Skip to main content

Priority of Synchronic Description over Diachronic Description



Synchronic and Diachronic Description
There are two different ways of investigating a language. We can investigate a language as it exists at a given point of time i.e. in the fifteenth century or in the nineteenth or 20th century and then describe it. This approach is called the synchronic approach.
The other approach consists in studying the state of the language at different periods of time and discover how it has evolved over time, what stages it has passed through and what changes have taken place in its pronunciation, lexicon, grammar and syntax with the passage of time. This approach is called the diachronic or historical approach.
Saussure is of the view that synchronic description of a language is more important than the diachronic description. To prove his point he compares language to a game of chess. He says that at a given point of time, we are concerned only with the position of the pieces at that time. It is not important to know how the pieces have reached there. Similarly, to use language for all practical purposes, what is important for us to know is the current state of the language. Its historical evolution is totally irrelevant.
The synchronic approach also helps us to avoid the etymological fallacy. It is sometimes assumed the meaning of the words is related to the original form from which they have been derived. But it is not true. Words as well as the forms derived from them often change their meaning as the language evolves. Consequently, a word may come to have a meaning which is not at all related to the root from which it has been derived. To be efficient users of the language, we need only to know the meaning of the word at the current time only. We have nothing to do with its history.
The game of chess has a beginning and an end. It also has a goal which gives us the direction in which the pieces have to move. But languages have no definite beginning or end. Nor is there any directionality in language. What we are concerned with is only the current state of a language to be able to use it efficiently.
Another argument I favour of the priority of synchronic description is that it is independent of diachronic description. To describe the state of a language at a given time, we do not need any knowledge of the stages through which it has passed before reaching the current state. On the other hand, a diachronic description requires a synchronic description of the language at several different points of time before the point of time in question. We cannot describe a language diachronically without reference to its earlier states.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Syntax - 3 Constituents, Phrasal (Syntactic) Categories and Phrase Structure (Syntactic) Rules

Syntax –  Constituents,  Categories  and Phrase Structure Rules A. Constituents Constituents are the units which may be words, phrases (groups of words not qualifying as sentences) or clauses (sentences embedded in lager sentences) that go into the making of a larger structure.   For example, the sentence – Boys are naughty – has three constituents all of which are words. In the sentence – The naughty boy broke the glass, - again, we have three constituents two of which are noun phrases and the third one is a verb. In the sentence – The boy who is naughty broke the glass – we have a clause (a sentence within a sentence)   - 'who is naughty' - as a constituent of a larger sentence. Traditional grammar operated with words as the constituents of sentences. The words were then classified into parts of speech such as nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs etc. But modern grammarians have rejected this classification because 1. Their defini...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Phoneme Theory

The Phoneme Theory Ferdinand De Saussure is remembered for laying the foundations of a different approach to language studies. Linguists before him believed that language is speech and there is no distinction between the two. Therefore linguistics is the study of speech. Saussure stressed that language is a system of signs which are arranged into structures of different levels according to some rules. The signs and the rules determining the acceptability of these structures exist in the collective psyche of a language community. No member of the community has a comprehensive knowledge of the system. But all of them have enough knowledge of it to enable them to use the language for their daily needs. Traditional linguists also asserted that words are the minimal units of language. Saussure rejected this belief. He postulated that the minimal units of language are the phonemes and the minimal semantic ad grammatical units are the morphemes. Saussure’s views about the place of ph...
Post a Comment
Read more

Phonology - Some Definitions

                              Phonology What is phonology Phonology is a subfield of linguistics which studies the structure and systematic patterning of sounds in human languages. It refers to the study of the articulation, classification and sounds used in a particular language and the rules which govern their distribution in the units of the next higher level i.e. syllables, morphemes or words.  Phonology and Phonetics The difference between phonetics and phonology is that of generality and particularity. Human speech organs are capable of producing a very large number of sounds. Phonetics is the study of these speech sounds – their articulation, classification, transmission and reception and the signs used to represent them - without reference to any particular language. Every language makes its own selection of a small and limited number out of them and organises them into charact...
Post a Comment
Read more