Linguistic Movemements and theories

THE STRUCTURALISTS After the 19th century Historicism (which mainly studied the evolution of languages (a new linguistic point of view was brought by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure with his work Course in general Linguistics (1916) Saussure turned those historical explanations of linguistic phenomena and language evolution (diachronic studies) into a description of language structure at a particular point of time (synchronic studies). In his work, he explains several aspects of language through dichotomies, which …

…analysis of sentences identifies the words as smallest relevant units and displays information about their lexical categorization (if it is a noun, an article, and adjective, etc.) and also the constituent structure, which is also assigned a particular category (noun phrase, verb phrase, etc). The term 'generative' must be understood as the capacity of a grammar to recognize a sentence as the set of sentences it generates, rather than the capacity of producing any sentence.