Branch: a part that is separated from a whole or system.

Genre: refers to a faction with unique style in academic, cultural and artistic aspects.

The difference between the two can be judged conceptually.

Branches are distinguished from research contents and objects, while schools are distinguished from research methods, angles and styles. A branch school also has different schools.

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Personal understanding.

Language school

socio-linguistics

Sociolinguistics is a marginal subject, which first appeared in the United States in the 1960s. It mainly refers to a subject that studies the social essence and differences of language from different social science angles by using the theories and methods of linguistics and sociology. There are some different understandings of this definition. Some scholars believe that this study should focus on language and combine the role of social factors to study language variation; Some scholars believe that it is sociology of language, which studies various relations between language and society and describes and explains social behavior with linguistic materials. We prefer the former.

The research scope of sociolinguistics: Generally speaking, it includes the following aspects:

1. The language situation of a country or region, such as bilingual, bilingual, multilingual or multilingual;

2. Various language varieties include regional dialect and social dialect (social dialect), standard language and vernacular (vernacular), formal style and informal style and their social functions;

3. The relationship between conversation situation and code selection and the interaction between code selection and interpersonal relationship;

4. The evaluation and attitude of society and different groups to various languages or language variants and the social effects arising therefrom;

5. Due to social, cultural, economic and political reasons, as well as the ways and laws of language changes caused by language contact.

The research object of sociolinguistics is usually considered as:

1. Language variation, and contact social factors to discuss the causes and laws of language variation, and often use statistical methods and probability models to describe these variations. This is also called "micro sociolinguistics" or "small sociolinguistics";

2. Language problems in society, such as bilingualism, language contact, bilingualism and language standardization mentioned above, are also called "macro sociolinguistics";

3. Study how people use language to communicate in the actual environment, and the differences between different societies in using language, such as the different habits of using language in a certain social class (including differences in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, called social variation of language), and the influence of different gender, age, industry and economic status on personal speech (called personal language variation).

If structural linguistics and transformational generative linguistics from Saussure study homogeneous languages, then sociolinguistics studies orderly heterogeneous languages and language structures related to social factors. This is an important feature that sociolinguistics is different from structuralist linguistics.

Sociolinguistics has made some obvious progress now. Since the 1960s, with the deepening of linguists' understanding of language heterogeneity, sociolinguistics has developed schools such as communicative ethnography, cross-cultural communication, communicative sociolinguistics, language socialization and language acquisition, conversation analysis, and language variation research.

The theoretical value of sociolinguistics is mainly reflected in the following three aspects: 1) puts forward a more detailed and broader concept of language, which breaks the limitation of studying only the homogeneous system within the language since Saussure; 2) Quantitative statistical analysis of language research; 3) Through the study of language variation, we can build a bridge between * * * and diachronic, and solve the contradiction between * * * and diachronic.

Systemic functional school

The rise of systemic functional school is related to the functionalism trend of thought in linguistics as a whole. Functionalism refers to an academic trend of thought against formalism in contemporary linguistics. It aims to describe and explain the phonetic, grammatical and semantic features of various languages through the functions that languages should realize in social communication. In this academic trend of thought, several schools have great influence. They are Prague School and London School.

Prague School has always been recognized as a functionalist school in linguistics, and its functions mainly include the function of language in communicative behavior, the function of language in society, the function of language in literature and the study of language at different levels from the perspective of function. The London School was initiated by Professor Firth, a British linguist, and later inherited and developed by his student Professor Halliday, forming what people now call a school of systemic functional linguistics. Halliday has published many works since 1970s, and established the theoretical system of Systemic Functional Grammar, which has become a unique school in linguistics.

Linguists from Systemic Functional Grammar School hold a seminar on system theory every year. The first to eighth sessions were held in Britain. With the expansion of influence and team, the ninth annual meeting of 1982 was held in Canada, which indicated that the theory of this school had international influence. 1985 the university of Michigan held its 12 annual meeting. Since going to the United States is the fortress of Bloomfield structuralism and Chomsky's transformational generative grammar school, it is of far-reaching significance to hold such a meeting in the United States. Today, functionalism and formalism have become two major ideological trends in linguistic research.

Systemic Functional Grammar includes "systemic grammar" and "Functional Grammar", but this is not a simple addition of the two grammars, but two inseparable aspects of a complete language theoretical framework.

Systemic grammar, or systemic grammar, emphasized that language, as an internal potential relationship of a system, is a system network composed of several subsystems related to meaning, which can be constantly selected by people, also known as "meaning potential". Language, as a symbol, must make corresponding choices in each semantic function part of the language when expressing the semantics that the speaker wants to express. The main points of functional grammar are: language is a tool of social communication, and the language system is gradually formed in order to realize various semantic functions in long-term communication; When people need to make choices in the language system in communication, they also carry out motivated activities according to the functions to be realized.

Transform-generate genre

Appeared in the late 1950s, represented by Chomsky of the United States, he used the theory and method of transformational generation to study language. Its activity center is MIT; In addition, there is an academic organization in Europe that specializes in transformational generative grammar, called "Old World Generative Linguistics Association", which is an international generative school organization and was founded in the Netherlands in the autumn of 1975.

1957 The publication of Chomsky's Syntactic Structure marked the birth of "transformational generative grammar". This theory is based on rationalism philosophy, which is completely different from American structuralism based on empiricism. Therefore, its appearance is a great challenge to the mainstream American structuralist linguistics at that time, and it is called "Chomsky Revolution".

It has been more than forty years since the transformational generative grammar was put forward. During this period, it mainly went through four stages:

The first stage is the "classical theory" period, from 1957 to 1965. Syntactic structure is the representative work of this period, and influential theories include phrase structure rules, transformation rules, morpheme phoneme rules and so on. The most striking feature of classical theory is that it advocates grammatical autonomy and excludes semantics from grammar, which is consistent with the popular structuralist linguistic theory.

The second stage is the "standard theory" period, from 1965 to 197 1. The representative work is Syntactic Theory, and its grammar includes four parts, namely, basic part, conversion part, semantic part and phonetic part. The most striking amendment in the standard theory is to incorporate semantics into grammar. It is pointed out that there are deep and superficial grammatical structures. Deep structure determines semantics and is transformed into surface structure through transformation rules. This amendment makes it different from the classical theory in principle.

The third stage is the "extended standard theory" period. The publication of Deep Structure, Surface Structure and Semantic Interpretation from 1972 to 1979 and 1972 marked the beginning of this period, and the Essay on Form and Interpretation published by 1977 was the representative. The main change of 1972 is that the surface structure also plays a certain role in semantic interpretation, while in the theory of 1977, semantic interpretation is all on the surface. In addition, the theory of "virtual trace" was put forward at this stage.

The fourth stage is from 1979 to now, represented by the set of domination and constraint. This book is based on 1979 Chomsky's theory of "domination" and "restraint" put forward at an academic conference in Pisa, Italy. There are two major changes in the theory at this stage: one is to add the principle system to the original rule system, and the other is to put forward the "virtual category". At present, the theory of domination and constraint is still in constant revision and development.

Transformational generative grammar emphasizes the explanation of human language ability, not just the description of language behavior. It studies the cognitive system and universal grammar embodied in the human brain. Chomsky believes that "language" is not something that actually exists. This concept comes from grammar, and only grammar exists. Therefore, the research object of transformational generative grammar is grammar rather than language. In addition, transformational generative grammar adopts the formal method of modern mathematical logic, and generates infinite sentences according to the limited axiomatic rule system and principle system to explain human language ability. Therefore, transformational generative grammar is different from traditional linguistics and structuralist linguistics in principle in research purpose, research object and research method. It opens up a new road for language research, shows a brand-new development direction, and presents linguistics to the world with a new look. It has also had an important impact on the development of other humanities and social sciences.

The study of transformational generative school also includes generative phonology, which is a branch of generative grammar and its task is to study the phonological knowledge in people's minds. Generative phonology has experienced four stages of development, from gestation, formation to standard theory, and now to nonlinear theory. Representative figures include Jacobson, Haller and Chomsky. 1952, A Preliminary Study of Speech Analysis, co-authored by Jakobson and Haller; 1956, Chomsky and Haller co-authored English Stress and Tone Crossing; And in 1968, Chomsky and Haller co-authored English Phonetic Patterns, which are the representative works of the first three stages respectively. The standard theory put forward in English phonetic model made generative phonology become the mainstream of American phonology in 1960s. After 1975, generative phonology entered the period of nonlinear theory, and various phonological names evolved, such as autonomous segmental phonology, rhythmic phonology and lexical phonology. During this period, Chomsky withdrew from the study of phonology and specialized in syntax, while Haller remained the standard-bearer in this field.

Generative morphology is also a research category of transformational generative school. In On Nominalization, Chomsky first clarified the specific role of morphology in generative grammar, and Haller further put forward the first explicit generative morphological model in 1973, and then Siegel, Jay Kendoff and Aaronov made some improvements on the generative morphological model.

In a word, the transformational generative school takes grammar as its research purpose, and the research of all branches is subject to this purpose, which has a great influence on the research of their respective fields. The influence of transformational generative school is not only reflected in linguistics, but also in other disciplines, such as computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and so on. Chomsky believes that transformational generative grammar will promote the development of cognitive science, and combine the research of linguistics with the research of neuroscience, psychology and biology to make contributions to exploring the mysteries of human brain.

American descriptive language school

A branch of structuralist linguistics, which was gradually formed and developed by some American scholars on the basis of investigation and study of American Indian languages in this century, is famous for its formal description of language materials and language structures. In the 1920s and 1930s, logical positivism in philosophy and behaviorism in psychology prevailed in the United States. The combination of this philosophical background and the study of Indian languages makes American structural linguistics present distinctive features.

The pioneers of this school are Franz Boas and Sapir. 19 1 1 The preface written by Baucus for the Handbook of American Indian Languages in can be said to be a preliminary theoretical summary of American anthropologists' investigation and study of Indian languages, which particularly emphasizes the principle of language description, that is, language facts should be described objectively, not framed by other languages or traditional grammar, and new concepts and concepts should be created in order to describe languages with different structures. Sapir's magnum opus on language published in 192 1 linked language research with human psychology, society and culture. Both of them emphasize the respect for language facts, and advocate taking oral recording as research material, and then objectively describe its structure.

1924, the American Linguistic Society was founded at the initiative of Baucus, Sapir and Bloomfield, which can be said to be the cradle of American descriptive linguistics. 1925, the association published Language magazine. The most important representative of this school is Bloomfield. In the 1920s, this school was still in its infancy and immature in theory. It was not until 1933 that Bloomfield's On Language was published that it formed its own unique theory and method. They regard language as a series of behaviors rather than actual stimuli and reactions, pay attention to observable verbal materials in language analysis, advocate relying on formal features to describe language structure, oppose using non-linguistic standards (especially psychological factors) to analyze language, and completely exclude historical factors in * * * description. These debates have had a great influence and have been guided by the theory of this school in the linguistic development of the next twenty or thirty years. It can be said that this school entered the "bloomfield" period from 1930s, and some people became the "bloomfield School".

1934, Parker, Nida, Fries and others began to hold the "Linguistics Summer Academy". They mainly inherited Sapir's academic tradition. Parker distinguished "position" and "element" in structural analysis, and tried to apply them to the analysis of all human behaviors. The late important members of this school include Harris, Wells, Bloch, Traege, Hoctor and Gleason. Among them, Harris is the most important 195 1 year, he published Structuralist Linguistic Methods, which marked that the theory and methods of this school entered a new era. He applied the method of mathematical logic to linguistics, advocated the standard of excluding meaning, and regarded distribution and substitution as the main principles and methods of structural analysis. Their theory is called "Post-Bloomfield School".

Generally speaking, this school has the following remarkable characteristics:

1. Pay attention to the description of oral English and the study of * * *.

2. Pay attention to the analysis of form and avoid the problem of meaning.

3. In structural analysis, in order to segment and classify independent units from a pile of speech materials, distribution and replacement methods are mainly used.

4. Analytic hierarchy process of syntactic structure is a concrete application of distributed substitution method in syntactic research, from which constitute analysis is developed, that is, a sentence or word is divided into its components according to levels.

5. Establish a new morpheme phoneme unit, which is based on the combination of grammar and pronunciation. It is a phonetic unit composed of a group of phonemes that appear in a morpheme variant (for example, the suffixes -s, -z and iz of English nouns are the same morpheme phoneme composed of different phonemes).

6. Emphasize verification.

Prague school

In a narrow sense, the Prague School refers to a group of linguists and literary theorists who have joined the Prague Linguistic Society since the second half of the 1920s. They are closely related to this society in their academic views and activities. The Prague School in a broad sense includes contemporary linguists who joined the Czechoslovak Linguistic Society and inherited the tradition of the Prague Linguistic Society.

The Prague School accepted Saussure's basic theory and acknowledged that language is a sign system, but it did not completely separate the language form from the supralinguistic factors and attached importance to the diachronic study of language, but it did not separate it from the diachronic study. They also accepted the function view of Russian linguist Kurnai, and combined structure and function to study language, thus calling themselves the structure-function school.

This school is very influential. Bao Linjie, an American linguist, once commented: "The Prague Linguistic Society has the greatest influence in European linguistics, and every important development of American linguistics is related to the theory of this school." The pioneer of this school is Matthews. From 1926 to 10, he initiated with six people, including Jacobson, Havranek and Becker, and established the Prague Language Society. Among the foreigners who join the societies, Russians are the most. In addition to Jacobson, there are also famous Trubetskoi, Kartsev, Kopecky and Isacenko. Most Russian wing members focus on the study of the internal structure of language, ignoring the relationship between language and supralinguistic factors. Most members in Czechoslovakia pay more attention to the relationship between language and society and the application of language theory. They are called Czech wings or Matthews wings. In addition to Matthews and Havranek, the members of Czech Wings are also famous: trenca, Wingate, Mukasovsky, Wahek, Scarrica, Krzynek, Heralek, trost, aubert Pfaar Xie, Boldov, Novak, Paolini and so on.

The contribution of this school in theory and method can be roughly classified into the following categories:

(1) is a multifunctional structural system.

(2) The establishment of phoneme theory.

(3) Phonetics concepts and typology principles are applied to grammar research.

(4) Put forward the theory of "language alliance". They believe that due to mutual influence, languages in neighboring areas often acquire some identical or similar features. Therefore, the * * * similarity of some languages does not necessarily come from the kinship of languages.

(5) Put forward the theory of actual sentence segmentation.

(6) It is proposed to strengthen the research on standardizing language theories, terms and functional styles to guide the whole language and cultural work.

(7) Advocating the application of the latest theory to language teaching from middle school.

structural linguistics

An important school of linguistics. Rising in Europe in the 1930s, the basic theory originated from Saussure's A Course in General Linguistics, which opposed the isolated analysis of language phenomena and advocated systematic research. Structural linguistics is divided into three schools: Prague School, Copenhagen School and American School of Structural Linguistics (also called American Descriptive Linguistics).

Prague school, also known as "structure-function school" or "function school". Its pioneer is Matthews, and its members mainly include Jacobson, Rubitz Coy and Haval Arnecke. 1926, 10 In June, the Prague Language Society was founded by six people, including Matthews and Jacobson. At the first international congress of linguistics, the Institute made the viewpoint of phonetics known to the world for the first time, which caused great repercussions. 1929, published in the journal Proceedings of Prague Linguistic Society. A comprehensive exposition of the collective view of the Prague School can be found in the outline they put forward at the first International Slavic Research Conference. The Outline emphasizes that language is a functional system, and the evaluation of language phenomena should focus on its function. Tru Beko's Principles of Phonology is an important representative work of this school. When the Second World War broke out, the main members of Prague School were scattered all over the world, which affected the decline. From 65438 to 0956, the Prague Linguistic Society merged with the Slavic Linguistic Society to form the Czechoslovak Linguistic Society, with He Lalek as its first president. This new society inherits the tradition of Prague Linguistic Society, so its members are called "Contemporary Prague School". The Prague School accepted Saussure's idea that language is a system, especially devoted to the study of phoneme system and established phoneme theory. Another feature of it is that it is not only interested in internal linguistics, but also interested in a wide range of linguistic issues, using linguistic theories to study literary works and other fields of external linguistics.

Copenhagen school, also known as Danish school. Representative figures are Hjelmslev, Brown Dahl, Urdal, etc. 193 1 year, Hjelmslev and Bloendal jointly founded the "Copenhagen Linguistic Society", which became a center of European structuralist linguistics at that time. 1938, The Journal of Linguistics was founded, and in the first issue of 1939, brendel published his paper Structural Linguistics, which became the program of this school. Hjelmslev is the president of the Copenhagen Linguistic Society. His Guiding Wheel of Language Theory and Principles of General Grammar are the representative works of Copenhagen School. Based on Saussure's language system theory, this school focuses on the study of language forms. It pays special attention to the combination of languages, which is a major aspect that distinguishes this school from Prague School. It regards language theory as a "pure deductive system" and adopts the "hypothesis-reasoning" method to analyze language, which does not involve the study of specific language facts, so its influence is relatively small.

Prague School and Copenhagen School merged into European Structuralist Linguistics, which is different from American Structuralist Linguistics. American structural linguistics, also known as American descriptive linguistics, is the most developed and important school in structural linguistics. It was gradually formed and developed by some American scholars on the basis of investigation and study of American Indian language in this century. The pioneers were Baucus and Sapir, who wrote The Handbook of American Indians and Linguistic Theory-An Introduction to Speech Studies respectively. They all emphasize the objective description of language. The most important representative of this school is Bloomfield, who founded the American Linguistic Society together with Baucus and Sapir in 1924 and published Language magazine in 1925. On Language published by Bloomfield in 1933 had a great influence on the formation and development of American structuralist linguistics, which was the foundation work of the school and brought it into the Bloomfield period. In 1950s, American structural linguistics entered the "post-bloomfield period", in which Harris and Hogate were the main representatives. A Course in Modern Linguistics published by Hoctor 1958 is a theoretical work of American Structuralist Linguistics, which makes a scientific summary of the development of American Structuralist Linguistics. 195 1 year, Harris's Structuralist Linguistic Methods was published, which was regarded as a sign and turning point in the post-Bloomfield period. The distinctive feature of American Structuralist Linguistic School is that it pays attention to the description of spoken language and tense, which is different from the tradition of European Structuralist Linguistic School that pays attention to written language. Their main contribution is to formulate a set of techniques for the formal analysis and description of language structures. This school has a great influence on Chinese studies.

Although Prague School, Copenhagen School and American Structuralist Linguistics School have their own traditions and characteristics, they also have similarities: they all accept some basic theories of Saussure, such as distinguishing between language and speech, and distinguishing between * * * time and duration in language. They believe that language is a symbol system, and the components in the system are separated from the discourse according to their differences and relationships, then classified and merged, and then closely related to each other.

Since its birth, Structuralist Linguistics has not only influenced various fields and schools of linguistic research, but also influenced the development of other humanities and social sciences. Its rigorous analytical methods have penetrated into anthropology, philosophy, psychology, literary criticism and other fields. In this way, structuralism has evolved from a linguistic theory to a trend of thought that has an influence on almost all humanities and social sciences, thus attracting widespread attention in academic circles.

historical comparative linguistics

Historical comparative linguistics, formerly known as comparative grammar, studies the law of language development through the comparison of language kinship, aiming at testing one's mother tongue. Historical comparative linguistics gradually developed and improved in the19th century, mainly focusing on the historical comparison of Indo-European languages. /kloc-before the 0/9th century, this kind of research was not without, but it was isolated and scattered. It was not until the19th century that systematic research was carried out, which led to the independent development of linguistics.

The emergence of historical comparative linguistics has two indispensable conditions. One is to collect all kinds of language materials in the world extensively, and the other is to understand the position and role of Sanskrit in language comparison.

/kloc-Historical comparative linguists in the 0/9th century made great contributions to the development of linguistics. They collected a wealth of language materials, conducted extensive and in-depth investigations and comparisons, not only put forward the hypothesis of human language evolution, drew the genealogy map of the world languages, but also created more scientific research methods and put forward new theories on the origin and essence of languages, which created favorable conditions for the emergence and development of structuralism and descriptive linguistics later.