Lecture No 2 Historical background of typological investigations

Lecture No 2


Historical background of typological investigations
Questions to cover:

1. 
   Foreign scientists’ assumption
   
2. 
   Native scientists’ conception
   

The questions of timing the history of linguistic comparison are quite compli­cated and are the ones which haven’t found their final solution yet.
There exist different variants of periodization of CL suggested by different modern linguists. I’m going to mention about two directions:

1. 
   Foreign scientists’ assumption
   
2. 
   Native scientists’ conception
   

In “the Essays on the History of Linguistics” by Amirova T.A., Rojdestvenskiy Yu.V., Olkhovikov B.A [1975] six stages are defined for the history of development of linguistics as a science. As all of them imply systemic comparison, this classification can be to a large extent applied to CL too.
I. Theory of naming in Antique philosophy. It established the rules of naming in the frames of philosophy, It also looked at relations between the names and the ob­jects of reality. There were 2 main schools of philosophers who supported opposite standpoints (analogists and anomalists) on the nature of names. As the theory of naming did not contain a specialized knowledge on language it was not included into general linguistics;
П. The Antique Grammar traditions of West and East. Theory of grammar emerged at this time. It describes language system through establishing relations between linguistic names (and some other parts of language). At this period the basic pri­mary grammatical categories — parts of speech were distinguished and described: the names such as the noun (proper and common), the adjective; the numeral; the verb, the pronoun. Also some secondary grammatical categories, i.e, the categories of parts of speech were identified: the category of number, gender, case, mood, etc.
Ш.