The prominence of linguistics has enabled to have a significant influence on the development of other disciplines which study form in areas other than language: anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, musicology, film theory and literary study for example.
This influence has come about for basically two reasons. First, one of the most influential early works on linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1913), suggested that the methods of linguistics might be extended to all communicative systems whether or not they use language, to become the basis of a general semiotics.
Second, contact between two Europeans who met in New York in the 1940s, the linguist Roman Jakobson and the anthropologist Claude Levi–Strauss. Left the latter convinced that phonology (the study of linguistics sounds) could provide a methodological basis for all the human sciences, and thus laid the path towards the French structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s, in which linguistics inspired a range of disciplines.
The influence of linguistics on other disciplines, including the study of literature, has been fruitful, but also had the effect of de-emphasizing the specificity of linguistics and the distinctive status of linguistics form.
Thus it has become common to describe various kinds of non-linguistics form by using the terminology of linguistics: writes refer to ‘the syntax of film’ or ‘the language of clothing’, for example.And literary form is sometimes analyzed as tough it was like linguistics form: thus narratives are sometimes seen as analogous to sentences.
These kinds of approach see ‘form; as something very general which exists similarly in many different media.
In opposition to these tendencies, most kinds of modern linguistics emphasize the distinctive characteristics of language, and the fact that when linguistics form is brought proper focus, it does not resemble any other kind of form.
This has been a fundamental principle of generative linguistics from its inception with Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structure (1957).
It has also been the basis for a claim about the human mind: if linguistic form is different from any other kind of form then the human child’s ability to acquire a language so rapidly and efficiently (and therefore learn how to speak and understand a language) might be based on some propensity towards the learning of specifically linguistics form.Thus it is possible that linguistics form emerges from mental structures which are specialized for language and with which human are born.
This has a further implication for literary linguistics. If linguistics form depends on specific mental structure and certain aspects of linguistics forms are adapted to literary use in ways which conform to general principle across languages, then it is possible that by studying the adaption of linguistics form in literary form we can therefore study the mind.
Literary scholars have sometime been content to borrow the terminology of linguistics while being resistant to the psychological implications of linguistics theory; both tendency can be traced to the same underestimation of the distinctiveness of linguistic form.
Linguistics and the Study of Form
