Practice question · Put in order
Arrange these milestones in the history of linguistics in chronological order.
- Chomsky's Syntactic Structures
- Jones on the affinity of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin
- Pāṇini's grammar of Sanskrit
- Saussure's Cours published posthumously
- Verner's Law explains exceptions to Grimm's Law
- The Port-Royal grammar
Hints
- The oldest item precedes the others by more than two thousand years.
- Verner comes a century after Jones, and Saussure four decades after Verner.
Show the answer
- Pāṇini's grammar of Sanskrit
- The Port-Royal grammar
- Jones on the affinity of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin
- Verner's Law explains exceptions to Grimm's Law
- Saussure's Cours published posthumously
- Chomsky's Syntactic Structures
Why
The gap at the front of this list is the fact worth carrying: formal grammatical analysis of a high order existed in India two millennia before Europe produced anything comparable, and its rediscovery in the nineteenth century is part of what set the comparative method going.
Practise A History of Linguistics
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More questions on A History of Linguistics
- Why is a systematic sound correspondence better evidence of relatedness than a set of similar-looking words?
- The Neogrammarians claimed sound change is strictly exceptionless, yet Grimm's Law showed apparent…
- Pāṇini's grammar of Sanskrit uses a formal metalanguage with ordered rules and abbreviation conventions.
- Match each figure or school to the position they are known for.
- Approximately how many rules does Pāṇini's grammar contain, to the nearest thousand?
- Sort each statement by whether it belongs to the COMPARATIVE method or to GENERATIVE grammar.
- Which are true of Grimm's Law?
- Complete the account of the comparative method.
- The behaviourist framework Chomsky attacked in 1959 held that language is acquired through association and…