2. Sanskrit Grammarians of Ancient India
• Panini (5th Century BCE) – “father of linguistics”
His work Ashtadhyayi is the oldest surviving
linguistic and grammar text of Sanskrit
• Katyayana – wrote commentaries on
Ashtadhyayi
• Pathanjali – wrote Mahabhasya, a commentary
on Sanskrit grammar
3. Western Linguistics
• Plato (5th century BCE)
• Aristotle ( 4th century BCE)
• Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BCE) - produced
the first systematic grammar of Western
tradition; it dealt only with word morphology.
• Apollonius Dyscolus (2nd century CE) – studied
syntax
4. Features of Traditional Linguistics
• Focussed on written language rather than spoken
language
• Focussed on the correctness and purity of
language
• Prescriptive – The works of ancient grammarians
prescribed rules regarding how a language should
be used and be kept “pure”
• Meaning was stressed
• Believed syntax followed logically from meaning
• Believed the grammatical framework of the
classical languages can be used to describe any
language
5. Modern Linguistics
• 19th century – Historical Linguistics
Diachronic study of languages
Development of comparative philology
All modern languages descended from ancient
languages.
(Eg. All romance languages like French, Italian,
Portuguese, Spanish evolved from Latin)
Ancient languages like Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Celtic,
Germanic evolved from a common ancestor
which is now called the Indo-European language.
Reconstruction of ‘proto’ languages
Language change is universal, continuous and
regular
6. 20th century
Structural Linguistics
• Accepted all languages (not just the classical ones) and
also the spoken varieties of languages
• Language as a system of systems (system of
interconnected units)
Phonology- system of sounds
Morphology- study of formation of words and relationship to other words
Syntax- the study of rules regarding arrangement of words in a sentence
Semantics- study of meanings
• Structural linguistics is descriptive and synchronic
• Descriptive - analyses how language is used by a
speech community
• Rejected use of meaning in describing grammatical
categories
7. Cognitive Approach
• rejected the structuralist view that the function of
linguistics was simply to provide a classification and a
terminology to talk about language.
• a linguistic theory must be able to capture the
psychological aspect of the knowledge of language
• to explain why things are the way they are.
• the business of linguistics was to construct a theory
which would explain and predict facts regarding
languages.
