by Esra'a Alobaly

1. Linguistic Theories
Approaches And
Methods

2. OUTLINE
 Linguistic theorizing
 Ferdinand De Saussure
 American structuralism
 Chomsky’s generative grammar
 Cognitive approaches
 Psycholinguistic approaches
 Corpus-based approaches

3. General aim of linguistic
theorizing
 Explain and identify a model of underlying principles of how
things work in language or in the world, by means of
observation and generalization.
 A good theory of the English language will allow us to predict
which sentences and words speakers are likely to produce and
understand and which they will not.
 Theories don’t merely have enormous explanatory potential,
but also massive practical implication.

4. General aim of linguistic
theorizing
 In the field of Grammar (including phonology, morphology, syntax, and
lexicology): to understand the nature and structure of languages.
 In the field of Semantics: to explain how linguistic elements and structures
can convey meaning.
 In the field of Cognitive-linguistic: to model what speakers know about
knowledge and how the structure of language relates to other cognitive
abilities like perception and attention allocation.
 In the field of Psycholinguistics: to explain how L are acquired by
children.
 In the field of Pragmatics : to model how communication works and how
understanding comes about.

5. General aim of linguistic
theorizing
 In the field of Sociolinguistics: to explain patterns of variation (accents,
dialects, registers, etc.).
 In the field of Historical linguistics: to model why and which Ls change
and are related to each other historically.

6. The pre-structuralist tradition in
the 19th century
 The Historical development and ‘genealogical’ relations dominated in this
period of time, and was known as the Comparative-historical tradition.
 Sir William Jones discovered that language show similarity to Creek and
Latin. And noticed the similarity of Sanskrit words such as mata
(mother). And all the three languages were descendants of common source.
 19th-century linguists is marked by the quest for principles of how
languages change and eventually split into mutually unintelligible new
languages in long-term developments like, French, Italian, and Spanish.

7. Ferdinand De Saussure
 At the beginning of the 20th century, Saussure was titled as the “Founder of
modern linguistics” and “ Founder of structuralism”

 Saussure claims that language is a socially shared “system of signs”.
 Example: When we talk about letter (t) >>> the significant of is that it does
not conflate with the one for (d) or (l) or others.

 When we talk about letter (t) this already refers to an abstract construct- a
type- however, is not the way it is pronounced or written, but the
opposition to (d), (p) and so on.

8. Central ideas of (Saussre’s)
 First: studying L change and development should be from
synchronic(same time),rather than diachronic (through time ) perspective.
 Second: investigating linguistics should be on the structure of the system
itself (langue), rather than the actual use ( parole).
 Third: the system has social and psychological known as (binary
conception of linguistic signs).Not only the physical sound of the word
matter, but also the mental image.
 Example: the word (Star)
Sta:

9. Prague School
 Building on Saussure’s distinction between phonology and phonetics, the
Prague school linguists define the following:
 Phonetics :describe the physical qualities of actual speech.
 Phonology: describe the features of sounds which are distinctive in the
sense of differentiate meaning.
 Phonemes: the smallest meaning-differentiating knowledge of a L.

10. Saussure’s f structuralist theories
in lexical semantics
 First: the theory of word-fields or lexical fields (describing historical
changes observable in this word-field)
 Ex. wisheit, list and kunst>>> ‘wisdom’, ‘knowledge’
 Second: the theory of sense relations or paradigmatic relations.(senses)
 Ex. the lexeme hot is constituted by its relations to other words,
(antonymy) to cold and the (synonymy) to words like burning.
 Third: semantic-feature theory
 Ex. Phonological features (₊₋voice) man and woman (₋₊male) woman
and girle (₊₋adult)

11. American structuralism
 Behaviorist psychology behind this view(black box), associated with
names like J.B. Watson, Frederick Skinner and Ivan Pavlov
 The 20th century were also a time when American linguists (among them
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf) began to investigate American
languages, such as the language of the Hopi Indians. Observable facts and
patterns on the level of linguistic form were much more rewarding
starting-points for linguistic research.
 Three examples of what linguistic theorizing in American Structuralism
looks like will be given below: Bloomfield’s method of identifying and
defining phonemes; Fries’s analysis and description of word classes; and
Gleason’s account of syntactic structur

12. American Structuralism
 Bloomfield (1933) on phonemes.
 features of sound are ‘different’ for purposes of communication”
 Ex. pin begins with the same sound as pig, pill, pit, but ends differently
 Fries (1952) on word classes
 Fries’s attempt to define the word classes of English without any recourse
to traditional meaning-based descriptions such as ‘nouns tend to denote
things’, ‘verbs tend to denote actions’ or ‘adjectives tend to denote
qualities’
 Fries defined four major word classes corresponding roughly to the
traditional parts-of-speech of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

13. American Structuralism
Gleason (1960) Immediate constituent analysis or IC analysis.
The aim of this approach is to exhaustively describe the “interrelationships”
between the words in utterances and thereby to accomplish a description of
“the syntax of the utterance in its entirety”.
Sentences consist of constructions which in turn consist of constituents
Ex. the old man who lives there has gone to his son’s house.
Old man is an immediate constituent of the construction the old man

14. Chomsky’s generative grammar
 Aims to come up with an explanation of the knowledge required by
speakers to be able to potentially generate syntactic representations of all
sentences that are considered grammatical in their native language and to
decide which sentences are ungrammatical (Generative grammar). and
the aim to offer an account of the general grammatical principles on which
the structures of all natural languages rest – a notion he refers to as
(Universal Grammar)
 Chomsky argued that the capacity to acquire language must, to a large
extent, be innate. already available in some kind of pre-wired format when
children are born.
 (LAD) Language acquisition device that distinguishes human beings
 from all other species

15. Chomsky’s generative grammar
 Generativist and productivity of grammar, largely defined as the
generative capacity of an idealized native speaker to produce and
understand an infinite number of sentences and to judge whether sentences
are grammatical or ungrammatical.
 An early and particularly influential challenge to Chomsky was mounted
by Charles Fillmore

16. Semantic roles: Fillmore’s
‘semanticization’ of grammar
 Fillmore introduces a new vision of a generative grammar, known as Case
Grammar, which essentially rests on a semantic foundation.
 According to Fillmore, prominent semantic roles
Ex.
The AGENT or AGENTIVE >>>>the person carrying out an action
The INSTRUMENT >>>>> the tool used by the agent to accomplish an
action
The PATIENT >>>>> a person affected by an action
and the OBJECTIVE or THEME >>>>an object or entity affected by the
action
agent >>> student
Which book will the student buy?
theme >>> book

17. Cognitive approaches
 The linguistic structures reflect our mental representations of the world
around us.
 It implies that the ways they are processed are related to general cognitive
abilities such as categorization, perception, attention-allocation and
everyday reasoning on the basis of cognitive models of the world.
 Three examples will be discussed below to illustrate further implications
of such a view.
 Prototype theory
 Conceptual metaphor theory
 Construction grammar

18. Cognitive approaches
1.Prototype theory
 The aim of feature semantics is to determine those distinctive features that
give rise to oppositions between neighboring word meanings.
 Ex. The meaning of the lexeme bachelor was described by means of the
distinctive features
[+HUMAN], [+ADULT], [+MALE] and [-MARRIED].
To describe the meaning of bachelor according to this approach, it is first
necessary to realize that such a concept only makes sense in the framework of
a cognitive and cultural model.

19. Cognitive approaches
2.Conceptual metaphor theory
 The central idea of this approach is that metaphors are not just a linguistic
phenomenon
 Ex. a special way of encoding meanings, but a cognitive one. If a speaker
uses an expression like we had reached a dead-end street when talking
about a difficult situation in a love relationship, then this would be
considered to reflect the speaker’s way of thinking about the relationship.

20. Cognitive approaches
3.Construction grammar
 Separates the syntactic module, which is rule- goverened, from the lexicon,
defined as the repository of all the knowledge about language account in terms
of rules since it is not generalized or predictable.
lexicon >>> is the store of information about phonological, syntactic, and
semantic properties of words
Ex. Which book will the student buy?
• yes-no question construction (of the type “aux – NP – main verb – NP”),
• a monotransitive argument-structure construction opening the slots of
“AGENT/subject verb – THEME/object”
• the will-future construction;
• the definite NP construction (the student, the book);
• lexical constructions representing knowledge about the form and meaning of the
lexemes student, buy and book.

21. Psycholinguistic approaches
 marginally interested in the structure of language, concentrating instead on
processes taking place during ongoing language production (writing and
speaking) and language comprehension (reading and listening).
The central fields of psycholinguistic research include:
 the ways in which the forms and meanings of words are stored and
retrieved from the mental lexicon;
 the processes taking place during written and spoken language production;
 the processes taking place during the comprehension of written and spoken
discourse;
 the patterns and principles underlying first language acquisition.

22. Corpus-based approaches
 A number of the models and approaches discussed so far are ‘corpus-
based’ in a wider sense of this notion. This means that their theorizing is
based on collections of authentic texts (written and spoken),
 corpora (from Latin corpus ‘body’, Ex.. a body of texts).
 For example, being interested in ancient languages, the representatives of
the historical comparative tradition of the 19th century basically had no
other choice than to proceed from the corpora of texts and documents
handed down to us from these earlier periods.

23. Corpus-based approaches
 The field of linguistics known today as corpus linguistics is not just defined
by the use of corpora but to the same extent by the reliance on computers. So
present-day corpus linguistics basically means computer-corpus linguistics.
 The International Corpus of English (ICE) was initiated by Sidney
Greenbaum in 1990 and is special in that it consists of several one-million-
word corpora collecting material from a wide range of English-speaking
areas in Europe (Great Britain, Ireland), Asia (India, Hong Kong, Singapore,
the Philippines, etc.), Africa (East Africa, Nigeria, Ghana), the USA and the
Caribbean (Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago) as well as Australia
and New Zealand.
Not all ICE corpora are available yet, but work is in progress. Not
surprisingly, the main aim of the ICE project is to provide material for
systematic comparisons of the world-wide varieties of English.