Early Traditions and the Nineteenth Century
Grammatical analysis began millennia ago. Pāṇini's grammar, composed in India, described Sanskrit with roughly 4,000 formal rules. Later, Greek and Latin scholars created the classical parts of speech. In 1660, the Port-Royal grammar claimed that sentence structure mirrors human thought.
In 1786, William Jones noted systemic links between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. This insight produced the comparative method, which reconstructs ancestral tongues using regular sound shifts.
- Grimm's Law: Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops shifted in Germanic. Latin p became English f (e.g., pater to father).
- Neogrammarians: Argued that sound change is strictly exceptionless.
- Verner's Law: Resolved apparent exceptions to Grimm, proving the Neogrammarian claim.
Modern Linguistics
Twentieth-century linguistics shifted focus toward structural and mental models:
- Saussure: Founded structuralism by viewing language as a relational system.
- Bloomfield: Established American structuralism using behavioural, distributional analysis.
- Chomsky: Published landmark works, including his 1959 review of Skinner. Chomsky argued grammar is an innate, generative mental system.
- Modern Era: Saw generative models expand alongside a major revival of corpus and statistical techniques.
Common pitfall: Viewing this history as linear progress. Pāṇini was already formal, and modern historical linguists still rely on Neogrammarian principles.