics, deriving ultimately from glossematics. Generative grammar considers grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. It is a system of explicit rules that may apply repeatedly to generate an indefinite number of sentences which can be as long as one wants them to be. The difference from structural and functional models is that the object is base-generated within the verb phrase in generative grammar. This purportedly cognitive structure is thought of as being a part of a universal grammar, a syntactic structure which is caused by a genetic mutation in humans.
Paul Smolensky is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond Washington.
Construction grammar is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human language. Constructions include words, morphemes, fixed expressions and idioms, and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice or the ditransitive. Any linguistic pattern is considered to be a construction as long as some aspect of its form or its meaning cannot be predicted from its component parts, or from other constructions that are recognized to exist. In construction grammar, every utterance is understood to be a combination of multiple different constructions, which together specify its precise meaning and form.
Syntactic Structures is an important work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. A short monograph of about a hundred pages, it is recognized as one of the most significant and influential linguistic studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning, thus arguing for the independence of syntax from semantics.
John Robert "Haj" Ross is an American poet and linguist. He played a part in the development of generative semantics along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal. He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966 to 1985 and has worked in Brazil, Singapore and British Columbia, and until spring 2021, he taught at the University of North Texas.
In linguistics, linguistic competence is the system of unconscious knowledge that one knows when they know a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which includes all other factors that allow one to use one's language in practice.
Generative semantics was a research program in theoretical linguistics which held that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid-1960s, but stood in opposition to it. The period in which the two research programs coexisted was marked by intense and often personal clashes now known as the linguistics wars. Its proponents included Haj Ross, Paul Postal, James McCawley, and George Lakoff, who dubbed themselves "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse".
Arnold M. Zwicky is a perennial visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford University, and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University.
Jan Koster is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Groningen.
Laura A. Michaelis is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and a faculty fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The modern study of linguistics is seen as a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective and precise analysis of all aspects of language — cognitive, social, environmental, and biological, as well as structural. Linguistics is based on the theoretical as well as 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 an informal manner that did not employ scientific methods.
Language complexity is a topic in linguistics which can be divided into several sub-topics such as phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic complexity. The subject also carries importance for language evolution.
In linguistics, the term formalism is used in a variety of meanings which relate to formal linguistics in different ways. In common usage, it is merely synonymous with a grammatical model or a syntactic model: a method for analyzing sentence structures. Such formalisms include different methodologies of generative grammar which are especially designed to produce grammatically correct strings of words; or the likes of Functional Discourse Grammar which builds on predicate logic.
Liliane Madeleine Victor Haegeman ARB is a Belgian professor of linguistics at Ghent University. She received her PhD in English linguistics in 1981 from Ghent University, and has written numerous books and journal articles thereafter. Haegeman is best known for her contributions to the English generative grammar, with her book Introduction to Government and Binding Theory (1991) well established as the most authoritative introduction on the Principles and Parameters approach of generative linguistics. She is also acknowledged for her contributions to syntactic cartography, including works on the left periphery of Germanic languages, negation and discourse particles, and adverbial clauses. As a native speaker of West Flemish, her research has also touched upon the comparative study of English and West Flemish in terms of the subject position and its relation to the clausal structure.
Theory of language is a topic from philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; "Why do languages have the properties they have?"; or "What is the origin of language?". In addition to these fundamental questions, the theory of language also seeks to understand how language is acquired and used by individuals and communities. This involves investigating the cognitive and neural processes involved in language processing and production, as well as the social and cultural factors that shape linguistic behavior.
The Usage-based linguistics is a linguistics approach within a broader functional/cognitive framework, that emerged since the late 1980s, and that assumes a profound relation between linguistic structure and usage. It challenges the dominant focus, in 20th century linguistics, on considering language as an isolated system removed from its use in human interaction and human cognition. Rather, usage-based models posit that linguistic information is expressed via context-sensitive mental processing and mental representations, which have the cognitive ability to succinctly account for the complexity of actual language use at all levels. Broadly speaking, a usage-based model of language accounts for language acquisition and processing, synchronic and diachronic patterns, and both low-level and high-level structure in language, by looking at actual language use.
