English Simplified

Imagine you want to understand a building. You could start by looking at the bricks, the cement, the design — but first, you need to know: what is a building, and what rules govern its construction?

Linguistics does the same for language. Before we study sounds (phonology) or word-forms (morphology), we ask: What is language? How does it work? What do great thinkers say about it?

Scientific means linguists don't just feel how language works — they observe, collect data, form hypotheses, and test them.

Systematic means language has patterns and rules. These patterns are studied unit by unit (sounds, words, sentences).

Objective means there is no "good" or "bad" language — a linguist does not judge; they describe. (This is called Descriptivism, not Prescriptivism.)

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist. Although he died before publishing his own book, his students compiled his lectures into a famous text: Course in General Linguistics (1916). This book revolutionised linguistics.

His key contribution: he said language should be studied as a system — like a game of chess where each piece (word/sound) gets its value not from itself but from its relation to other pieces.

Saussure said words exist in TWO types of relationships — like a grid with horizontal and vertical axes.

Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949) was an American linguist and one of the leaders of the Structuralist movement in America. His key book is Language (1933). He believed linguistics should be purely scientific — studying only what is observable (actual speech), not mental concepts.

Think of it like peeling an onion — you remove layers one by one. At each step, you split a unit into its TWO most immediate parts. You stop when you reach individual morphemes (smallest units).

Noam Chomsky (born 1928) is the most influential linguist of the 20th century. He challenged Bloomfield's Behaviorist view (that language is learned by habit through stimulus-response) and argued that language is innate — we are born with it.

His key books: Syntactic Structures (1957), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965).

Generative: The grammar can generate (produce) all possible grammatical sentences — even ones never spoken before.

Transformational: Simple, basic sentences (Kernel sentences) can be transformed into more complex structures through rules.

Chomsky asked: How do children, across all cultures and languages, learn their mother tongue so quickly and perfectly — without being formally taught grammar?

His answer: Humans are born with a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) — a built-in "language faculty" in the brain. The LAD contains Universal Grammar (UG) — abstract principles common to all human languages.

Dell Hymes (1927–2009) was an American sociolinguist. He argued that Chomsky's concept of competence was too narrow. Chomsky only described grammatical competence — knowing the rules of grammar. But Hymes said: knowing grammar is not enough to communicate successfully in real life.

Hymes used the acronym SPEAKING to describe the components of communicative competence:

Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) was a Russian-American linguist who proposed that every act of communication serves one (or more) of six functions. He built this model on a communication framework: Sender → Message → Receiver (along with Code, Contact, and Context).