Linguistics as a scientific study of language -- The study of language as sound -- Grammar as a formal system -- The development of language study in the West -- Traditional grammar -- The nineteenth century : historical and comparative linguistics -- Ferdinand de Saussure -- Edward Sapir -- Leonard Bloomfield -- J.R. Firth : contextual theory and prosodic phonology -- Louis Hjelmslev : glossematics -- Noam Chomsky : transformational grammar and linguistic universals
