Content introduction history of modern linguistics

The actuality of my course paper is "The main trend of modern linguistics and their problems". The research is to define the role of modern linguistics in English linguistics. Furthmore, the course paper gives complete information about modern linguistics and including its types and methods.
The aim of the course paper is the thorough analysis of modern linguistics and their problems.
The theoretical significance of the work is devoted information about modern linguistics: what does it mean?, importance and benefits of it for teaching students.
The practical value of the course paper is about how to learn it in lessons and giving thorough data about specific features of linguistics with its phases and typology.
The sources of the course paper are scientific books and journals, which consist of related articles. Moreover, adequate information comes from several internet resources.
The structure of the course paper consists of introduction, main body, involving two and three sub parts, the conclusion, bibliography.
Conclusion of the course paper gives overall idea with all information which were provided.
Bibliography gives references of the course paper.
1. History of modern linguistic

The modern field of linguistics dates from the beginning of the 19th century. While ancient India and Greece had a remarkable grammatical tradition, throughout most of history linguistics had been the province of philosophy, rhetoric, and literary analysis to try to figure out how human language works. But in 1786, an amazing discovery was made: There are regular sound correspondences among many of the languages spoken in Europe, India, and Persia. For example, the English 'f' sound often corresponds to a 'p' sound in, among others, Latin and Sanskrit, an important ancient language of India:

ENGLISH LATIN SANSKRIT
father pater pitar
full plenus purnas
for per pari
Scholars realized that these correspondences—found in thousands of words—could not be due to chance or to mutual influence. The only reliable conclusion was that these languages are related to one another because they come from a common ancestor. Much of 19th century linguistics was devoted to working out the nature of this parent language, spoken about 6,000 years ago, as well as the changes by which 'Proto-Indo-European', as we now call it, developed into English, Russian, Hindi, and its other modern descendants.¹
This program of historical linguistics continues today. Linguists have succeeded in grouping the 5,000 or so languages of the world into a number of language families sharing a common ancestor. At the beginning of the 20th century, attention shifted to the fact that not only language change, but language structure as well, is systematic and governed by regular rules and principles. The attention of the world's linguists turned more and more to the study of grammar—in the technical sense of the term the organization of the sound system of a language and the internal structure of its words and sentences. By the 1920s, the program of 'structural linguistics', inspired in large part by the ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, was developing sophisticated methods of grammatical analysis. This period also saw an intensified scholarly study of languages that had never been written down. It had by then become commonplace, for example, for an American linguist to spend several years working out the intricacies of the grammars of Chippewa, Ojibwa, Apache, Mohawk, or some other indigenous language of North America.
The last half-century has seen a deepening of understanding of these rules and principles and the growth of a widespread conviction that despite their seeming diversity, all the languages of the world are basically cut from the same cloth. As grammatical analysis has become deeper, we have found more fundamental commonalities among the languages of the world. The program initiated by the linguist Noam Chomsky in 1957 sees this fact as a consequence of the human brain being 'prewired' for particular properties of grammar, thereby drastically limiting the number of possible human languages. The claims of this program have been the basis for a great deal of recent linguistic research, and have been one of the most important centers of controversy in the field. Books and journal articles routinely present evidence for or against the idea that central properties of language are innate.a
There is also a long tradition in the study of what it means to say that a word or sentence 'means' a particular thing and how these meanings are conveyed when we communicate with each other. Two popular ideas about what meanings are go back to the ancient Greeks: One is that meanings are mental representations of some sort; another is that the meaning of an expression is purely a function of how it is used. Both ideas have launched research programs that are active today. They have been joined by a third approach, building on work by philosophers such as Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, which applies formal methods derived from logic and attempts to equate the meaning of an expression with reference and the conditions under which it might be judged to be true or false. Other linguists have been looking at the cognitive principles underlying the organization of meaning, including the basic metaphoric processes that some claim to see at the heart of grammar. And still others have been examining the ways that sentences are tied together to form coherent discourse.
In the past 50 years, there has been increasing attention to the social side of language as well as the mental. The subfield of sociolinguistics has come of age in part as a consequence of post World War II social movements. The national liberation movements active in third world countries after the war posed the question of what would be their official language(s) after independence, a pressing question, since almost all of them are multilingual. This led to scholarly study of the language situation in the countries of the world. In addition, the movements for minority rights in the United States and other Western countries has led to a close examination of social variation that complements earlier work in geographical variation. Scholars have turned the analytical tools of linguistics to the study of nonstandard varieties like African American Vernacular English and Chicano Spanish. And the women's movement has led many linguists to investigate gender differences in speech and whether our language has to perpetuate sexual inequality.
Linguistics encompasses many branches and subfields that span both theoretical and practical applications. Theoretical linguistics (including traditional descriptive linguistics) is concerned with understanding the fundamental nature of language and developing a general theoretical framework for describing it. Applied linguistics seeks to utilise the scientific findings of the study of language for practical purposes, such as developing methods of improving language education and literacy.
Linguistic phenomena may be studied through a variety of perspectives: synchronically (describing a language at a specific point of time) or diachronically (through historical development); in monolinguals or multilinguals; children or adults; as they are learned or already acquired; as abstract objects or cognitive structures; through texts or oral elicitation; and through mechanical data collection versus fieldwork.
Linguistics is related to philosophy of language, stylistics and rhetorics, semiotics, lexicography, and translation; philology, from which linguistics emerged, is variably described as a related field, a subdiscipline, or to have been superseded altogether. The earliest activities in the description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī. Today, modern-day theories on grammar employ many of the principles that were laid down then.
Before the 20th century, the term philology, first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the study of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus. Since Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted and the term philology is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history, and literary tradition", especially in the United States (where philology has never been very popularly considered as the "science of language").
Although the term linguist in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641, the term linguistics is first attested in 1847. It is now the usual term in English for the scientific study of language,[citation needed] though linguistic science is sometimes used. Linguistics is a multi-disciplinary field of research that combines tools from natural sciences, social sciences, formal sciences, and the humanities. Many linguists, such as David Crystal, conceptualize the field as being primarily scientific. The term linguist applies to someone who studies language or is a researcher within the field, or to someone who uses the tools of the discipline to describe and analyse specific languages.²
Further information: Philology and Grammarian (Greco-Roman). The formal study of language began in India with Pāṇini, the 6th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. Pāṇini's systematic classification of the sounds of Sanskrit into consonants and vowels, and word classes, such as nouns and verbs, was the first known instance of its kind. In the Middle East, Sibawayh, a Persian, made a detailed description of Arabic in AD 760 in his monumental work, Al-kitab fii an-naħw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), the first known author to distinguish between sounds and phonemes (sounds as units of a linguistic system). Western interest in the study of languages began somewhat later than in the East, but the grammarians of the classical languages did not use the same methods or reach the same conclusions as their contemporaries in the Indic world. Early interest in language in the West was a part of philosophy, not of grammatical description. The first insights into semantic theory were made by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue, where he argues that words denote concepts that are eternal and exist in the world of ideas. This work is the first to use the word etymology to describe the history of a word's meaning. Around 280 BC, one of Alexander the Great's successors founded a university ( Musaeum) in Alexandria, where a school of philologists studied the ancient texts in and taught Greek to speakers of other languages. While this school was the first to use the word "grammar" in its modern sense, Plato had used the word in its original meaning as "téchnē grammatikḗ" (Τέχνη Γραμματική), the "art of writing", which is also the title of one of the most important works of the Alexandrine school by Dionysius Thrax. Throughout the Middle Ages, the study of language was subsumed under the topic of philology, the study of ancient languages and texts, practised by such educators as Roger Ascham, Wolfgang Ratke, and John Amos Comenius.
There was a shift of focus from historical and comparative linguistics to synchronic analysis in early 20th century. Structural analysis was improved by Leonard Bloomfield, Louis Hjelmslev; and Zellig Harris who also developed methods of discourse analysis. Functional analysis was developed by the Prague linguistic circle and André Martinet. As sound recording devices became commonplace in the 1960s, dialectal recordings were made and archived, and the audio-lingual method provided a technological solution to foreign language learning. The 1960s also saw a new rise of comparative linguistics: the study of language universals in linguistic typology. Towards the end of the century the field of linguistics became divided into further areas of interest with the advent of language technology and digitalised corpora.
Linguistics, as any science, has passed through many developmental stages. Many theories have been introduced to tackle various linguistics phenomena and issues. Starting, at least, from the 19th century, linguistics had been knowing interesting progressions in terms of the ways, methods, theories, and approaches of treating and conducting linguistics issues. In this summary, I will take you back on a journey in the history of modern linguistics.
In the two previous centuries, linguistics had known recognizable developments. The school of historical linguistics was established and progressed in the 19th century. It was, later, known as Neogrammarianism. At the beginning of the 20th century, structuralism came to light with the insights introduced by the Swiss-French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
In the second half of the 20th century, generative linguistics was born and developed with its founder Naom Chomsky's permanent efforts and has been the dominant theory until the present time. The pre-structuralist tradition in the 19th Century. Linguistics, as a science, began at the beginning of the 19th century. Its main interest was comparing languages to identify their historical developments and to determine their genealogical relations. The period is thus known as the comparative historical tradition.
Linguistics at this period was diachronic in its orientation. Proceeded and led by German philologists like Jakob Grimm, Franz Bopp, August Friedrich Pott, August Schleicher and Hermann Paul, the concern of linguistics at that time was to know how languages change over time and actually split into mutually unintelligible new languages in long-term progressions. Stunning instances of these splits are the modern Romance language Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and others. Basically, researchers at that time focused on changes that languages had undergone at the level of sounds; i.e. phonological level. In addition, 19th-century scholars were interested in inflectional morphology and lexical similarities across languages.
To compare languages, 19th-century philologists had formulated complicated data-based methods that allowed for building up documented written records, and reconstructing languages that are about to extinct. Specifically, the so-called Junggrammatiker or Neogrammarians (Karl Brugmann, August Leskien, and others) stressed that the laws contended to illustrate sound changes have to be based on concrete facts rather than philosophical conjecture so that it can have the same quality as laws in exact sciences like Physics and Chemistry; a progression that led the general trend in the time toward a ‘positivist’ philosophy and theory of science.
The advent of structuralism in the 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, and based on the developments linguistics had reached in the 19th century with the Neogrammarians, there had been a turning point in linguistic theorizing, especially with the advancement put forth by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Albeit de Saussure is given credit for bringing about a profound change in linguistics at the beginning of the 20th century, much of the literature attributed to him was already out there, so to speak. However, no one can deny the efforts of de Saussure in moving linguistics to be modern science. To be fair, he deserves titles such as ‘founder of modern linguistics’ and ‘founder of structuralism’, which are often attributed to him. Saussure’s germinal ideas were gathered in the famous Cours de Linguistique Générale (Course in General Linguistics), a collection of his lectures in Geneva; the book was based on Saussure’s original insights and his students’ notes and published in 1916 by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye after Saussure’s death in 1913.
Based on his experience in Berlin, the most eventful ‘structuralist’ claim made by de Saussure is that language is a socially shared system of signs. This system is determined by the relations of its elements. The system, therefore, is more important than the elements consisting it, i.e. its component parts. The components in the system obtain their significance only through their relations to other components.³
One simple example by de Saussure is the significance of letters like , , , or others. The significance or value of such letters is not inherited in them but is composed through their oppositions and differences with one another in the system. “ is not by virtue of an inherent quality of the symbol representing it, but it is because it is not , or any other member of the system.
The same is true for the sounds of spoken language, where the phoneme /t/ has different realizations in different environments (for instance, in the initial position as in table, between vowels as in cutter or matter, or even by a glottal stop as in button /bʌʔn̩/. However, the quality of /t/ in the system is not the way it is pronounced, but the opposition to /d/, /p/, and so on.
In brief, with the new approach which treats language as a system of signs per se, the linguistic elements exhibit their qualities only through their relations to one another in the system.