Introducing linguistics
pp. 367-369
in: Martin Middeke, Timo Müller, Christina Wald, Hubert Zapf (eds), English and American studies, Stuttgart, Metzler, 2012Abstract
Even though the term "linguistics' is actually a fairly recent coinage (first attested in the second half of the nineteenth century according to the Oxford English Dictionary), linguistics as the scientific study of language is of course much older with a respectable tradition of two-and-a-half thousand years. Its roots can be traced back to Pânini and other ancient Indian linguists and their the work on the grammar of (the Old Indian language) Sanskrit (fifth or fourth century BC) as well as to early Greek traditions of rhetoric, logic and stylistics in the classical age. Most notably, it was Aristotle who pioneered a number of fundamental ideas of grammar and the form-meaning relationship that have shaped linguistic thinking up to now. However, linguistics as an independent academic discipline concerned with forms and structures, meanings and usages, historical and variational changes of language is much younger. Indeed, it was one of the fundamental tenets shared by students of language in the nineteenth and early twentieth century that linguistics is a field of study in its own right rather than a sub-discipline of stylistics or an auxiliary science assisting literary, philosophical, juridical or theological scholars in their exegetical endeavors.
