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The paradigm shifts throughout the history of Linguistics
According to Karaulov Yu.N., throughout the history of linguistics there have been distinguished historical, psychological, structural and social paradigms (Караулов, 1987). Postovalova V.I. differentiates semiological, anthropological and theoanthropocosmic (transcendental) paradigms (Постовалова, 1999). Stepanov Yu. S. writes about three major paradigms: semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic (Степанов, 1985). Susov I. points out four major linguistic paradigms: comparative, structural, generative, functional. Kubryakova E.S. argues for traditional, generative, cognitive and communicative paradigms (Кубрякова, 1999). But most researchers claim that there are three types of paradigms: 1) comparative-historical; 2) structural; 3) anthropocentric. All other paradigms represent a certain linguistic trend referring to one of the three (Маслова, 2008). In this respect, Yu. N. Karaulov’s social and psychological, V.V. Shakhovskiy’s emotive, V.I. Postovalova’s theoantropocentric, E.S. Kubryakova’s cognitive, communicative paradigms can be included into the anthropocentric paradigm. Any paradigm, as V.A. Maslova asserts, is characterized by the following features: 1) a paradigm should be common for all the social, humanitarian, natural sciences. For example, structuralism was accepted and developed in history, biology, physics, linguistics, etc.; 2) a paradigm is a set of scientific frameworks within which model problems and their solutions are secured. Only the above-mentioned three paradigms seem to be appropriate to these criteria (Маслова, 2008, 2009).
Let’s in brief highlight the main assumptions and achievements of each paradigm.
The comparative-historical paradigm came into existence in the XIX century. The emergence of this paradigm is bound to the discovery of Sanscrit, an ancient language of India. In 1816 German linguist Frans Bopp compared the verbal systems of Sanscrit, Greek, Latin and several Indo-European languages and proved their genetic relatedness, as well as Rasmus Rask (1818) discovered the genetic relatedness between Germanic, Slavonic languages and Greek, Latin. Later Jacob Grimm established the sound correspondences between the consonants of Germanic and other Indo-European languages, and that became known as “Grimm’s law”. August Schleicher introduced the theory of genealogical tree-diagrams. He also made the first attempt to reconstruct the Indo-European proto-language by applying the comparative method. An alternative model was created by Johannes Shmidth, who proposed that the boundaries between the descendants of proto-languages were constantly shifting. His model became known as the “wave model” of genetic relationships. August Wilhelm Shlegel divided the world’s languages into the following types: 1) isolating languages, such as Chinese, in which words do not change (don’t take affixes); 2) agglutinative languages, such as Turkish, in which words contain a number of affixes, each of which has a single grammatical function; 3) inflectional languages (Latin), in which words can take affixes expressing several grammatical functions. This typology was refined by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who added the fourth type to Shlegel’s classification: 4) incorporating languages, such as Eskimo, in which the distinction between a clause and a word is blurred. It should be mentioned, that these classifications, and findings remain valid for present-day linguistics.
So, the comparative-historical paradigm, the aim of which was to establish the genetic relationships of the world languages, dominated throughout the XIX century. The findings of this paradigm consist in: the establishment of relatedness of the Indo-European languages, the construction of language families and reconstruction of proto-languages, the morphological and genealogical classifications of languages, etc. But the main achievement of this paradigm is working out a comparative-historical method of studying languages. It is this method that gave incentive to the development of linguistics as an independent science.
The origins of the next paradigm, called “structuralism” is attributed to the work by Ferdinand de Saussure presented in the posthumous publication “Course of General Linguistics”. The structural analysis was focused not on the use of language (parole/speech), but rather on the structural system of language (langue). Language was regarded as a static system of interconnected units. In other words, structural linguistics is considered to be “a system of signs” composed of the signified (an abstract idea or concept) and the signifier (means of expressing the signified). The structural approach is focused on the synchronical rather than diachronical relationships of linguistic units. A language system was looked upon as an integrity of elements, entering into various combinations with each other. Different levels of language were differentiated and studied separately. So, structuralism set out to model language in purely linguistic terms, as an independent science not connected with other disciplines. Linguistic patterns were explained by appeals to internal structural properties specific to a language.
In brief, the main assumptions of structuralism are: 1) language is a system of structural sets, all units of which are interconnected by syntagmatic and paradigmatic links; 2) language is a system of signs that correlate with other systems of signs in the domain of semiotics; 3) there is a strict differentiation between language (langue) and speech (parole); 4) language is studied synchronically, rather than diachronically; 5) attention is focused on the static rather than dynamic aspects of the language.
Sausser’s ideas had a great influence on linguistics and determined the emergence of the Prague, Moscow, Kopenhagen linguistic schools. Suffice it to mention the names of such prominent linguists as R. Jakobson, N. Trubetskoy, L. Hjelmslev, L. Bloomfield, O. Jespersen, A. Peshkovskiy, Boduen de Courtene, etc.
It should be stressed that structural linguistics played a very important role in the development of linguistic theory. It raised and discussed the problems of crucial importance such as the systematic structure of language, the correlation of form and content in the language, paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of linguistic units, the level structure of the language, etc. (Алефиренко, 2005). All these issues remain topical for present day linguistics as well.
However, the structural model of language, as has been mentioned, was not able to answer the questions related to the global problems of “language and human mind”, “language and culture”, language and society”.
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