Early to Mid-20th Century Descriptive Linguistics

         In the 20th century, the emphasis shifted from language change to language description, instead of looking at how different languages came from original source such as Indo- European language, linguists began to concentrate on describing single languages at one particular point in time.

        If any one person can be held responsible for this change of emphasis, it was the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who is sometimes labeled as father of modern linguistics. Amazingly , he died without having written any major work on general linguistics , but his students collected his lectures notes together  n after his death and published them under the title  of‘’ Course in General linguistics ‘’ which exerted a major influence on the course of linguistics particularly in Europe.

        De Saussure’s crucial contribution to the study of language that all languages items are essentially interlinked with each other like a ‘’ game of chess’’ . In such a case, he initiated the era of ‘’ structural linguistics’’ , a system in which each item is defined by its relationship to all the others. His insistence that language is a carefully built structure of interwoven elements. 

       All linguistics since de Saussure was structural . It means that language is a patterned system composed of interdependent elements rather than a collection of unconnected individual items. 

       One of De Saussure’s student Leonard Bloomfield considered that linguistics should deal objectively and systematically with observable data. He was more interested in which language is a group of elements connected with each other. He neglected meaning and meaning was not important in the study of descriptive linguistics. A huge number of linguists followed Bloomfield in his study of language and his time was called ‘’Bloomfielian era’’ . A large number of linguists concentrated on writing descriptive grammar of unwritten language without recourse to meaning. 

   Firstly, their study was to find native speakers and collecting samples from those native speakers. Secondly, these samples of language should be analyzed phonologically and systematically without recourse to the meaning. In such a case, they initiated a new grammar that was called ‘’ descriptive grammar’’ . Unfortunately, a number of problems arose which could not be solved by the methods of Bloomfield and his followers. Critics criticized Bloomfield’s methods of descriptive grammar saying that linguistics became very narrow. Trivial problems of analysis became major controversial issues. By around 1950 linguistics had lost his touch with other disciplines and became an abstruse subject.        

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