Beginning linguistics in Europe

ТЕОРЕТИЧНА ГРАМАТИКА

Конспект лекцій

та практичні завдання

Рекомендовано вченою радою ДонДТУ

Алчевськ

УДК 811.111,25

Б 24

Барков Микола Михайлович –доцент кафедри терії та практики перекладу германських і романських мов Донбаського державного технічного університету;

Баркова Тамара Володимирівна –старший викладач кафедри мовної підготовки фахівців Донбаського державного технічного університету.

Рецензенти:

В. Е. Краснопольський – доц., зав. каф. іноземних мов Східноукраїнського національного університету ім. В. Даля (м. Луганськ);

Т. Г. Бесєдіна – доц. каф. мовної підготовки фахівців Донбаського державного технічного університету (м. Алчевськ).

Рекомендовано вченою радою ДонДТУ

(Протокол № 2 від 27. 02. 2009)

Б 24 Барков М. М., Баркова Т. В.

Теоретична граматика: Консп. лекц. та практ. завд./ М. М. Барков, Т. В. Баркова. – Алчевськ: ДонДТУ, 2009. – 140 с.

Конспект лекцій має на меті розвинути в студентік такі навички: широко мислити, логічно будувати висновки, висловлюсати свої думки і заперечувати положення по досліджуваній темі.

Для студентів спеціальності «Переклад» всіх форм навчання.

УДК 811.111,25

© Барков М. М.,

Баркова Т. В. 2009

© ДонДТУ, 2009

© дизайн обкладинки

О. М. Дика, 2009

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.

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