II. Practical Task

1. Answer the following questions.

Why did scholars make repeated attempts to group languages according to their origin?

How many languages are there in the world?

Is the number of them growing or diminishing?

How do they differ from one another?

What scholars were the first to develop the idea of language relation­ship?

In connection with what studies was the historical comparative linguistics cre­ated?

What stimulated the appearance of the historical comparative method in lin­guistics?

Who was the first to put forward a scientific hypothesis that Sanskrit was re­lated to some European languages?

How did Sir William Jones ground his ideas?

What was the principal line of European linguistics in the 19th century?

Who continued to develop the historical comparative method in the 19th and 20th centuries?

What are the aims of the historical comparative method?

* * *

What lingual elements are called "prehistoric"?

What is meant by the term 'reconstruction'?

For what other purposes is the historical comparative method used besides reconstructing prehistorically forms?

How do families of related languages arise? What causes the splitting of languages?

What epoch in the history of peoples is characterized by language divisions?

What language is called the 'parent language'?

Can the parent language continue to exist in living speech after a family of languages has arisen out of it?

Do all the kindred languages survive after the splitting of the parent language?

What features of resemblance between languages prove their kinship?

Why is the arbitrary character of the lingual sign so important for the historical comparative method?

What resemblances between languages do not evidence their kinship?

* * *

Why must we compare the elements of the basic word stock and grammatical affixes to prove that the languages are kindred?

Give examples of related native words in the Indo-European languages.

Why is it important for the comparative study of languages to note the uneven character of language development?

Why do languages develop unevenly?

How are reconstructions formed?

What notation is used to represent historical changes in scientific treatises?

Give examples.

What are the main limitations of the historical comparative method?

What material is analisable by the historical comparative method?

Are all the common features of related languages inherited directly from the parent language?

What is dangerous in elaborating reconstructions?

Can the historical comparative method be applied to spoken languages?

Is the historical comparative method antiquated?

What other families of languages besides the Indo-European are being studied by the comparative linguistics?

Lecture № 3

Developing of ideas and schools in modern linguistics.

The main method of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th cen­tury was the historical comparative method. It was for the scientific study of languages, it had definite shortcomings and limitations.

The historical comparative method gave no exact definition of the object of linguistics as an independent science. As Louis Hjelmslev pointed out, "The linguistics of the past-even of the recent past—has concerned itself with the physical and physiological, psychological and logical, sociological and historical precipita­tions of languages, not of the language itself."

The study of numerous languages of the world was neglected.

It was mainly the historical changes of phonological and morphologi­cal units that were studied. Syntax hardly existed.

As a reaction to the atomistic approach to language a new theory ap­peared.

The first linguists to speak of language as a system or a structure of smaller systems were de Courtenay, Fortunatov and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de-Saussure.

The work that came to be most widely known is de-Saussure's. Course in General Linguistics, posthumously compiled from his pupils' lecture-notes be­tween 1906 and 1911.

De-Saussure's main ideas are as follows:

1. Language is understood as a system of signals, interconnected and in­terdependent. It is this network of interdependent elements that form the object of linguistics as an independent science.

2. Language as a system of signals may be compared to other systems of signals, such as writing, alphabets for the deaf-and-dumb, military signals, symbolic rites, forms of courtesy, etc. Thus, language may be considered as being the object of a more general science—semeiology—a science of the fu­ture which would study different systems of signals used in human societies.

3. Language has two aspects: the system of language and the manifestation of this system in social intercourse—speech. The system of language is a body of linguistic units—sounds, affixes, words, grammar rules and rules of lexical series. The system of language enables us to speak and to be understood since it is known to all the members of a speech community. Speech is based on the system of language, and it gives the linguist the possibility of studying the system.

De-Saussure gave the following diagram to illustrate his theory of the asso­ciative series of the system of language