| | | The Comparison between Firthian Linguistics and Noam Chomsky’s Generative Grammar
| | 小学英语教学的论文 Abstract: For most of our lifetime, we just use and comprehend our native language unconsciously without any arguments and questions. Only when we thought of our childhood and maybe brought up the children might we realize that how many complicated aspects are involved in the acquisition process. And after we have known the first language or native language, we try to learn a second language or foreign languages, we found it more difficult to understand that human beings have to make efforts to obtain the competence for language communication. Hence it is really important to know something about the short history of linguistics. Of course there are so many schools of linguistics in its history. But in this essay, only the comparison between Firthan Linguistics and Noam Chomsky’s Generative Grammar is presented to show you the similarities and differences of the two and how languages come into being.
Firthian linguistics, or the London School, was founded in England, a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an unusually long history, by John Rupert Firth (1890-1960), the first general linguistics anthropologist and father of the London School. Firth, a Yorkshireman, read history as an undergraduate. He was professor of English at the University of the Punjab from 1919 to 1928, and returned in the latter year to a post in the phonetics department of University College, London. In 1938 Firth moved to the linguistic department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, where in 1944 he became the first professor of General Linguistics in Great Britain. Until very recently, the majority of university teachers of linguistics in Britain were people who had trained under Firth’s aegis and whose work reflected his ideas. There are many other British linguists in this school, such as F. Palmer, John Lyons, R.H. Robins and M. A. K. Halliday.
Firth’s theory: 1) Analysis of language: structure / system; 2) He argues not only social process but also individual human beings are involved in the development of language. He emphasis the personal side of human being. He did not agree Saussuran dictum, langue and parole, language is a set of commensions, and mode of action. 3) Speech is the essence of language. 4) Language is developed as a result of inter-nature and nurture. People’s learning process of language the target language used by people in reality.
During the development, there were two outstanding aspects that are always associated with the name of Firth: context of situation theory and prosody.
The context of situation theory is the foundation of linguistics. Firth insisted that sound and meaning in language were more directly related than they are usually taken to be. Meaning is the focus of linguistic study; context may be employed to be the theory and approach of analysis. Meaning does not come from the idea of the word comprised the situation by, or from the relation. It has three contents: 1) speech interrelates with outside word; 2) narrative situation; 3) speech is used to fill a kind of vacuum, for instance, the phallic function in communication: “How do you do?” “Nice day!” “Mhm!” etc. The principle just mentioned did have some heuristic value for the work of the London School. It meant for instance, that the practitioners of the school were quite happy to introduce grammatical considerations to their phonological analyses. To Firth’s notion of meaning we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinosky (1884-1942), professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics from 1927 onwards. For Malinowsky, to think of language, as a “means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener” was a misleading myth (1935, p.9): to speak, particularly in a primitive culture, is not to tell but to do. His main ideas: 1) language is not a self-contained system, it is dependent on the society itself in which language is used on two ways: a. Language evolves in the accordance in the computer: coin new words to the specific demands; b. Language is used in context. 2) Language serves as great variety of context situation. Firth accepted Malinaosky’s view of language, and indeed the two men probably each influenced the other in evolving what are ultimately very similar views; as a result, Firth uses the word meaning in rather bizarre ways. The meaning of an utterances is what it does, but of course varies aspects of utterances do very different kinds of thing. Malinaosky clarifies his idea of meaning by appealing a notion of “context of situation”(Malinaosky 1923, p.306). To quote Lyon’s exposition of Firth’s view (1966, p.290), “meaning” or “function in context”, is to be interpreted as acceptability or appropriateness in that context: an utterance or part of an utterance is “meaningful” if, and only if, it can be used appropriately in some actual context“. Firth’s view on meaning seem, in fact to have very little to offer.
Another development in linguistics, which is also closely related to Firth, is prosodic analysis. The prosody means 1) the relationship of each phoneme to its phonemic context; 2) the relationship each lexical item to the others in the sentence; 3) morphological relations of each word; 3) sentence type; 4) relationship of sentence to its context situation. The prosodic phonology has no phoneme but character. The segments will remain to be phonematic unit after the structural prosodic unit being analyzed and taken off. The supersegamental features in intonation, pitch, stress; palatalization, nasalization and lip rounding divided into prosodic component unit. For phonematic unit, it has fewer phonological features, maybe just the feature of voicing. The prosody operates the different kinds of it over stretch of structures e.g. tooth features in lip-rounding, aspiration. Different tones will cause the change of its meaning. Prosody’s link in grammatical category: e.g. rows [rouz] inflexible, plural form of a noun, present singular third person of a verb; but rose [rouz] just the grammatical meaning. So the word “tooth” [tu:θ] is expressed as wC1VC2 in phonematic. “W” represents lip rounding, etc. There are also polysystemicness principal and monosystemicness principal. For example the complementary contribution of / p/ in [ph] pot and [p] in stop, spot; / m. n / mice, nice; rum, run, rung.
In so far as scholars trained within the London School have contributed to our understanding of semantics, as John Lyons in particular has done, they have achieved this by going beyond the framework of ideas shared by other members of the school. The application of these principles to syntax has been carried out by successors of Firth, notably Michael Halliday (b. 1925), once professor of General Linguistics at University College, London, and at the time of writing professor at the University of Sydney, and R. A. Hudson (b. 1939), of UCL.
Syntactic analysis in the London style is commonly called “systemic grammar” (other, less significant terms have also been used). A “system” in Firthian language, remembers, is a set of mutually exclusive options that come into play at some point in a linguistic structure. This is the clue to London School syntax: like Firthan phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choices which one makes (consciously or unconsciously) in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentences that one’s language makes available.
To make this clearer, we may contrast the systemic approach with Chomsky’s approach to grammar. A chomskyan grammar defines the class of well-formed sentences in a language by providing a set of rules for rewriting symbols as other symbols, such that if one begins with the specified initial symbol S and applies the rules repeatedly the end-result will be one of the target sentences. Such a grammar can succeed in defining a range of different sentences, clearly, only because in applying the rules one is often faced with choices. But in a Chomsky grammar the choice-points are diffused throughout the description, and no special attention is drawn to them. Many choices are made in the constituency base: a given category symbol is expanded by means of braces or commas into alternative rewriters, or brackets are used to show that some element may or may not occur in the rewriter of a category symbol. Other choices arise in applying transformations: certain transformations are optional, others can apply in alternative ways, and (in some versions of transformational theory) there are alternative orders for applying transformations, with the nature of the ultimate result varying according to which order is selected. Often it would be the case that some choice in applying transformational rules becomes available only if certain options have been selected in the constituency base, but a Chomskyan grammar does nothing to make such interdependencies between choices explicit – that is not its aim. To cite a very simple example, Halliday (1967, p. 40) suggest that one system of choices operating in English main clauses, a system which he labels “transitivity”, provides for a choice between “intensive” and “extensive”. In a standard transformational grammar, the syntactic differences between these clauses would correlate with choice of rewrite for the category symbol “VP” and for certain other symbols in the base, with choice of whether or not to apply the Passive transformation, and with choice of whether or not to apply the transformation which deletes the by-phrase produced by passive. No explicit statement would be found in a transformational grammar pointing out, for example, that the choice of applying the Passive transformation arises only if certain options are chosen when rewriting “VP” in the base, and there are certainly no special names given to the alternative structures which result from the various choices. (Occasionally Chomskyans do use a special terms to describe some particular syntactic structure, but usually this is a term inherited from traditional philological vocabulary, and traditional terminology provide names for only the most elementary among the many systems defined in a systemic grammar – Chomskyans do not make a point of supplementing this deficiency.) London School linguists have no interest in asking what particular types of rules are used in realizing various systemic options, since they are not concerned with the question of linguistic universals. In the case of syntax the Chomskyans are less one – sided than in the case of phonology, since most Chomskyan grammars include a constituency base defining a range of deep structures as well as a set of transformational rules converting deep into surface structures. Alongside the notion of “system”, Halliday (for example, 1961) introduces into syntax the notions “rank” and “delicacy”: scale of rank; scale of delicacy and scale of exponence. Any grammatical system will operate at a specific rank. If we think in terms of Chomskyan hierarchical tree diagrams, Halliday is saying, as it were, that sentences can be represented not merely as trees but as trees which are regimented in such a way that along any branch there are the same number of intermediate nodes between the “root” and the “leaf”. The most important view of Halliday is his scale and category grammar, and systemic grammar. He supposed that there are four categories in language: unit, class, structure and system. These four categories are linked with scale of rank, scale of delicacy and scale of exponence.
Firthian Linguistics and Chomskyan Generative Grammar is just a small proportion in the history of linguistics. But the interest towards languages and the practical problems accelerates the independent establishment of linguistics at several centers, such as India, Arab and Greek Rome. Each center has its own achievements. It is very hard to believe that the European linguistics could not reach such a level without loaning the linguistic achievement outside of Europe especially the ancient India linguists’ study on Sanskrit grammar and phonology. It is said that European science is the global one. So it is same in the case of linguistics. To learn something about European linguistic
schools means to learn linguistics internationally.
Bibliography
Robins, R. H. 1967, 《语言学简史》， 安徽教育出版社
Sampson, Geoffrey ，1980, Schools of Linguistics , Stanford University Press
王宗炎， 1980，《伦敦学派奠基人弗思的小学英语教学的论文语言理论》， 《国外语言学》， 1980年第5 期
胡壮麟， 1983，《韩礼德》，《国外语言学》， 1983年第2 期
赵世开， 1987，《 国外语言学概述—— 流派和代表人物》， 北京语言学院出版社
徐志民， 1990，《 欧美语言学简史》，学林出版社
|
| | |
| | | | <<<<<全文未完>>>>> 全文字数约$$$zishu$$$字 | |
| | |
| |
|
教育论文中心