NAQT You Gotta Know - Linguists

Sanskrit grammarian who worked at Taxila, a seat of Vedic learning. Wrote the first known descriptive grammar of any language, the Ashtadhyayi, which explains the differences between Vedic and the later Sanskrit forms, providing logical rules for making words from Morphemes.

Judge and employee of the British East India company, and a philologist (someone who studies language through historical and primary sources). He popularized the idea of a common origin for Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and others, which led to the reconstruction of the Indo-European language family and the idea of a Proto-Indo-European language.

Created the theory of structuralism, in which linguists analyze the structures of language and how they relate to each other, and often focus on synchronic analyses of language, which look at a language at a specific point in time, as opposed to diachronic analyses, which look at how languages change over time. Also contributed to the understanding of Proto-Indo-European by postulating an early version of the laryngeal theory.

Starting with S, one of the linguists known for the namesake hypothesis, according to which the structure of a language shapes how people think. (Linguistic determinism: language restricts what people can think of).

Above's counterpart

Developed an American school of Sausure's structuralism, which influenced but also later displaced by the theories of Noam Chomsky. His textbook "Language" was particularly influential in emphasizing studying language separately from the psychology and anthropology of its speakers. First studied phonology and morphology of the Germanic languages in the Neogrammarian tradition, but later worked more on the Tagalog language.

Studied under structuralist Zellig Harris but went on to develop his own theory of generative grammar. Emphasized biological and cognitive bases of language, which gave rise to his theory of child language acquisition, in which people are born with an innate linguistic capacity of Universal Grammar that is activated by hearing speech.

Functionally invented the linguistic study of pragmatics, how people communicate in context, by putting forth a set of maxims that follow from the assumption that speakers are cooperating with each other. (Cooperative principle). Maxim of quality, relation, and manner.

Berkeley linguist and cognitive scientist. Student of Chomsky's theories of generative syntax, but he later became a leader of generative semantics, as chronicled in Randy Allen Harris book "The Language Wars." He argued that meaning precedes syntactic structure in how the brain uses language.

University of Pennsylvania linguist and student of Uriel Weinreich who pioneered the study of sociolinguistics, looking at how languages varies across speakers. It expanded the focus of tradition dialectology to include not only regional variation but also class, race, gender, and similar traits.

Psycholinguist and cognitive psychologist, he analyzed Chomsky's theories of Universal Grammar in his book, "The Language Instinct." In this work, he suggests that language comes from specific brain increased frequency of irregular verbs is necessary for children to learn them well.