Logical grammar

Many philosophers of language, since Plato and Aristotle, have considered language as a manmade tool for making statements or propositions about the world on the basis of a predicate-argument structure. Especially in the classical tradition, the purpose of the sentence was considered to be to predicate about the subject. Aristotle's example is "Man is a rational animal", where Man is the subject and is a rational animal is the predicate, which attributes the subject.^[13][14] In the twentieth century, classical logical grammar was defended by Edmund Husserl's "pure logical grammar". Husserl argues, in the spirit of seventeenth-century rational grammar, that the structures of consciousness are compositional and organized into subject-predicate structures. These give rise to the structures of semantics and syntax cross-linguistically.^[15] Categorial grammar is another example of logical grammar in the modern context.

More lately, in Donald Davidson's event semantics, for example, the verb serves as the predicate. Like in modern predicate logic, subject and object are arguments of the transitive predicate. A similar solution is found in formal semantics.^[16] Many modern philosophers continue to consider language as a logically based tool for expressing the structures of reality by means of predicate-argument structure. Examples include Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Winfrid Sellars, Hilary Putnam, and John Searle.

Cultural–historical approaches

During the 19th century, when sociological questions remained under psychology,^[17] languages and language change were thought of as arising from human psychology and the collective unconscious mind of the community, shaped by its history, as argued by Moritz Lazarus, Heymann Steinthal and Wilhelm Wundt.^[18] Advocates of Völkerpsychologie ('folk psychology') regarded language as Volksgeist; a social phenomenon conceived as the 'spirit of the nation'.

Wundt claimed that the human mind becomes organised according to the principles of syllogistic reasoning with social progress and education. He argued for a binary-branching model for the description of the mind, and syntax.^[19] Folk psychology was imported to North American linguistics by Franz Boas^[20] and Leonard Bloomfield who were the founders of a school of thought which was later nicknamed 'American structuralism'.^[21][22]

Folk psychology became associated with German nationalism,^[23] and after World War I Bloomfield apparently replaced Wundt's structural psychology with Albert Paul Weiss's behavioral psychology;^[24] although Wundtian notions remained elementary for his linguistic analysis.^[25] The Bloomfieldian school of linguistics was eventually reformed as a sociobiological approach by Noam Chomsky (see 'generative grammar' below).^[21][26]

Since generative grammar's popularity began to wane towards the end of the 20th century, there has been a new wave of cultural anthropological approaches to the language question sparking a modern debate on the relationship of language and culture. Participants include Daniel Everett, Jesse Prinz, Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson.^[27]

Structuralism: a sociological–semiotic theory

The study of culture and language developed in a different direction in Europe where Émile Durkheim successfully separated sociology from psychology, thus establishing it as an autonomous science.^[28] Ferdinand de Saussure likewise argued for the autonomy of linguistics from psychology. He created a semiotic theory which would eventually give rise to the movement in human sciences known as structuralism, followed by functionalism or functional structuralism, post-structuralism and other similar tendencies.^[29] The names structuralism and functionalism are derived from Durkheim's modification of Herbert Spencer's organicism which draws an analogy between social structures and the organs of an organism, each necessitated by its function.^[30][28]

Saussure approaches the essence of language from two sides. For the one, he borrows ideas from Steinthal^[31] and Durkheim, concluding that language is a 'social fact'. For the other, he creates a theory of language as a system in and for itself which arises from the association of concepts and words or expressions. Thus, language is a dual system of interactive sub-systems: a conceptual system and a system of linguistic forms. Neither of these can exist without the other because, in Saussure's notion, there are no (proper) expressions without meaning, but also no (organised) meaning without words or expressions. Language as a system does not arise from the physical world, but from the contrast between the concepts, and the contrast between the linguistic forms.^[32]

Functionalism: language as a tool for communication

There was a shift of focus in sociology in the 1920s, from structural to functional explanation, or the adaptation of the social 'organism' to its environment. Post-Saussurean linguists, led by the Prague linguistic circle, began to study the functional value of the linguistic structure, with communication taken as the primary function of language in the meaning 'task' or 'purpose'. These notions translated into an increase of interest in pragmatics, with a discourse perspective (the analysis of full texts) added to the multilayered interactive model of structural linguistics. This gave rise to functional linguistics.^[33] Some of its main concepts include information structure and economy.

Formalism: language as a mathematical–semiotic system

Structural and formal linguist Louis Hjelmslev considered the systemic organisation of the bilateral linguistic system fully mathematical, rejecting the psychological and sociological aspect of linguistics altogether. He considered linguistics as the comparison of the structures of all languages using formal grammars – semantic and discourse structures included.^[34] Hjelmslev's idea is sometimes referred to as 'formalism'.^[33]

Although generally considered as a structuralist,^[35] Lucien Tesnière regarded meaning as giving rise to expression, but not vice versa, at least as regards the relationship between semantics and syntax. He considered the semantic plane as psychological, but syntax as being based on the necessity to break the two-dimensional semantic representation into linear form.^[36]

Post-structuralism: language as a societal tool

The Saussurean idea of language as an interaction of the conceptual system and the expressive system was elaborated in philosophy, anthropology and other fields of human sciences by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and many others. This movement was interested in the Durkheimian concept of language as a social fact or a rule-based code of conduct; but eventually rejected the structuralist idea that the individual cannot change the norm. Post-structuralists study how language affects our understanding of reality thus serving as a tool of shaping society.^[37][38]

Language as an artificial construct

While the humanistic tradition stemming from 19th century Völkerpsychologie emphasises the unconscious nature of the social construction of language, some perspectives of post-structuralism and social constructionism regard human languages as man-made rather than natural. At this end of the spectrum, structural linguist Eugenio Coșeriu laid emphasis on the intentional construction of language.^[18] Daniel Everett has likewise approached the question of language construction from the point of intentionality and free will.^[27]

There were also some contacts between structural linguists and the creators of constructed languages. For example, Saussure's brother René de Saussure was an Esperanto activist, and the French functionalist André Martinet served as director of the International Auxiliary Language Association. Otto Jespersen created and proposed the international auxiliary language Novial.

Language as a genetically inherited phenomenon

Languages as species

It was thought in early evolutionary biology that languages and species can be studied according to the same principles and methods. The idea of languages and cultures as fighting for living space became highly controversial as it was accused of being a pseudoscience that caused two world wars, and social Darwinism was banished from humanities by 1945. In the concepts of Schleicher and Müller, both endorsed by Charles Darwin, languages could be either organisms or populations.^[49]

A neo-Darwinian version of this idea was introduced as memetics by Richard Dawkins in 1976. In this thinking, ideas and cultural units, including words, are compared to viruses or replicators. Although meant as a softer alternative to genetic determinism, memetics has been widely discredited as pseudoscience,^[39] and it has failed to establish itself as a recognised field of scientific research.^[50] The language–species analogy nonetheless continues to enjoy popularity in linguistics and other human sciences.^[51] Since the 1990s there have been numerous attempts to revive it in various guises. As Jamin Pelkey explains,

Theorists who explore such analogies usually feel obliged to pin language to some specific sub-domain of biotic growth. William James selects "zoölogical evolution", William Croft prefers botanical evolution, but most theorists zoom in to more microbiotic levels – some claiming that linguistic phenomena are analogous to the cellular level and others arguing for the genetic level of biotic growth. For others, language is a parasite; for others still, language is a virus ... The disagreements over grounding analogies do not stop here.^[52]

Like many other approaches to linguistics, these, too, are collectively called 'functionalism'. They include various frameworks of usage-based linguistics,^[53] language as a complex adaptive system,^[54] construction grammar,^[55][56] emergent linguistics,^[57][58] and others.