Periods Historical Linguistics Descriptive Linguistics Generative Linguistics Future trends

and the search for

universals
Century Nineteenth century Mid-to late-20th century 21st century
th
Early-to mid-20
century
Years 1786-1850 1857 (1913)-1950 1957-19** 2000-2***

Representative figures  Plato and Aristotle  Ferdinand de  Noam Chomsky  Noam Chomsky
 Sir William Jones Saussure
 Scholars “Leipzig”  Leonard Bloomfield
 Darwin
 Young
Grammarians
Discoveries Sir William Jones Ferdinand de Saussure Chomsky’s influence is
discovered that Sanskrit, was the first who permanent. As a result,
Greek, Latin, Celtic, and suggested language was he woke up non-
Germanic all had like a game of chess. linguists’ interest in
striking structural Ferdinand de Saussure language such as
similarities. insisted language is a psychologists,
carefully built structure neurologists,
of interwoven elements. anthropologists,
So all linguistics, since sociologists,
Saussure is structural. philosophers and others.

Contributions Plato was the first Saussure´s book called Chomsky’s book was Corpus linguistics
person to distinguish “Course in General “Syntactic Structures”
between nouns and Linguistics” (1915). (1957).
verbs. Leonard Bloomfield Chomsky’s recent word
Darwin, “Origin of published “Language” is Minimalist Program.
Species” (1850) seemed (1933). He attempted to
natural to attempt to
lay down rigorous
chart the evolution of
procedures for the
language alongside the
evolution of species. description of any
Young Grammarians language. He proposed
claimed language methods of analysis and
change is natural analytical techniques.