Articles represent four schools of thought in the field of linguistics: structural, behavioral, transformational, and tagmemic. Summarizing structural linguistics before 1956, John Lotz emphasizes the importance of spoken language and the "internal order" imposed upon "physical and behavioral phenomena," and indicates some of the basic beliefs of structural linguists. W. Nelson Francis demonstrates practical applications of structural linguistics research and points out that structuralists must work from observable data rather than intuition. B. F. Skinner argues that students of language should begin by examining the "total speech episode" as behavior similar in all fundamental respects to other kinds of human behavior. Owen Thomas introduces the transformationalist approach, which is primarily interested in those rules that connect form with meaning and explain how grammatical elements interact to form sentences. Kenneth L. Pike describes the viewpoint of the tagmemicist, who sees "characteristics of rationality" and "universal invariants" inherent in language structure. Noam Chomsky, believing that language study should occur within a larger philosophical framework, advocates a return to more traditional goals in linguistic research. (Author/LH)