Lecture No 2 Historical background of typological investigations

The Universal Grammar (the first period of scientific linguistics) reveals com­mon features of language structures basing on the comparison of languages with different typological structure.
IV. Comparative linguistics. That period falls into 3 stages: a) Comparative –His­torical linguistics dealing with the study of genetic similarities and relations of lan­guages; b) Comparative Typological linguistics dealing with language study and identifying language types irrespectively of their cultural historic origin; c) theory of linguistics which forms philosophy of language and serves the basis of General linguistics.
V. System linguistics working with the language philosophy, basically with psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.
VI. Structural linguistics which deals: a) study of the language internal structure, formulates between language and other sign systems; 2) elaborates the theory of linguistic methods and strategies thus creating basis for linguistic modeling.


The questions of timing the history of linguistic comparison are quite compli­cated and are the ones which haven't found their final solution yet. The history of linguistic comparison is an integral part of linguistic science development which is bound with the history of nation and cogni­tion. That is why there are no generally accepted criteria for timing this problem yet. We’ll see Dr Buranov’s viewpoint.
In his book “Сравнительная типология английского и тюркских языков” he identifies 4 periods in the history of typological studies:
The first period is characterized as a spontaneous or evolutionary. It begins with the emergence of the first linguis­tic works. That period was over not long before the Renaissance. In Ancient Greece the language was studied in the frames of philosophy. The major issue which was in the focus of discussion was correlation of substances to their names. Still already in the works of Protagoras and Aristotle there are statements related to distinguishing words, word combinations, linguistic categories like gender, case, number, definition of the sentence, classification of words into names and actions or parts of speech. These works served as the basis for distinguishing linguistics into an independent science. E.g. many scholars, while compiling grammars of separate languages used the models of the languages with already described grammatical structures. (The prin­ciple of analogy). For example, while compiling the first English grammars the models of Latin were widely used. The first grammars for the European languages, were based on the Latin Gram­mars.