History of Comparative Linguistics

History of Comparative Linguistics
the end of the 18th century up to the middle of the 19th century, which is called the beginning of comparative research;
the end of the 19th century – the period of neogrammarian studies, when linguists started comparing living languages;
the beginning of the 20th century up to the present – the period of structural and functional approaches to language.

CLAUDE LANCELOT, ANTOINE ARNAUD
‘‘Universal or Rational Grammar’’
(Pour Royal Monastery 1660),
was an attempt to create grammar on
‘‘common in all languages principles’’.

Summary
The historical and comparative method was originally employed to diachronically investigate genealogically related languages, principally Indian, Germanic and Romanic.
2) At the same time general observations in non-related languages were being carried out. These observations helped to establish the languages’ isomorphic and allomorphic features. Thus, together with the historical and comparative study, typological investigations were born.

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835)
The father of typology

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT
is considered to be the father of typology.
grouped all known to him languages into the four classes.
suggested evolutionary theory.
explained the divergences found in languages with the help of existence of ethnic psychology.
used the notion of folk’s spirit represented in national language.

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT`S
classification
isolating languages, which are devoid of the form-building morphemes (like Chinese);
agglutinative languages (like those of the Turkic group);
flexional languages (like the Indo-European and Semitic languages);
4) incorporating languages of American Indians, which are characterized by the possibility of words to combine and form specific word-sentences.

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT`S evolutionary theory
The isolating languages
the agglutinative languages
the inflexional languages

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT`S evolutionary theory
The isolating languages were considered by him to be archaic,
the agglutinative – to be at the intermediary stage of development and
the inflexional ones as those representing the highest degree in language evolution.

SUMMARY:
IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY TYPOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS WERE BASED ON THE MORPHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE.
different structural types of languages were shown as the stages of one process of the development of languages in general as the movement from less perfect to more perfect.

19th century
All through the second half of the 19th century the only object of typological investigation was a word / word-form.
It was investigated with an accent on its common and divergent features with the aim to establish a universal morphological classification.
Nevertheless, in some researches the object of investigation has moved from morphology to syntax.

20th C. TYPOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS:
MULTILATERAL OR GRADED TYPOLOGY
CHARACTEREOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY
QUANTITATIVE TYPOLOGY

Edward Sapir
MULTILATERAL OR GRADED TYPOLOGY

MULTILATERAL OR GRADED TYPOLOGY
the American linguist Edward Sapir.
suggested TWO PARAMETERS:
a) the degree of cohesion between the root and the affixal morphemes in a word:
1) isolating (no formal elements),
2) agglutinative (affixal morphemes don’t cause the changes in
root morpheme),
3) fusional (when it is difficult to find the boundary between the
root and the affixal morphemes),
4) symbolic (root morphemes change because of the shift of the
stress , the change of intonation etc);
b) the degree of synthesis:
1) analytical,
2) synthetic
3) polysynthetic languages.

Summary
Of special attention in the 20th century were questions concerning the ways of contrasting the microsystems of related and non-related languages with the aim of investigating morphological and functional features.
At the same time syntactic relations (C.Bazell, I.I.Meshchaninov) and phonological features (N.Trubetskoy, Ch.Hockett, O. Isachenko) were taken into account.

TYPOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATIONS
Morphological
Phonological
Syntactic

MORPHOLOGICAL
CLASSIFICATION
(after W. Humboldt)

MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION
THE ISOLATING languages
THE AGGLUTINATIVE languages
THE FLEXIONAL languages
THE INCORPORATING / POLYSYNTHETIC languages

the isolating languages
are devoid of the form-building morphemes, they are also called amorphous or formless.
Grammatical relations in these L. are expressed by word order.
The best specimen of an I.L. is Chinese, which is monosyllabic and invariable.

Chinese
A TONAL L.
and the meanings of words
of the same structure
are distinguished by
tones and
position of the word in the sentence.

The exact meaning is made clear by
tones and positions in the sentence.

the agglutinative languages
1) monosemantic and standard suffixes, so called ‘‘stickers’’,
2) a strictly prescribed order of suffixes etc.
(okul ‘‘школа’’,
okullar ‘‘школи’’,
okullarimiz ‘‘наші школи’’,
okullarimizda ‘‘в наших школах”)
These features are permanent for Turkic languages, so it is possible to contrast them to another group of languages.

the flexional languages
The form of a word changes to show a change in meaning or grammatical function.
Often there is no clear boundary between the root and the part which shows the grammatical meaning: mice (mouse + plural)
Indo-European as Greek, Latin, English, Russian, Ukrainian etc. and Semitic languages

the incorporating / polysynthetic languages
of American Indians
with no word / sentence distinction
which are characterized
by the possibility of words
to combine and form
specific sentence structures.

American Indian
I came to give it to her (English) = inialudam (Am.Indian)
i - n - i - a - l - u - d - a - m
i-past time
n-personal pronoun ‘‘I’’
i-personal pronoun ‘‘it’’
a-possessive pronoun ‘‘her’’
L-preposition of direction ‘‘to’’
u-indicates movement away from the speaker
d=give
am-modifies the verbal content in a local sense

PHONOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION

PHONOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION
(after O. Isachenko)
CONSONENTAL
VOCALIC

CONSONENTAL languages
dominates
the system of consonants
which is characterized by the variety of consonantal phonemes and the small number of vocalic phonemes –
Ukrainian, Russian, Polish

VOCALIC languages
dominates
the system of vocalic phonemes
with the limited number of consonants,
and the number of vowels
exceeds the average number
of vocalic phonemes –
English, German, Slovenian, Serbian-Croat

syntactic classifications

according to the type OF grammaTICAL word-formation:
SYNTHETIC languages, in which the grammatical relations between words are expressed by forms of the words themselves.
ANALYTICAL languages, in which the grammatical relations are expressed by means of prepositions. They are also characterized by the use of auxiliary words and a fixed word order (S-V-O).

The change of placement of the elements
is possible in synthetic L. only.
Compare:
e.g. The hunter killed the bear & The bear killed the hunter,
e.g. Мисливець убив ведмедя = Ведмедя убив мисливець.

Ivan I. Meshchaninov
(1883 Ufa - 1967 Leningrad)

According to the way of expressing subject-predicate relations
(after I.I.Meshchaninov)
NOMINATIVE
ERGATIVE
PASSIVE

NOMINATIVE languages
the subject stands
for the doer of the action
and is expressed in the Nominative Case (Indo-European and Semitic L.).
subject in the Nom. Case=doer of the action

ERGATIVE languages
1) There is no positional difference
between the subject and the object.
2) The subject is in the Ergative Case.
e.g. Such a structure can be illustrated by the sentence:
Його убило блискавкою (Caucasian L.).

PASSIVE languages
Neither the subject nor the object have special grammatical forming up within the syntactic unit. They merge with the verb-predicate into a single unit, in which the predicate is a leading component (incorporative L.).

N.S.Trubetskoy
studied
phonological systems of many languages (‘‘The grounds of Phonology’’).

F.F.Fortunatov
added
to Humboldt’s classification
flexional-agglutinative type of language.

I. I.Meshchaninov
classified languages according to the positions of the subject and the predicate in the sentence.
G.P.Melnikov
proposed the theory of determinants (on the basis of the dominant features).
R.Yakobson
studied language universals.