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Linguistics in the United States

Linguistics is the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language. There are a number of linguists who have incorporated into the subject.

William Dwight Whitney

To begin with, William Dwight Whitney was born in Northampton, Massachusetts. Whitney attended Williams College and was the best linguist in his class, however there is no evidence that he had any special interest in languages. In 1854, Whitney was appointed professor Sanskrit at Yale University, following with comparative philology. During Whitney's thirty years in elementary French and German at Yale, this played an important part in the development of instruction in modern languages in the United States. The history of linguistics in the United States begins with William Dwight Whitney, the first U.S.-taught academic linguist, who founded the American Philological Association in 1869. Whitney was the first president of the American Philological Association and was its most faithful contributor. Following Whitney's death on June 7, 1894, the first American Congress of Philologists would assemble in Philadelphia. This was to join the devotion to the memory of one who for nearly thirty years has been a commanding figure in the progress of learning.

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 to Dr. William (Zev) Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Chomsky fled from his native Russia to the United States in 1913 in order to avoid being drafted into the Czarist army. While growing up, his family was actively involved in Jewish cultural activities and Jewish issues, particularly the revival of the Hebrew language and Zionism.Chomsky began his formal education at a remarkably young age. On his second birthday, he was sent to Deweyite experimental institution in Philadelphia called the Oak Lane Country Day School, where he remained until the age of twelve. When Chomsky came to the field of linguistics it was informed by the classical philology that he had learned from his father, and from his own readings. This is where the start of Chomsky's interest in the study of language began. In 1945, aged 16, Chomsky began a general program of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he explored philosophy, logic, and languages and developed a primary interest in learning Arabic. Living at home, he funded his undergraduate degree by teaching Hebrew. In 1952 Chomsky published his first academic article, Systems of Syntactic Analysis, which appeared not in a journal of linguistics but in The Journal of Symbolic Logic. Highly critical of the established behaviorist currents in linguistics, in 1954 he presented his ideas at lectures at the University of Chicago and Yale University. He had not been registered as a student at Pennsylvania for four years, but in 1955 he submitted a thesis setting out his ideas on transformational grammar; he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree for it, and it was privately distributed among specialists on microfilm before being published in 1975 as part of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.

Throughout his career, Chomsky published a review of B. F. Skinner's 1957 book Verbal Behavior in the academic journal Language, in which he argued against Skinner's view of language as learned behavior. The review argued that Skinner ignored the role of human creativity in linguistics and helped to establish Chomsky as an intellectual. Chomsky went on to be appointed plenary speaker at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, held in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which established him as the de facto spokesperson of American linguistics.

The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited. As such he argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences. In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, who viewed behavior (including talking and thinking) as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments. Accordingly, Chomsky argues that language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species and distinguished from modes of communication used by any other animal species. Chomsky's nativist, internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of "rationalism" and contrasts with the anti-nativist, externalist view of language consistent with the philosophical school of "empiricism", which contends that all knowledge, including language, comes from external stimuli. In addition, Noam Chomsky created two of his major theories that are apart of the subject to linguistics. One is universal grammar in the 1960s Chomsky has maintained that syntactic knowledge is at least partially inborn, implying that children need only learn certain language-specific features of their native languages. He bases his argument on observations about human language acquisition and describes a "poverty of the stimulus": an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic competence they attain. For example, although children are exposed to only a very small and finite subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first language, they somehow acquire the highly organized and systematic ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences, including ones that have never before been uttered, in that language. To explain this, Chomsky reasoned that the primary linguistic data must be supplemented by an innate linguistic capacity. Furthermore, while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever relevant capacity the human has that the cat lacks the language acquisition device, and suggested that one of linguists' tasks should be to determine what that device is and what constraints it imposes on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that result from these constraints would constitute "universal grammar". The second theory is the Transformational-generative grammar is a broad theory used to model, encode, and deduce a native speaker's linguistic capabilities. These models, or "formal grammars", show the abstract structures of a specific language as they may relate to structures in other languages. Chomsky developed transformational grammar in the mid-1950s, whereupon it became the dominant syntactic theory in linguistics for two decades. Chomsky's theory posits that language consists of both deep structures and surface structures: Outward-facing surface structures relate phonetic rules into sound, while inward-facing deep structures relate words and conceptual meaning. Transformational-generative grammar uses mathematical notation to express the rules that govern the connection between meaning and sound (deep and surface structures, respectively). By this theory, linguistic principles can mathematically generate potential sentences structures in a language.

Stephen Krashen

Stephen Krashen is another well-known linguist, who was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1941. Krashen is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, who moved from the linguistics department to the faculty of the School of Education in 1994. He is a linguist, educational researcher, and activist. Stephen Krashen received a PhD. in Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1972. Krashen has among papers (peer-reviewed and not) and books, more than 486 publications, contributing to the fields of second-language acquisition, bilingual education, and reading. He is known for introducing various hypotheses related to second-language acquisition, including the acquisition-learning hypothesis, the input hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the affective filter, and the natural order hypothesis. Most recently, Krashen promotes the use of free voluntary reading during second-language acquisition, which he says "is the most powerful tool we have in language education, first and second."