1、语言学名家简介1. F. de Saussure (18571913)Ferdinand de Saussure was a great Swiss linguist at the turn of the 20th century. Though he was enormously influential as a teacher, lecturing at the cole des Hautes tudes in Paris from 1881 to 1891 and as professor of Indo-European linguistics and Sanskrit (190119
2、13) and of general linguistics (19071913) at the University of Geneva, he did not have his ideas published during his lifetime because of his persistent search for perfection. Three years after his death, a compilation of notes on his lectures by two of his students. Bally and Sechehaye, was publish
3、ed with the title the Course in General Linguistics, which soon became the most influential linguistic works at that time.Saussure established the structural study of language, emphasizing the arbitrary relationship of the linguistic sign to that which it signifies. He also contended that language m
4、ust be considered a social phenomenon, a structured system that can be viewed synchronically and diachronically but he insisted that the methodology of each approach is distinct and mutually exclusive. He also introduced two terms that have become common currency in linguistics “parole”, the speech
5、of the individual person, and “langue”, the systematic, structured language existing at a given time within a given society. Saussure advocated more importance to be attached to “langue” rather than “parole”, and suggested that the diachronical rather than the synchronical approach be adopted by the
6、 linguists at his time. His creative ideas on the theoretical and methodological orientation of language research have been so widely accepted that he is generally regarded as the father of modern linguistics. 2. O. Jespersen (18601943)Otto Jespersen was an internationally influential Danish linguis
7、t. He was born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin. He also studied linguistics at Oxford.Jespersen was a professor of English at Copenhagen University from 1893 to 1925. Along with Paul Passy, he was a founder of the Inter
8、national Phonetic Association. He was a vocal supporter and active developer of artificial international languages such as Esperanto. He was also involved in the delegation that created the artificial language Ido and later developed the Novial language, which he considered an improvement. He was mo
9、st widely recognized for some of his books. His monumental work A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles concentrated on morphology and syntax. His Growth and Structure of the English Language is a comprehensive view of English by someone with another native language, and still in print, ov
10、er 60 years after his death and nearly 100 years after publication. More than once he was invited to the U. S. as a guest lecturer, and he took occasion to study the countrys educational system. As a foremost authority on English grammar, he helped to revolutionize language teaching in Europe.3. YR
11、Chao (18921982)Chao Yuen Ren（赵元任），born in Tianjin with ancestry in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, China, was one of the leading linguists in the world.Chao went to the United States with a scholarship in 1910 to study mathematics at Cornell University. He got his PhD from Harvard University in 1918. T
12、hen he went to teach physics at Cornell University for one year. In 1920 he went back to China and taught psychology and physics in Tsinghua School. He reentered Harvard University in 1921, first researching phonetics, then teaching as a lecturer on philosophy, and then as a professor of Chinese lan
13、guage. In June, 1925 he returned to Tsinghua and soon became a fruitful researcher on phonology, dialectology, and general linguistics. In 1938 he left China and taught first for a short period at the University of Hawaii, and then at Yale University until 1941. Then he went back to Harvard Universi
14、ty, teaching as well as editing dictionaries there for five years, and becoming an American citizen in the meantime. From 1947 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He retired in 1962 with the title Professor Emeritus there. Chao was the president of the Linguistic Society of America
15、during 1945, and a special issue of the societys journal, Language, was dedicated to him in 1966. Chao went back with his wife and some family members to China for a visit in 1973, soon after the thawing of the relations between China and the USA, and was warmly welcomed by Premier Zhou Enlai and ma
16、ny of his old friends. He visited China again in 1981 and was granted Honorary Professor of Beijing University. Chao passed away on Feburary 24, 1982. Chao published prolifically on language research, the most influential of which is A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968). Besides English, Chao could sp
17、eak German, French, and Japanese. He was the interpreter of the renowned British philosopher Bertrand Russell when he visited China in 1920, and they became lifelong friends since then. Chao was also an excellent composer. His composition How could I help thinking of her (教我如何不想她) was a “pop hit” in
18、 the 1930s in China. The lyrics were written by Liu Bannong (刘半农)，another linguist who invented the Chinese feminine pronoun 她. His love of music brought him sensitive ears to sounds and tones, which was very helpful for his phonological and dialectological study.In the 1920s, Chao joined the initia
19、l work of shaping Gwoyeu Romatzyh (国语罗马字)，but, as a gifted punster, he also wrote the essay the Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den, which consisted of 92 characters all with the sound shi (though in the four different tones of Mandarin), and was incomprehensible when romanized.4. L. Bloomfield (18871
20、949)Leonard Bloomfield is considered one of the best Linguists of all time. He devoted his entire life to a thorough-going study of language, its structure and its use. His influence dominated the science of linguistics from 1933 when his most important work, Language, was publishedto the mid-1950s.
21、Bloomfield was born on April 1, 1887, in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard College at the age of 19 and did graduate work for 2 years at the University of Wisconsin, where he also taught German, His interest in linguistics was aroused by Eduard Prokosch, a philologist in the German department. Bloo
22、mfield received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1909.After teaching German at the University of Cincinnati for a year, Bloomfield became assistant professor of comparative philology and German at the University of Illinois, where he remained until 1921. Then he became professor of Ge
23、rman and linguistics at Ohio State University. He was one of the founders of the Linguistic Society of America in 1924. In 1927 he went to the University of Chicago and worked there as professor of Germanic philology till 1940, when he became professor of linguistics at Yale University. He died in N
24、ew Haven, Conn., on April 18, 1949.Bloomfield adopted Ferdinand de Saussures concept of language structure. Influenced by the behaviorist psychologist A. P. Weiss whom he met when he worked at Ohio State University, Bloomfield took a logical positivist approach to science, holding that a mechanistic
25、 rather than a mentalistic approach to human phenomena was necessary if the disciplines concerned with man were to be truly scientific. The period from the publication of Language in 1933 to the mid-1950s is commonly called the “Bloomfieldian era” of linguistics. His masterpiece Language (1933) is a
26、 standard text. It had a profound influence on linguistics, for it was a clear statement of principles that became axiomatic, notably that language stubby must always be centered in the spoken language, as against documents; that the definitions used in grammar should be based on the forms of the la
27、nguage, not on the meaning of the forms; and that a given language at a given time is a complete system of sounds and forms that exist independently of the pastso that the history of a form does not explain its actual meaning. Though Bloomfields particular methodology of descriptive linguistics was
28、not widely accepted, his mechanistic attitudes toward a precise science of linguistics, dealing only with observable phenomena, were most influential. For a long period most American linguists considered themselves in some sense Bloomfields disciples, whether they actually studied under him or not,
29、and a great deal of American linguistic work has taken the form of working out questions raised and methods suggested by Bloomfield. His influence waned after the 1950s, when adherence to logical positivist doctrines lessened and there was a return to more mentalistic attitudes. 5. N. Chomsky (1928)
30、Avram Noam Chomsky is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, often considered the most significant contribution to the field of theoretical linguistics of the 20th century.
31、He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinners Verbal Behavior, which challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of mind and language dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has also impacted the philosophy of
32、language and mind.Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar William Chomsky. He was brought up in Hebrew culture and literature.Starting from 1945, he studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, learning from Zellig Harris
33、. During the years 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. While a Junior Fellow he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled, “Transformational Analysis”. According to his theory, utterances have a syntax which can be characterized by a formal gram
34、mar, in particular, a context-free grammar extended with transformational rules. Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all languages. This innate knowledge is often referred to as universal grammar, The Principles and Parameters approach (
35、1979) make strong claims retarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the worlds languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain.Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, phi
36、losophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs and U. S. foreign policy. He is one of Americas most prominent political dissidents, authoring over 30 political books dissecting such issues as U. S. interventionism in the developing world, the political economy of human rig
37、hts and the propaganda role of corporate media. 6. C. Fillmore (1929)Charles J Fillmore is an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph. D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1961. Professor Fillmore spent ten years at the Ohio Sta
38、te University before joining Berkeleys Department of Linguistics in 1971, He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His research has concentrated mainly on questions of syntax and lexical semantics, and has emphasized the relationship between properties of lin
39、guistic form and matters of meaning and use. He has been extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics; he was one of the founders of cognitive linguistics, and developed the theories of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), and Frame Semantics (1976). In all of his research he has illu
40、minated the fundamental importance of semantics, and its role in motivating syntactic and morphological phenomena. His earlier work, in collaboration with Paul Kay and George Lakoff, was generalized into the theory of Construction Grammar. His current major project is called FrameNet ( http:/framene
41、t.icsi.berkeley.edu ). It is a wide-ranging on-line description of the English lexicon. In this project, words are described in terms of the Frames they evoke. Data is gathered from the British National Corpus, annotated for semantic and syntactic relations, and stored in a database organized by bot
42、h lexical items and Frames. The project is influentialIssue 16 of the International Journal of Lexicography was devoted entirely to it. It has also inspired parallel projects, which investigate other languages, including Spanish, German, and Japanese.7. R. Montague (19301971)Richard Montague was an
43、American mathematician and philosopher. His research focused on the foundations of logic and set theory. Though not a professional linguist, Montague exercised a major influence on semantics in the 1970s and 1980s. He was one of the first people to systematically explore the possibilities of a compl
44、etely rigorous formal analysis of both the syntax and the semantics of natural languages along the lines of logic. His seminal works on language between 1970 and 1973 founded the theory known after his death as Montague Grammar, one of the main starting points for the field of formal semantics. Mont
45、ague was born September 20, 1930 in Stockton, California and died March 7, 1971 in Los Angeles. At St. Marys High School in Stockton he studied Latin and Ancient Greek. After a year at Stockton Junior College studying journalism, he entered the University of California, Berkeley in 1948, where he st
46、udied mathematics, philosophy, and Semitic languages, and graduated with an A. B. in philosophy in 1950. He continued graduate work at Berkeley, receiving an M. A. in mathematics in 1953 and his Ph. D. in Philosophy in 1957. Alfred Tarski, one of the pioneers in the model-theoretic semantics of logi
47、c, was Montagues main influence and directed his dissertation. Montague taught in the philosophy Department of the University of California, Los Angeles from 1955 until his death. Montagues work constitutes a decisive breakaway from the traditional view that natural languages are too vague and too u
48、nsystematic to be treated formally, in the same way as the formal languages of logic and mathematics. From the rapid developments in generative linguistics in the 1960s and early 1970s, scholars like Montague, Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and others gained confidence that a formal syntactic theory
49、of natural language was no pipedream, and that, therefore, a formal semantics might also prove to be a possibility.Although the work in generative linguistics thus constituted an important impetus for the development of formal, model-theoretic semantics for natural language, this is not to say that this undertaking met with much enthusiasm in generative linguistic circles. On the contrary, whereas people like Montague and Davidson were of the opinion that not ju
