Content introduction history of modern linguistics

3. Main problems of modern linguistics
New times bring with themselves new challenges, even for old sciences – and linguistics is not an exception from this rule. Some come from new technological advances, some from the changes in geopolitical situations, still others are the results of applying the synergetic approach to different problems, allowing a completely new point of view on an age-old subject. In a sense, linguistics is especially prone to this particular approach, because language is what all human beings have in common, and every human being still has to resort to language in all their areas of activity.
One example of such an approach is a whole and relatively new discipline in the body of academic learning, called ecolinguistics. At a glance, such a combination may strike one as weird and even ridiculous – after all, it is hard to imagine spheres of learning that would be farther from each other than sciences dealing with language and environment respectively.
And yet, such connections were found, and the fact that ecolinguistics exists today as a discipline emphasizes the holistic nature of modern science – no aspect of this world can be said to exist in isolation. Everything is connected to something else, and we can gain additional insights from studying it from points of view that are not normally associated with the subject.
As a result, we have ecolinguistics – a discipline that is based on the assumption that language exists in close connection not only with cultural, sociological and economical, but ecological factors as well. And vice versa – discourses existing in particular language may have strong impact on the psychology of people using it and, consequently, on the ecological situation of environments they live in.⁶
Despite having appeared as a separate movement within linguistic science only as recently as in 1990, ecolinguistics has made considerable progress. However, it still has a vast field of work ahead of it, for so far the attention of the discipline has been mostly concentrated on the influence not of entire languages, but their isolated discourses on ecology – the so-called eco-critical discourse analysis. It is mostly concerned with linguistic analysis of texts on ecology, environment and environmentalism to discover underlying assumptions and messages that may not be evident from simple reading of the texts – in broader meaning, this movement studies all discourses that have or can potentially have any influence on ecology.
Linguistic ecology, on the contrary, studies languages from the ecological standpoint, believing that there are important analogies between the environment languages exist in and the environment in a more traditional sense of the word. Separate languages are treated as something akin to biological species, and the influence of humankind is perceived as either positive or negative for their well-being.
As a whole, ecolinguistics of today is still a fairly young science, with a long road ahead of it – before it can really make an impact it has to define more clearly its area of jurisdiction; still, it is fascinating to see the birth of a new science at the confluence of two older ones. As each new language that is studied reveals more exciting and unanticipated linguistic features, a shift away from the dominant view of language universality is gradually taking place. Evans and Levison (2009) suggest this generative position, which has pervaded modern linguistics since Chomsky’s proposal of Universal Grammar, be replaced by the functionalist position that heralds language variation as the key to natural human language.
This change is concurrent with that of another more specific view that has also restricted linguistic theory for decades, stemming from Saussure’s principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Due to the dominance of study on European languages, linguists have projected their grammars onto claims about all languages, believing them all to be the same at some deep level. The study of iconicity in languages has thus been largely neglected as it was considered a marginal phenomenon in the lexicon of languages, restricted mainly to onomatopoeia. This may be the case for some spoken, Indo-European languages, but within the diversity of languages worldwide, this feature is much more widespread, deserving equal attention to arbitrariness, as a driving factor for the choice of a linguistic sign. This paper discusses the notion of iconicity, with regard to how it may support or clash with these concepts of language universals and variation.
Iconicity, as opposed to arbitrariness, is “the conceived similarity or analogy between of the form of a sign and its meaning”. Modern linguistic thinking has been dominated by the idea that meaning is linked to signs by convention and tradition alone, neglecting the possibility that this may not be wholly so. Iconicity challenges this view.
South American and Balto-Finnic languages. According to Perniss, these iconic words evoke “sensory, motor or affective experiences or characteristic aspects of the spatio-temporal unfolding of an event.” Unlike the isolated phenomenon of onomatopoeia, these words are used frequently in every day conversations and especially in narratives and story telling, where they help bring the events to life through vivid depiction and enactment. Below is a table from Perniss et al.’s paper, showing examples of sound symbolism in Japanese and an African language, Siwu. While it may be hard to fully comprehend the iconicity in a foreign language, it is evident how these words may conjure certain mental states and associations, evoking the sensory impressions of an event. Iconicity is a general term that includes all sound-symbolism, ideophones and mimetics.
They may conduct research by interacting with children and adults in schools, in the field, and in university labs. Because of the pervasive influence of language in our everyday lives, work in linguistics interacts in important ways with studies carried out in many other fields, including psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, law, philosophy, computer science, communication, and education. Majors in linguistics find practical outlets for their linguistic training in the computer industry, law and forensics, teaching foreign languages and English as a second language, translation and interpretation, speech pathology, lexicography, and policy-making in government and education. All these fields of employment share an interest in people with highly developed skills in the analysis and use of spoken or written language. The major in linguistics equips students with just such skills.