Most important contributions to morphology

Most important contributions to morphology

1. Ferdinand de saussure contribution to linguistics

   • Synchronic linguistics: confines to the study of how a language is spoken by a specified speech community at a particular point of time and diachronic linguistics, the kind in which we study the historical development of language through different periods of time
     • Lange: a system, an institution a set of interpersonal rules and norms in speech and writing
   • Parole: An actual manifestation of langue, the concrete use of the language, the actual utterances.
   • Semiology: the study of signs.

2. René de Saussure was a Swiss Esperantist and professional mathematician who composed important works about Esperanto and interlinguistics from a linguistic viewpoint.

   • Esperanto II was a reform of Esperanto proposed by René de Saussure in 1937, the last of a long series of such proposals beginning with a 1907 response to Ido later called Antido 1. Esperanto II was one of several languages investigated by the International Auxiliary Language Association, the linguistic research body that eventually standardized and presented Interlingua de IALA.

3. Edward Sapir one of the foremost American linguists and anthropologists of his time, most widely known for his contributions to the study of North American Indian languages. A founder of ethnolinguistics, which considers the relationship of culture to language, he was also a principal developer of the American (descriptive) school of structural linguistics.

   • he made a steady contribution to ethnology
   • The hypothesis states that the way people think is strongly affected by their native languages. It is a controversial theory championed by linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf.
     • Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

4. Leonard Bloomflied was one of the most important general treatments of linguistic science in the first half of the 20th century and almost alone determined the subsequent course of linguistics in the United States.

   • His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family.
     • In his textbooks he selected Indo-European examples that supported the key Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change, and emphasized a sequence of steps essential to success in comparative work: appropriate data in the form of texts which must be studied intensively and analyzed; application of the comparative method; reconstruction of proto-forms. He further emphasized the importance of dialect studies where appropriate, and noted the significance of sociological factors such as prestige, and the impact of meaning. In addition to regular linguistic change, Bloomfield also allowed for borrowing and analogy.

5. Noam Chomsky is known as the father of modern linguistics. Back in 1957, Chomsky with his revolutionary book Syntactic Structures laid the foundation of his non-empiricist theory of language. Two years later, with his review of B. F. Skinner’ Verbal Behavior, he showed that Behaviorism, the dominant approach to language at the time, was no longer to be the way of studying language.

   • Chomsky’s major contribution to studying language was that he made it scientific. He demonstrated that despite the observable variety of the world’s languages, there is in reality only one language. All other languages — dead, still spoken, or even future ones — are variations of a single theme. After Chomsky, linguistics is defined as 'the scientific study of language,' 'language' in the singular.

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