Generative Semantic

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

The linguistic relativity principle, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, is the idea that differences in the way language encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people think, so that speakers of different languages will tend to think and behave differently depending on the language they use. The hypothesis is generally understood as having two different versions: (i) the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories and (ii) the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behavior.

The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th century thinkers, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt who saw language as the expression of the spirit of a nation. The early 20th century school of American Anthropology headed by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir also embraced the idea. Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf came to be seen as the primary proponent of the hypothesis, because he published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences in human cognition and behavior. Whorf's ideas were widely criticized, and Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg decided to put them to the test. They reformulated Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity as a testable hypothesis, now called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and conducted experiments designed to find out whether color perception varies between speakers of languages that classified colors differently. As the study of the universal nature of human language and cognition came in to focus in the 1960s the idea of linguistic relativity fell out of favor. A 1969 study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay showed that color terminology is subject to universal semantic constraints, and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis was seen as completely discredited.

From the late 1980s a new school of linguistic relativity scholars have examined the effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad support for weak versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts.Effects of linguistic relativity have been shown particularly in the domain of spatial cognition and in the social use of language, but also in the field of color perception. Recent studies have shown that color perception is particularly prone to linguistic relativity effects when processed in the left brain hemisphere, suggesting that this brain half relies more on language than the right one.Currently a balanced view of linguistic relativity is espoused by most linguists holding that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in non-trivial ways but that other processes are better seen as subject to universal factors. Current research is focused on exploring the ways in which language influences thought and determining to what extent. The principle of linguistic relativity and the relation between language and thought has also received attention in varying academic fields from philosophy to psychology andanthropology, and it has also inspired and colored works of fiction and the invention of constructed languages.

The formalism based on Noam Chomsky

The formalism of context-free grammars was developed in the mid-1950s by Noam Chomsky, and also their classification as a special type of formal grammar (which he called phrase-structure grammars). 
A context-free grammar provides a simple and mathematically precise mechanism for describing the methods by which phrases in some natural language are built from smaller blocks, capturing the "block structure" of sentences in a natural way. Its simplicity makes the formalism amenable to rigorous mathematical study.

In Chomsky's generative grammar framework, the syntax of natural language was described by a context-free rules combined with transformation rules. In later work (e.g. Chomsky 1981), the idea of formulating a grammar consisting of explicit rewrite rules was abandoned. In other generative frameworks, e.g. Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar et al. 1985), context-free grammars were taken to be the mechanism for the entire syntax, eliminating transformations.

—A formal grammar (sometimes simply called a grammar) is a set of formation rules for strings in a formal language. The rules describe how to form strings from the language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings or what can be done with them in whatever context—only their form. 

Formal language theory, the discipline which studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics . Its applications are found in theoretical computer science, theoretical linguistics, formal semantics, mathematical logic, and other areas. 
 

A formal grammar is a set of rules for rewriting strings, along with a "start symbol" from which rewriting must start. Therefore, a grammar is usually thought of as a language generator. However, it can also sometimes be used as the basis for a “recognizer"—a function in computing that determines whether a given string belongs to the language or is grammatically incorrect

Parsing is the process of recognizing an utterance (a string in natural languages) by breaking it down to a set of symbols and analyzing each one against the grammar of the language. Most languages have the meanings of their utterances structured according to their syntax—a practice known as compositional semantics.

The linguistic formalism derived from Chomsky can be characterized by a focus on innate, universal grammar (UG), and a disregard for the role of stimuli. According to this position, language use is only relevant in triggering the innate structures. With regard to the tradition, Chomsky’s position can be characterized as a continuation of essential principles of structuralist theory from Saussure (Givón 2001). 

The formalist propositions regarding innateness and stimuli do fit extensively with the cognitive opposition 
to behaviouristic psychology.

London School of Linguistics

Or the London school of structuralism is a trend in contemporary structural linguistics (J. R. Firth, W. Sidney Allen, R. H. Robins, and M. A. K. Halliday).

The London school of linguistics is involved with the study of language on the descriptive plane (synchrony), the distinguishing of structural (syntagmatics) and systemic (paradigmatics) concepts, and the social aspects of language. In the forefront is semantics. The school’s primary contribution to linguistics has been the situational theory of meaning in semantics (the dependence of the meaning of a linguistic unit on its use in a standard context by a definite person; functional variations in speech are distinguished on the basis of typical contexts) and the prosodic analysis in phonology (the consideration of the phenomena accruing to a sound: the number and nature of syllables, the character of sound sequences, morpheme boundaries, stress, and so on). The distinctive function is considered to be the primary function of a phoneme.

The London school rejects the concepts of the speech collective and social experience and studies the speech of the individual person; it is subject to terminological and methodological inaccuracy and proves in many aspects to be linguistics of speech and not language.

Compared to other schools of modern linguistics, the London School is more interested in instrumentality of language and meaning or function in context. Influenced by Malinowski's theorizing, Firth and his followers stress the functioning of language and argue that language cannot be disassociated from meaning and should be looked at from a sociological perspective. The London School and the systemic functional grammar, which has developed out of the London approach to language, consider meaning and function as the basis of human language and communicative activity. The linguistic theorizing in the London style is of practical significance and therefore is more relevant to sociolinguistics, stylistics, literary criticism and language teaching. From the linguistic ideas of a few important figures of the London School, we may see the developmental stages this School has gone through and how the tradition has been established for the academic discipline of linguistics in Britain.

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Functional Linguistics: the Prague School

The Prague school, or Prague linguistic circle, was an influential group of literary critics and linguists in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralism literary analysis during the years 1928–1939. It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. Following the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the circle was disbanded in 1952, but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English Firthian linguistics). American scholar Dell Hymes cites his 1962 paper, "The Ethnography of Speaking," as the formal introduction of Prague functionalism to American linguistic anthropology.

The Prague linguistic circle included the Russian émigrés Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Sergei Karcevskiy, as well as the famous Czech literary scholars René Wellek and Jan Mukarovský. The instigator of the circle and its first president was the Czech linguist Vilém Mathesius (President of PLC until his death in 1945).

In 1929 the Circle promulgated its theses in a paper submitted to the First Congress of Slavists. "The programmatic 1929 Prague Theses, surely one of the most imposing linguistic edifices of the 20th century, encapsulated the functionalist credo”. In the late 20th century, English translations of the Circle's seminal works were published by the Czech linguist Josef Vachek in several collections.

The hallmark of Prague linguistic was that it saw language in terms of functions. They analyzed a given language with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language. This differentiated the Prague School sharply from their contemporaries, the American Descriptivists. 

Prague linguistics looked at languages as one might look as a motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others. They used the notions of “phoneme” and “morpheme”, for instance; but they tried to go beyond description to explanation, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.

One fairly straightforward example of functional explanation in Methodius’s own work concerns his use of terms commonly translated theme and rheme, and the notion which has come to be called Functional Sentence Perspective by recent writers working on the Prague tradition. Most sentences are uttered in order to give the hearer dome information; but obviously we do not produce unrelated pieces of information chosen at random, rather we carefully tailor our statements with a view not only to what we want the hearer to learn but also to what he already knows and to the context of discourse which we have so far built up. According to Mathesius, the need for community means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts: the theme, which refers to something about which the hearer already knows, and the rheme, which states some new fact about that given topic.

Very often, the theme/rheme division will correspond to the syntactic distinction between subject and predicate, or between subject-plus-transitive-verb and object a related point is that many Prague linguistics were actively interested in questions of standardizing linguistics usage. Such an interest was perhaps natural for Czechs, whose language is marked by unusually extreme divergence between literary and colloquial usage, and had n the inter-war period only just become the official language of an independent State, but it was certainly encouraged also by the functional approach of the Prague School.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was one of the members of the Prague School not based in Czechoslovakia. He belonged to a scholarly family of the Russian nobility; his father had been a professor of philology and Rector of Moscow University. Trubetzkoy began at an early age to study Finno-Ugric and Caucasian folklore and philology; he was a student of Indo-European linguistics at his father’s university, and became a member of staff. In 41922 he was appointed to the chair of Slavonic philology at Vienna, and he became a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle when it came into being under Mahesius’s aegis a few years later.

Trubetzkoyan phonology, like that of the American Descriptivists, gives a central role to the phoneme; but Trubetzkoy, and the Prague School in general were interested primarily in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes, i.e. the nature of the oppositions between the phonemes that potentially contrast with one another at a given point in a phonological structure, rather than in the syntagmatic relations which determine how phonemes may be organized into sequences in a language.

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