Modern linguistic

Beginnings

•Modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the shift of focus from
historical concerns of changes in languages over time to the idea that a language can be viewed as a
self-contained and structured system situated at a particular point in time.

•This forms the basis for structuralist linguistics that developed in the post-First World War period.

•The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is widely acknowledged as the key figure in this
refocusing of interest, and as the founding father of modern linguistics.

•Saussure began his career in the Indo-European historical-comparative tradition, within which he made
a seminal contribution. Saussure published little himself, but his students in Geneva reconstructed his
ideas from their lecture notes, and published them posthumously in 1916 as Cours de linguistique
générale [Course in general linguistics).

•His work has proved a rich field for subsequent investigators, and has inspired numerous
interpretations and reinterpretations. His influence extended beyond linguistics, Into neighboring
disciplines including anthropology and semiotics (the field of study that investigates signs and sign
systems generally).

•Saussure championed the idea that language is a system of arbitrary signs, and his conceptualization of
the sign has been highly influential.

•Phonetics and phonology were dominant in early modern linguistics. The International Phonetic
Association (IPA) was established in 1886 by a group of European phoneticians.

•The British phonetician Henry Sweet (1845-1912) was one of the leading figures In phonetics in the
second half of the nineteenth century.

•He and the Polish linguist Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) were independently instrumental in
development of the notion of the phoneme or distinctive sound, foreshadowed centuries previously by
the author of The first grammatical treatise.

Structuralism

•Structuralism, in linguistics, is any one of several schools of 20th-century linguistics committed to the
structuralist principle that a language is a self-contained relational structure, the elements of which
derive their existence and their value from their distribution and oppositions in texts or discourse.This
principle was first stated clearly, for linguistics, by the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913).

•In the United States the term structuralism, or structural linguistics, has had much the same sense as it
has had in Europe in relation to the work of Franz Boas (1858-1942) and Edward sapir(1884-1939) and
their followers
 European Structuralism

•Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss Linguist, credited with finding the field of structural linguistics, a
new theory applying in linguistics system.

•What is Structural Linguistics?

•Structural linguistics, as far as Saussure is concerned, is the idea that language is a systematic contrast
and equivalence.

•Structural linguistics holds the view that language consists of a string of linguistic objects, such as
words, phonemes, morphemes, and each object earns its meaning from contrast to other objects in a
linguistic system.

•In order to understand the Saussurean structural system, we have to first understand, the key ideas
and distinction between 'sign/signifier/referent", "Langage/Langue/ Parole', 'synchronic/diachronic' and
'syntagmatic/paradigmatic.

The Saussurean Model

•Saussure's central distinction is between langue' and 'parole".

•Parole: it consists of individual usages of language at particular times to make statements, ask
questions, individual utterance, commands etc.

•Parole is the speech act.

•Langue: it is the underlying system- passively assimilated and not explicitly formulated by speakers.

•Langue makes all acts of speaking possible, intelligible and meaningful. It is the systematic language
shared by community. Saussure used the term "langue to signify language as a system or structure; on
the other hand 'parole' means any given utterance in that language.

•Langage: inherent and universal faculty of humans to build languages (codes) to communicate: Langage
refers to psychological faculties allowing communication using any communication system. Langage is
innate.

•Signifier: It is the sound image of that what we talking about, the act of speech or utterance.

•Signified: It is the concept of the thing of which we are talking about. It is the idea of our mind.

•Referent: The actual real thing in the world is called referent.

•Saussure says, the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. There is an arbitrary
unconventional relationship between the two.

•For, Saussure, the meaning we give to words is purely arbitrary, and that these meanings are
maintained by conventions only. Words, therefore, are 'unmotivated signs', means that there is no
inherent connection between a word and it designates.
•Synchrony: It refers to a study of complete linguistics system at a given time. Saussure's aim was to
show that language can be studied synchronically and that this is the most illuminating way to explicit it.

•Diachronic: it refers how the linguistic system developed over a period of time.

•A syntagmatic relationship involves a sequence of signs that together create meaning.

- John ate an octopus.

•A paradigmatic relationship involves signs that can replace each other, usually changing the meaning
with the substitution.

- an octopus ate John.

•As far as Saussure is concerned, the study of language is liable to belief. He stresses that language is
structural; thereby language can be freed from the social, cultural, political or historical associations.

• Practically this approach to language means that the study of language by structural relations only.

•Linguistic objects and their meanings can be grasped only through their contrast with other linguistic
objects in the systems.

the Saussurean Model So why are any of these interesting?

• As far as Saussure is concerned, the study of language is liable to belief. He stresses that language is
structural; thereby language can be freed from the social, cultural, political or historical associations.

• Practically this approach to language means that the study of language by structural relations only.

• Linguistic objects and their meanings can be grasped only through their contrast with other linguistic
objects in the systems.

The American School of Structuralism

• Two distinguished linguists, Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield, mark the Inception of the
AMERICAN SCHOOL in linguisystems

• They were the progenitors of the two branches of American linguistics, of which only one, the one
which goes back to Bloomfield basically, represents structuralism in de Saussure's sense.

• The second branch, which goes back to Sapir, cannot be considered structuralist, for Sapir's successors
correlate the results of the structural analysis of a language with the results of a structural analysis of
the entire material and spiritual culture of the people who speak the language.

The American School of Structuralism (Edward Sapir)

• Like de Saussure, Sapir distinguishes between a physical and an ideal system (pattern) in language, and
it is the latter which he considers a "real and an immensely important principle in the life of a language".
• On Sapir's view, units of cultural behaviour (such as linguistic units) can only be identified through the
relations they maintain to other elements of the same kind.

• This set of interrelations is what Sapir calls a "pattern", or refers to simply as "form".

The American School of Structuralism (Edward Sapir) Strong and weak versions of
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

• The theory of linguistic relativity is known in two versions: the strong hypothesis (linguistic
determinism) and the weak hypothesis (linguistic relativity).

• It is necessary to clarify that the words "strong" and "weak" are not related to the strength of the
scholarly argumentation, but rather to the degree to which language is assumed to influence our
thought and behavior.

• According to the strong version, the language we speak determines/constraints the way we think and
view the real world.

The American School of Structuralism (Edward Sapir)

Arguments for and against :

• The ability of people to learn and to speak multiple languages casts doubt on the strong version of the
theory, since a person may learn many different languages, but this does not change the way he/she
thinks. Therefore, the strong version of Sapir Whorf hypothesis is refuted by the greater majority of
linguists and anthropologists,

• Experiment:

• One of such experiments was devised and conducted by Kay and Kempton (1984). The scholars invited
two groups of monolingual participants: 1) English speakers and 2) Tarahumara (a Uto-Aztecan language
of northern Mexico) speakers. Unlike English, Tarahumara does not have separate words to differentiate
between "green" and "blue"-Tarahumara has one word "siyóname" which means "green or blue".

The American School of Structuralism (Leonard Bloomfield)

• Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) was a major influence in the shift of linguistics from the historical and
comparative study of languages prevalent during the 19th century to the description of the structure of
languages in the 20th century.

• He defined himself as a behaviorist. His work at Ohio University, from 1921 to 1927, put him in close
touch with the behaviorists A. P. Weiss, Pavlov's, Watson's, and Meyer's writings.

• He formulated theoretical and methodological principles based on structural linguistics for the
teaching of foreign languages (Bloomfield, 1987) and didactic material specifically for the teaching of
Russian and Dutch (Cowan, 1987).
 The American School of Structuralism (Leonard Bloomfield)

• The main concepts of teaching English from a structuralist approach include a focus on sentence
structure, patterns of sentences and appropriate grammar and composition. Teaching English through a
structuralist approach includes a focus on four main skills:

• Understanding the grammatical structures

• Speaking properly, according to the rules of proper grammar and mechanics; using proper sentence
structure the English language.

• Reading properly, according the rules of comprehension

• Writing properly, according to the rules of proper grammar and mechanics; using proper sentence
structure

Features of American Structuralism

• In order to avoid the dangers implicit in traditional grammar, American linguists had the following
aims:

• To describe current spoken language, not dead languages.

• To focus on language form as a sole objective, thus neglecting meaning to a subordinate place.

• To perform the description of language using an organized, unprejudiced, and meticulous method
which allows the analyst to extract the grammar of a language from a corpus of recorded data in a
quasi- mechanical way following four steps:

a) Field recordings of a corpus of data;

b) Segmentation of the utterances of the corpus at different levels: phoneme, morpheme, word, group,
clause and sentence;

c) Listing an inventory of forms thus obtained from each level and stating the distribution (possible
environment) of the forms;

d) Classifying the forms (by giving them names) and utterances of the language being studied. Only such
an essentially classificatory method could enable them, it was thought, to concentrate systematically
without any predetermined framework, on the unique structure of the language under examination.

Generativism

• Generativism is associated so closely with Noam Chomsky that it is often referred to (despite his
disapproval) as 'the Chomskyan revolution'.
• Chomsky's approach was a reaction to the behaviorist theory of language prevalent at the time,
championed by the psychologist Skinner.

• Under a behaviorist model, the brain is considered a blank slate with regard to linguistic knowledge;
children must thus be explicitly taught their language by the adults around them in a stimulus-response
manner, their behavior being rewarded when they imitate the adults' language correctly.

Generativism

• Chomsky instead advocated a view subscribed to in the previous century (to which behaviorism had
been a reaction) that some brain activities are unconscious and reflexive, just as is the case for many
physical processes. Much of human beings' linguistic knowledge, Chomsky argued, is abstract and
unconscious, but can be brought to conscious awareness by examining speakers' usage of such linguistic
knowledge (known as the competence/performance dichotocorrect

Generativism

• Transformational grammar (TG) first emerged in the early 1950s in the work of the leading 'post-
Bloomfieldian', Zellig S. Harris, Chomsky's supervisor at Pennsylvania, and was the central focus of his
Ph.D. (1955), entitled 'Transformational Analysis".

Generativism

• Generativism is associated so closely with Noam Chomsky that it is often referred to (despite his
disapproval) as 'the Chomskyan revolution'.

• Chomsky's approach was a reaction to the behaviorist theory of language prevalent at the time,
championed by the psychologist Skinner.

• Under a behaviorist model, the brain is considered a blank slate with regard to linguistic knowledge;
children must thus be explicitly taught their language by the adults around them in a stimulus-response
manner, their behavior being rewarded when they imitate the adults' language correctly.

Generativist School of Linguistics

• The term 'generativism' (used by Lyons 1997, p. 297) refers to of language that was developed by
Chomsky and his followers.

• 'Generativism', in this sense, has been enormously influential, not only in linguistics, but also in
philosophy, psychology and other disciplines concerned with language.

• Generativism is usually presented as having developed out of, and in reaction to, the previously
dominant school of post-Bloomfieldian American descriptivism: a particular version of structuralism.
 Generativist School of Linguistics

•Creativity is, in Chomsky's view, a peculiarly human attribute, which distinguishes men from machines
and animals. But it is a rule-governed creativity.

•The utterances we produce have a certain grammatical structure; they have rules of grammaticality
and this gives rise to a connection between creativity and productivity.

• So, our creativity in the use of language manifests itself within the limits set by the productivity of the
language system. And the very central component in Chomsky generativism is that the rules that
determine the productivity of human languages have formal properties due to the structure of human
mind.

Creativity and Productivity

1. In chomsky's view, creativity is a particular human attribute, which distinguishes men from machine
and as far as we know from anaimals.

2. It is rule governed creativity and this is where generative grammar comes in its own.

3. The utterenaces that we produce have a certain grammatical structure; they conform to identifiable
rules of well-formedness.

4. Productivity makes possible exercise of creativity.

5. Productivity is not to be identified with creativity, but there is an intrinsic connection between them.

• This brings us to mentalism. Chomsky believes that linguistics has an important role to play in the
investigation of the nature of the mind. Chomsky wishes to study language within the framework of
concepts and assumptions provided by natural sciences.

Generativist School of Linguistics

• The attitude towards linguistic universals in Chomsky's generativism and both Bloomfieldian and post-
Bloomfieldian structuralism is quite different. Bloomfield and his followers emphasized the structural
diversity of languages.

• Generativists, in contrast, are more interested in what languages have in common. Another difference
is that Chomsky attaches more importance to the formal properties of languages and to the nature of
the rules that their description requires than he does to the relations that hold between language and
the world.

• A further difference between generativism and Bloomfieldian and post-Bloomfieldian structuralism

relates to the distinction that Chomsky draws between competence and performance. The distinction
between competence and performance, as drawn by Chomsky, is similar to Saussure's distinction
between langue and parole.
 Generativist School of Linguistics

•Concept of Grammar

• Grammar is traditionally subdivided into different but inter-related areas of study -morphology and
syntax.

• Morphology is the study of how words are formed out of smaller units (morphemes), and the study of
principles which determine the ways the parts are combined together to form the whole.

• Syntax is concerned with the ways in which words can be combined together to form phrases and
sentences, and the study of principles which determine the ways the words can be combined together
to form phrases and sentences.

Generativist School of Linguistics

• However, grammar is traditionally concerned not just with the principles which determine the
formation of words, phrases and sentences, but also with the principles which govern their
interpretation - i.e. with the principles which tell us how to interpret (to assign meaning to) words,
phrases, sentences.

• For example, any comprehensive grammar of English will specify that compound words like man-eater
and man-made have very different interpretations: in a compound like man-eater, the word man.

• Thus, the structural aspect of meaning is traditionally said to be part of the domain of grammar. We
might therefore characterize grammar as the study of the principles which govern the formation and
interpretation of words, phrases, and sentences.

Generativist School of Linguistics

• The aims of linguistics are often summarized by Chomsky in the form of three questions (Chomsky
1991):

• 1. What constitutes knowledge of language. The linguist's duty is to describe what people know about
language - whatever it is that they have in their minds when they know English, Arabic or Russian or any
language.

• 2. How is such language acquired: A second aim is to discover how people acquire this knowledge.
Studying acquisition of language knowledge means first establishing what the knowledge that is
acquired actually consists of, i.e. on first answering question of (UG, initial state, prior experience)

• 3. How is such knowledge put to use A third aim is to see how people use this acquired language
knowledge. Again, investigating how knowledge is used depends on first establishing what knowledge is.

Generativist School of Linguistics

• If we say that grammar is the study of grammatical competence, then we are implicitly taking a
cognitive view of the nature of grammar.

• If the term grammatical competence is used to denote what native speakers subconsciously know
about the grammar of their language, then grammar is part of the more general study of cognition (i.e.
human knowledge).

• In the terminology adopted by Chomsky (1986), our ultimate goal is to characterize the nature of the
internalized linguistic system (or 1-language, as Chomsky terms it) which enables humans to speak and
understand their native language.

Generativist School of Linguistics

• One aim of generative grammar is to make a contribution to the problems of universals Universal
Grammar (UG).

• UG is a theory of knowledge, not behavior.

• UG theory holds that the speaker knows a set of principles that apply to all languages, and parameters
that vary from one language to another. The importance of UG theory is its attempt to integrate
grammar, mind and language at every moment.

Generativist School of Linguistics (Reminder)

• -The theory of grammar is concerned with characterizing the general properties and organization of
grammars of natural languages.

• -Any adequate theory of language should be universal, explanatory and restrictive, and should provide
grammars which are minimally complex, and learnable.

• -There is an innateness hypothesis put forward by Chomsky, under which the course of language
acquisition is genetically predetermined by innate language faculty.

• -The language faculty incorporates a set of UG principles (universal grammatical principles), for
example structure dependency principle.

• -Languages differ in their structure along a range of different grammatical parameters, for example:
the wh-parameter. The null subject parameter and the head parameter.

Functionalism

• Functionalism or functional linguistics refers to the study of the form of langauge in reference to their
social function in communication.

• It considers the individual as a social being and investigates the way in which she/he acquires language
and uses it in order to communicate with others in his or her social environment.
• Functionalism originated in the early 20th Century by the «Prague School of linguistics >> and has
been developed to << London School of Linguistics »> and most famous functionlisim theory is «
systemic grammar >> which was developed by M.A.K Halliday.

Functionalism

• Formalist Approach:

• Language is an autonomous, arbitrary system whose form is independent of its function.

• Functionalist Approach:

• Language is not an arbitrary and autonomous system, but rather shaped by the communicative
function it serves.

• Functionalists maintain that the communicative situation motivates, constrains (stops), or otherwise
determines grammatical structure, meaning that the language choices a child makes during
development are heavily influenced by the functional purpose they serve.

Beginning of a new Trend in Linguistics

• We have seen that the impetus towards synchronic linguistics, as opposed to traditional philology,
originated independently with Saussure in Switzerland and Boas in the USA.

• A third impulse in the same direction came from Vilem Mathesius (1882-1945), a Czech Anglicist who
studied and subsequently taught at the Caroline University of Prague.

• Saussure's lectures on synchronic linguistics were given in 1911, and that year also saw the publication
of Boas's Handbook; coincidentally, it was in 1911 too that Mathesius published his first call for a new,
non-historical approach to language study (Mathesius 1911).

Inception of the Prague School of Functionalism

• Around Mathesius there came into being a circle of like-minded linguistic scholars, who began to meet
for regular discussion from 1926 onwards, and came to be recognized (until they were scattered by the
Second World War) as the 'Prague School'.

• The hallmark of Prague linguistics was that it saw language in terms of function.

• They analysed 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
(and it differentiates them equally sharply from the Chomskyan school which has succeeded the
Descriptivists).
 Inception of the Prague School of Functionalism

• The Prague Linguistic Circle represented an important moment in the history of linguistics in that it
provided linguistics with new theories such as the theory of linguistic functions.

• The Prague Linguistic Circle started activity in 1928, when, at the first International Congress of
Linguistics, organized in The Hague, the Prague participants presented their program drafted by Roman
Jakobson in cooperation with Nicholay Serghey Trubetzkoy and Serghey Karcévsky.

• The fruit of their research was launched and made known a year later at The First International
Congress of Slavicists held in Prague.

Inception of the Prague School of Functionalism

• The Prague Linguistic Circle was brilliantly represented by such linguists as Vilém Mathesius, Roman
Jakobson, Nicholay Serghey Trubetzkoy, Jan Mukarovsky. Their preoccupations covered various areas of
the sciences of language.

• Trubetzkoy dealt with phonetics and phonology, Vilém Mathesius dealt with syntax, Roman Jakobson
was interested in poetics and Jan Mukarovky tackled poetic language.

The Prague School of Functionalism: Mathesius

• One fairly straightforward example of functional explanation in Mathesius'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 in the Prague tradition.

• Most sentences are uttered in order to give the hearer some 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, a sentence will commonly fall into two parts (which may be very unequal in
length): the theme, which refers to something about which the hearer already knows, and the rheme,
which states some new fact about that given topic.

The Prague School of Functionalism: Mathesius

• Very often, the theme/rheme division will correspond to the syntactic distinction between subject and
predicate, or between subject-plus-transitive-verb and object:

• Theme (in some sources, also "topic," "background," or "presupposition") is the semantic point of
departure of a clause (or more broadly, discourse) about which some information is provided:

1) Tom likes travelling.

2) Our friends have invited us.

• Rheme (in some sources, also "comment," "focus," or "pre dictation") is the destination where the
presentation moves after the departure point:

3) Tom likes travelling.

4) Smoking is harmful for our health.

The Prague School of Functionalism: Trubetzkoy

• Trubetzkoy's chief contributions to linguistics lie in the domain of phonology, particularly in analyses of
the phonological systems of individual languages and in search for general and universal phonological
laws.

• His magnum opus, (Principles of Phonology), was issued posthumously and translated into virtually all
main European and Asian languages. In this book he famously defined the phoneme as the smallest
distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology
as a discipline separate from phonetics.

Functionalism: The Prague School (Trubetzkoy)

• Trubetzkoy considered each system in its own right, but was also crucially concerned with establishing
universal explanatory laws of phonological organization, and his work involves the discussion of
hundreds of languages, including their prosody.

• Furthermore, his principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign
languages, in which it is argued that the same or a similar phonological system underlies both signed
and spoken languages.

Functionalism: London School

• The London School of Linguistics, along with phonology, focuses more on the semantic aspect of
language.

• Not to mention that it too follows Saussure's path of synchrony.

• It "rejects the concepts of the speech collective and social experience and studies the speech of the
individual person".

• The key figures of this school are Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, J.R. Firth, Michael Halliday, and R.A.
Hudson.

Functionalism: London School (J.R. Firth)

• J.R. Firth is an important name in The London School of Linguistics as he contributed to the phonology
with his theory of prosodic analysis and to semantics by adopting and developing ideas of Polish
anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) into a contextual theory of meaning.

• This idea later on inspired Halliday to develop his theory of "systemic functional grammar".

• This concerns the nature and import of the various choices one makes to utter one particular sentence
out of infinitely numerous sentences available in a language. This idea led to developing a taxonomy for
sentences.

Functionalism London School (M.A.K Halliday)

• Michael Halliday was a British linguist who studied child language acquisition.

• Halliday suggested that communication and language acquisition begin before children can speak.
Studies of his own son's linguistic behaviour led to the publication of Learning How to Mean in 1975.

• In Learning How to Mean (1975), Halliday suggested that, as a child learns its first language, it
simultaneously learns about the world around them.

• Halliday viewed language as a cultural code that teaches us how to be part of society, rather than
simply a method of communication. He therefore viewed language as a cultural tool rather than just a
communication tool

Functionalism London School (M.A.K Halliday)

• Halliday's functions of language examples

• The following functions describe how children acquire and use language. The first four relate to how
children's social, emotional, and physical needs are met through language.

• The instrumental function of language :

• The instrumental function of language refers to when language is used to fulfill a need, such as
requiring food, drink, or comfort. For example, the phrases 'I want", 'Can I have', and 'I need' are all
examples of instrumental language.

Functionalism London School (M.A.K Halliday)

• The regulatory function of language

• When a speaker commands, persuades or requests something from someone else, this is known as a
regulatory language function. Regulatory language controls the listener's behaviour (the speaker adopts
a commanding tone). Examples include:
• 'Let's go home now."

• "You need to finish that work by tomorrow, so get on with it.'

• 'Can you give me the report from yesterday?"

• As evident in these examples, the listener has restricted agency as the speaker has taken the dominant
position in the conversation.

Functionalism London School (M.A.K Halliday)

• Interactive function of language

• This function has to do with how we form relationships with others as it encompasses the
communicative use of language.

• It is how we relay our thoughts and emotions, strengthening bonds with those around us.

• Interactional language examples include phrases like 'I love you mum' or 'Thank you so much',
revealing the emotions and opinions of the speaker.

Functionalism London School (M.A.K Halliday)

• Personal functions of language

• This function defines how we refer to ourselves and express our personal opinions, our identity, and
our feelings. A child may communicate their opinions and emotions in a simplistic way, using phrases
like 'me good' or 'me happy.

• It also encompasses how we use language to learn more about our surroundings, by requesting
information about it.

• We use language here to gain information which benefits ourselves and our understanding of society.
Questions like 'what's that?' or 'what does that mean?' are examples of personal language function.

Functionalism London School (M.A.K Halliday)

• Heuristic Function of Language

• This term refers to language associated with discovery and explanation, usually in the form of
questions or a running commentary (when the child talks about what they are doing as they are doing
it).

• For example, a lot of children talk to themselves when they are younger (some

people still do this as adults!) to explain what they are doing, to themselves. This helps them understand
their actions in relation to the world around them.
• Another example of children narrating is persistent questioning it is not uncommon for children to
continuously ask "What's that?", 'What does that do?", or 'Why?' in response to an adult giving them an
instruction. It also occurs when adults are talking about a topic children don't understand.

Functionalism London School (M.A.K Halliday)

• Representational/informative

• Similar to heuristic and personal functions, representational language occurs when we request
information. However, it differs from 'heuristic' and 'personal' functions as it also refers to when we
relay information. In other words, it describes the exchange of information between two or more
people.

• For example, questions like what's that? and what does that do? are representational; if this question
is answered it leads to an exchange of information.

• Another example of representational language is when people relay stories.

Functionalism London School (M.A.K Halliday)

• Imaginative Function of language

• When children tell stories and create imaginary friends or concepts in their heads, it is an imaginative
way of using language. Imaginative language usually occurs in leisure or play scenarios. Remember when
you were a child playing in the playground?

Functionalism Reviewed

• A particular movement within structuralism.

• According to Mathesius, sentences need continuity.

• Similarly, Halliday's Systemic Functional approach adds the social semiotic aspect to language. Inspired
by Firth, he said that language is functional because it has evolved throughout time and it is more
paradigmatic than syntagmatic. This leads to the aforementioned idea of taxonomy.

• While the Prague school has important contribution towards functionalism and to syntax, the London
school has significant contribution to the functionalism and semantics.

Psychology: Inception of Behaviorism

• According to standard histories, psychology emerged as an independent discipline in 1879, when

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) founded a psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig, Germany.
• In his work, Wundt assumed that the study of conscious or subjective mental life was the appropriate
subject matter for psychology.

• As part of his study of mental life, Wundt conducted experiments in an area close to what we would
now call sensation and perception.

• Wundt believed that by understanding mental life, we could come to understand the full range of the
human condition, including human culture.

Psychology: Inception of Behaviorism

• Among those individuals who studied at Leipzig was the Englishman E. B. Titchener (1867-1927), who
emigrated to the United States and started his own psychology program at Cornell University in Ithaca,
New York, in 1892.

• Titchener called his approach "structuralism."

• Following Wundt, Titchener assumed that the appropriate subject matter for psychology was
conscious, subjective mental life.

• For Titchener, the elements of mental life were our sensations, images, and feelings. These elements
were to be studied by carefully drawing inferences from participants' introspective reports and reaction
times.

Psychology: Inception of Behaviorism

• Many questioned whether structuralism had practical implications, such as for educating children,
training the workforce, or managing behavior in any general sense.

• Accordingly, an alternative to structuralism emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900's in the United
States called "functionalism."

• Functionalists employed some of the same research methods as had structuralists, but emphasized
the function of conscious mental phenomena, such as how they aided adaptation.

• For example, functionalists might use reaction times to study how children's conscious mental
phenomena developed over time, so that educational practices could be properly tailored to their
development.

Psychology: Inception of Behaviorism

• Two difficulties that arose in connection with both structuralism and functionalism were the lack of
reliability and the lack of agreement.
• Introspection as a method was particularly problematic. For instance, concerning the lack of reliability,
research findings with the introspective method were not often replicated with other participants or in
other laboratories, despite the emphasis on properly trained participants.

• Similarly, concerning the lack of agreement, it was not abundantly clear what psychologists were
actually talking about when they debated whether there was a difference between introspective reports
about the "texture" of an image and a sensation.

The Rise of Behaviorism

• Beginning in the second decade of the 20th century, John B. Watson (1878-1958) argued ferociously
against both structuralism and functionalism. In a now classic article, Watson (1913) asserted that it was
not effective as a science and that the time had come for psychology to take its place as a legitimate
natural science.

• It could do so by discarding its long-standing concern with conscious mental functioning as a subject
matter and introspection as a method.

• In Watson's view, mental life as traditionally conceived simply did not exist. Rather, psychology should
embrace behavior as its subject matter and rely on experimental observation of that subject matter as
its method.

• He called his viewpoint behaviorism. It was objective as opposed to subjective;

The Rise of Behaviorism: Classical Conditioning

• Behaviorism borrowed measurement and analytical techniques from "animal psychology and
reflexology and then applied them to adaptive forms of behavior.

• Behaviorism insisted on analyzing behavior at a detailed and, if necessary, sequential level.

• By emphasizing observability, it avoided problems inherent in introspective reports, namely, the lack
of reliability and the lack of agreement.

• The principal unit of analysis for Watson was the "habit," defined as the coordinated and consistent
act that develops in a given situation through repetition, rather than some supposed phenomenon from
mental life.

• Watson applied his analysis to everything from human emotional responses to language.

The Rise of Behaviorism: Classical Conditioning

• Classical conditioning is a type of learning that happens unconsciously.

• When you learn through classical conditioning, an automatic conditioned response is paired with a
specific stimulus. This creates a behavior.
• The best-known example of this is from what some believe to be the father of classical conditioning:
Ivan Pavlor. In an experiment on canine digestion he found that over time dogs were salivating not only
when their food was presented to them, but when the people who fed them arrived.

• To test his theory that the dogs were salivating because they were associating the people with being
fed, he began ringing a bell and then presenting the food so they'd associate the sound with food.

The Rise of Behaviorism: Classical Conditioning

• These dogs learned to associate the bell ringing with food, causing their mouths to salivate whenever
the bell rang-not just when they encountered the food.

• We're all exposed to classical conditioning in one way or another throughout our lives.

• In our day to day, advertisers often use it to push their products. For example, beauty commercials use
actors with clear, smooth skin to lead consumers to associate their product with healthy skin.

Classical Conditioning Process

• Unconditioned stimulus. This is the thing that triggers an automatic response. Food is the
unconditioned stimulus in Pavlov's dog experiment.

• Unconditioned response. This is what response naturally occurs when you experience the
unconditioned stimulus, such as salivating from the food.

• Conditioned stimulus. This is considered a neutral stimulus. When you're presented with it over and
over before the unconditioned stimulus (e.g., food), it will start to evoke the same response. The bell
before the food is the conditioned stimulus.

• Conditioned response. This is the acquired response to the conditioned stimulus (the bell), which is
often the same response as the unconditioned response. So, the dogs salivated for the bell the same
way they salivated for the food in front of them.

Classical Conditioning Process

• Extinction. This term is used when you start presenting the conditioned stimulus (the bell) over and
over but without the unconditioned stimulus (the food). Over time, the dogs would unlearn their
conditioning that the bell means food is coming.

• Generalization. This refers to when you can generalize similar things and respond the same way. Dogs
began salivating at sounds similar to bells because they were generalizing what they learned.

• Discrimination. The opposite of generalization, this is our ability to tell the difference when something
is similar but not identical, so it won't produce the same response. A horn sound, for instance, wouldn't
make the dogs salivate.
 The Rise of Behaviorism: Classical Conditioning Weaknesses

• Despite the importance of Watson's contributions, two problems remained.

• One was the apparent spontaneity of behavior: Some responses seemed to develop without a
characteristic stimulus evoking them.

• A second problem was the variability of behavior. Even when a characteristic stimulus preceded
responses, the topography and frequency of the responses often differed significantly.

• As a result of such problems, by 1930 many researchers and theorists began to seek ways to modify
classical S-R behaviorism.

• At issue was how to do so. One approach that proved popular was to insert intervening "organismic
variables between stimulus and response. The function of these variables was to mediate the relation
between stimulus and response, thereby accommodating the previously mentioned concerns about
spontaneity and variability.

The Rise of Behaviorism: Operant Conditioning

• Operant conditioning (or instrumental conditioning) is a type of learning in which an individual's

behavior is modified by its antecedents and consequences.

• Mechanisms of instrumental conditioning suggest that the behavior may change in form, frequency, or
strength.

• The expressions operant behavior and respondent behavior were popularized by B. F. Skinner. The
former refers to an item of behavior that is initially spontaneous, rather than a response to a prior
stimulus, but whose consequences may reinforce or inhibit recurrence of that behavior.

• Operant conditioning is distinguished from classical conditioning (or respondent conditioning) in that
operant conditioning deals with the reinforcement and punishment to change behavior.

• Operant behavior operates on the environment and is maintained by conditioning of reflexive (reflex)
behaviors which are also elicited by antecedent conditions, while classical conditioning is maintained by
its antecedents and consequences.

Classical Conditioning Vs. Operant Conditioning

• While classical conditioning has to do with automatic, learned responses, operant conditioning is a
different type of learning.

• In operant conditioning, you learn a behavior by the consequence of that behavior, which in turn
affects your future behavior.
• So, when a behavior has a satisfying result, you learn to associate it with that result and work to have
it repeated. On the flip side, a negative result will cause you to avoid that behavior to avoid that result.

• While classical conditioning is considered unconscious learning, operant conditioning is what most
people would consider a habit. It's about reinforcement and is considered more controlled. Classical
conditioning is considered more of a reflex.

Classical Conditioning Vs. Operant Conditioning

• B.F. Skinner is the person whose work is most often cited in connection with operant conditioning.

• To implement his empirical approach, Skinner invented the operant conditioning chamber in which
subjects such as pigeons and rats were isolated from extraneous stimuli and free to make one or two
simple, repeatable responses.

• Another invention, the cumulative recorder, produced a graphical record of these responses from
which response rates could be estimated. These records were the primary data that Skinner and his
colleagues used to explore the effects on response rate of various reinforcement schedules.

• A reinforcement schedule may be defined as any procedure that delivers a reinforcer to an organism
according to some well-defined rule. The effects of schedules became, in turn, the basic experimental
data from which Skinner developed his account of operant conditioning. He also drew on many less
formal observations of human and animal behavior.