[7][citation needed] Aristotle laid the foundation of Western linguistics as part of the study of rhetoric in his Poetics c. 335 BC.
This was contested in the early 20th century by Ferdinand de Saussure, who established linguistics as an autonomous discipline within social sciences.
[6] Following Saussure's concept, general linguistics consists of the study of language as a semiotic system, which includes the subfields of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
[15][better source needed] In semantics, the early Sanskrit grammarian Śākaṭāyana (before c. 500 BCE) proposes that verbs represent ontologically prior categories, and that all nouns are etymologically derived from actions.
[citation needed] Pāṇini (c. 6th century BCE) opposes the Yāska view that sentences are primary, and proposes a grammar for composing semantics from morphemic roots.
[16] Pāṇini's system also differs from modern formal linguistics in that, since Sanskrit is a free word-order language, it did not provide syntactic rules.
[citation needed] The Greeks developed an alphabet using symbols from the Phoenicians, adding signs for vowels and for extra consonants appropriate to their idiom (see Robins, 1997).
In the Phoenicians and in earlier Greek writing systems, such as Linear B, graphemes indicated syllables, that is sound combinations of a consonant and a vowel.
As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented on, forming the basis of philology and criticism.
Plato in his Cratylus presents the naturalistic view, that word meanings emerge from a natural process, independent of the language user.
His arguments are partly based on examples of compounding, where the meaning of the whole is usually related to the constituents, although by the end he admits a small role for convention.
The Platonic dialogs contain definitions of the meters of the poems and tragedy, the form and the structure of those texts (see the Republic and Phaidros, Ion, etc.).
The categories are not abstract platonic entities but are found in speech, these are substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action and affection.
They played an important role in defining the linguistic sign-terms adopted later on by Ferdinand de Saussure like "significant" and "signifié".
Other grammars by Charisius (mainly a compilation of Thrax, as well as lost texts by Remmius Palaemon and others) and Diomedes (focusing more on prosody) were popular in Rome as pedagogic material for teaching Greek to native Latin-speakers.
The terminology invented by Greek and Latin grammarians in the ancient world and medieval period continue as a part of our everyday language.
In the 4th century, Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.
Philology came to be divided into three branches: exegesis (訓詁; xùngǔ), grammatology (文字; wénzì) and phonology (音韻; yīnyùn).
They adopt a realist position on the name-reality connection – universals arise because "the world itself fixes the patterns of similarity and difference by which things should be divided into kinds".
[24] The philosophical tradition features a well known conundrum "a white horse is not a horse" by Gongsun Longzi (4th century BCE), which resembles those of the sophists; Gongsun questions if in copula statements (X is Y), are X and Y identical or is X a subclass of Y. Xunzi (c. 310 – c. after 238 BCE) revisits the principle of zhengming, but instead of rectifying behaviour to suit the names, his emphasis is on rectifying language to correctly reflect reality.
The last great philologist of the era was Zhang Binglin, who also helped lay the foundation of modern Chinese linguistics.
[25] Ancient commentators on the classics focused their attention on lexical content and the function of linking words rather than syntax; the first modern Chinese grammar was produced by Ma Jianzhong (late 19th century), based on a Western model.
Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar).
In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from Latin/Greek to include the languages of the day.
Other linguistic works of the same period concerning the vernaculars include the First Grammatical Treatise (Icelandic) or the Auraicept na n-Éces (Irish).
Franciscus Juniuns, Lambert ten Kate from Amsterdam and George Hickes from England are considered to be the founding fathers of German linguistics.
Under these circumstances, linguists such as Franz Boas tried to prescribe sound methodical principles for the analysis of unfamiliar languages.
[32] During the 18th century conjectural history, based on a mix of linguistics and anthropology, on the topic of both the origin and progress of language and society was fashionable.
Through the 19th century, European linguistics centered on the comparative history of the Indo-European languages, with a concern for finding their common roots and tracing their development.
[44] From roughly 1980 onwards, pragmatic, functional, and cognitive approaches have steadily gained ground, both in the United States and in Europe.