The Study of Language

Phonetics and Phonology

Applied Linguistics

The Descriptivists

The descriptivist approach to linguistic science is most closely associated with the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1887 - 1949). Descriptivism originated in America at the beginning of this century and was a major paradigm for research right up until the 1960s. The inspiration for descriptivism was the urgent need to produce a lasting record of the native languages of North America, since many of them were under immediate threat of extinction. To this end, the American anthropologist Franz Boas spearheaded an early survey and published the results in the classic Handbook of American Indian Languages, in 1911. Nowadays, it is no surprise to learn that linguists study all manner of strange and exotic languages from around the world. Yet it was only with the pioneering work of Boas that such languages were accorded equal status with more familiar objects of study like Latin, Greek and German. In this respect, descriptivism represented a sharp break with the traditions of European linguistics.

The initial surprise, which never ceased to impress descriptivists, was the enormous range of linguistic diversity they unearthed. Seemingly, each new language they came across possessed quite unique structures and categories. For example, it was discovered that in Kwakiutl, a language indigenous to British Columbia, verbs are not inflected to indicate the time of action, as in most European languages, but to indicate whether or not the speaker actually witnessed an event in person, or only learned of it from another person, from the available evidence, or even from a dream. Remarkably, these differences of perspective are encoded in the syntax of the language. In English we would require long, possibly unwieldy phrases to convey what, in Kwakiutl, would be encoded in the grammar via verb inflections.

In order to cope with the barrage of alien concepts and constructions in their analyses, descriptivists made strenuous efforts to set aside their preconceptions about language. Methods of analysis appropriate for Latin and Greek could easily give a distorted picture when applied to a native American language. A fundamental aim was to devise an objective approach, a set of ‘discovery procedures’, which could be applied to any language, in order to interpret it correctly and produce an accurate description. This technique failed in its assumption that any set of procedures or techniques of analysis are entirely independent of the object studied. In fact, it will always be the case in any science that the methods of investigation employed will reflect to some extent the expectations and prejudices of the scientist.

In contrast with current preoccupations in linguistics (see universal grammar), a notable feature of descriptivism is its disdain for the idea that certain universal linguistic concepts and categories are inherent in all human languages. Bloomfield asserted the opposing ‘infinite diversity’ view with the observation that the very next language one came across might well contradict any universal tendencies hitherto observed, and that it was therefore futile to study languages with a view to discovering underlying universal characteristics.

                               

                                                                                                  Franz Boas

Pragmatics

Pragmatics

For Charles Morris that pragmatics is the science of the relation of signs to their interpreters. Pragmatics is concerned not with language as system or product per se, but rather with the interrelationships between language form, messages and languages users.

In the code-model, communication is seen as an encoding-decoding process, when a code is system that enables the automatic pairing of messages (meanings, internal to senders and receivers), and signals (what physically transmitted, (sound, smoke visual, writing) between the sender and the receiver.

The code mode has the merit of describing one way in which communication can be achieved.

Pragmatic perspectivse on language use.

Pragmatic meaning

One task of pragmatics is to explain how participants in a dialogue such as the one above move from the decontextualized meanings of the words and phrases to a grasp of their meaning in context

Assigning reference in context

The process of Assigning reference also involves the interpretations of “deictic expression”. These are linguistic items that point to contextually salient referents without naming them explicitly.

Assigning sense in context

These observations show that contextual meaning (reference and sense) is not fully determined by the words are used: there is a gap between the meaning of the words used by the speaker and the thought that the speaker intends to express by using those words on a particular occasion.

Inferring illocutionary force

This theory which was generated by the philosopher John Austin (1975) and developed Josh Searle views language as a form of action, that when we speak, we do things like make requests, make statements, offer apologies and so on.

Working out implicated meaning.

Deriving an interpretations that satisfies the Co-operative principles is effected through the maxims which the communicator is presumed to abide by:

Truthfulness: (communicators should do their best to make contributions which are true).

Informativeness:  (communicators should do their best to be adequately informative)

Relevance: (communicators should do their best to make contributions which are relevant)

Style: (communicators should do their best to make contributions which are appropriately short and clearly expressed)

Explaining the impact of social factors.

Leech proposes a set of “politeness maxims” such as the modesty maxim and the agreement maxim which operate in conjunction with the co operative maxims. They are worded as rules (for example minimize praise of self, maximize agreement between self and other), but in fact they aim to describe the interactional principles that underlie language use.

The pragmalinguistic perspective focuses on the linguistics strategies that are used to convey a given pragmatic meaning, whereas the sociopragmatic perspective focuses on the socially based assessments, beliefs and interactional principles that underlie peoples’ choice of strategies.

A sociopragmatic perspective focuses on the social judgment associated with such a scenario, for example what the relationship between the participants is and the social acceptability of reaching for food in such context.

Conversational patterns and structure.

An approach that starts from the commonsense observation that people take turns in conversation, and that relies on descriptions of naturally occurring data discover the rules involved in the patterning of conventional exchanges. The utterances in pair are ordered, in that the first member of a pair requires a second member.

The role of context

Context plays a major role in the communication process, and so important task for pragmatic theory is to elucidate this process, it is widely accepted that the following features of the situational context have a particularly crucial influence on people´s use of language:

The participants: their roles, the amounts of power differential between them, the degree of distance-closeness between them the number of people present.

The  message content: how costly or beneficial the message is to the hearer and/or speaker, how face threatening it is whether it exceeds or stays within the rights and obligations of the relationship.

The communicative activity: how the norms of the activity influence language behavior such as right to talk questions, discourse structure, and level of formality.

Unfortunately, context is sometimes taken to be concrete aspects of the environment in which an exchange takes place and that have bearing on the communication process.

One of the main problems of pragmatic is to explain the constant updating of contextual assumptions in the course of a communicative exchange.

Pragmatics research: Pragmatics and methods

There a re two broad approaches to pragmatics, a cognitive-psychological approach and a social-psychological approach.

Cognitive pramatics are primarily intereted in exploring the relation between the decontextualized, linguistic meaning of utterances, what speakers mean by their utterances on given occassions, and how listeners interpreter those utterances on those given occasions.

                                                                  Charles Morris

A rich and adaptable instrument

M.A.K. HALLIDAY

In an educational context the problem for linguistics is to elaborate some account of language that is relevant to the work of the English teacher.

It is not necessary, to sacrifice a generation of children, or event one class roomful, in order to demonstrate that particular preconceptions of language are inadequate or irrelevant. In place of a negative and somewhat hit and miss approach, a more fruitful procedure is to seek to establish certain general positive criteria of relevance. These will relate, ultimately, to the demand that we make of language in the course of our lives.

We tend to underestimate both the total extend and the functional diversity of the part played by language in the life of the child.

Perhaps the simplest of the child´s models of language, and one of the first to be evolved, is what we may call the instrumental model. The child becomes aware that language is used as a mean s of getting things done.

Language as an instrument of control has another side to it, since the child is well aware that language is also a means whereby others exercise control over him. Closely related to the instrumental model, therefore is the regulatory model of language. This refers to the use of language to regulatory behavior of others.

A single incident has little significance; but such general types or regulatory behavior; through repetition and reinforcement determine the child´s specific awareness of language as a means of behavioral control.

Closely related to the regulatory function of language it its function in social interaction , and the third of the models that we may postulate as forming part of the child´s image of language is the interactional model.

Language is used to define and consolidate the group , to include and to exclude, showing who is the one of us and who is nor, no impose status, and to contest status that is imposed and humor, ridicule, deception, persuasion, all the forensic and theatrical  arts of language are bought into play .

                                       M.A.K. HALLIDAY

The London School

England is a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an usually long history. Linguistic description becomes a matter of practical importance to a nation when it envolves a standard or official language for itself out of the welter of diverse and conflicting local usages normally found in any territory that has been settled for a considerable time, and it happens that in this respect England was, briefly, far in advance of Europe. 

Functions of Language

Language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions. The addresser sends a message to the addressee. To be operative the message requieres a context referred to (referent' in another, somewhat ambiguous, nomenclature), seizable by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized, a code fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee, and finally to a contact, a physical channel and psychological connexion between the addresser and addresse, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication.

Functional linguistics: the Prague School

Saussure´s lectures on synchronic linguistics were given in 1911, and that year, also saw the publication of Boas’s Handbook; coincidentally, it was in 1911 too that Mathesius published his first call for a new, non-historical approach to language study (Mathesius 1911).

Around Mathesius there came into being a circle of like-minded linguistic scholars, who began to meet for regular discussion from 1926 onwards, and came to be recognized as “the prague  school”.

The Prague School practiced a special style od synchronic linguistic, and although most of the scholars whom one thinks of as members of the school worked in Prague or at  least Czechoslovakia, the term is used also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consciously adhered to the Prague style.

As long as they were describing the strucrure of a language, the practice of the Pargue School was not very different from that of their contemporaries, they used the notions phoneme and morpheme for instance, but they tried to go beyond description to explanation, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.

American linguistic restricted themselves and still restrict themselves to description.

According to Mathesius, the need for continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts, the theme which refrers to something about which the immediately preceding sentences, and the rheme, so that the peg may be established in the hearer´s mind bedore anything new has to be hung on it.

It would be inaccurate to suggest that the notion of functional sentence perspective was wholly unknow in American linguistic, some of the descriptivists did use the terms topic and comment in much the same way as Mathesius theme and rheme.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the Prague School not based I Czechislovakia. He belonged to a scholarly family of the Russian nobility: his father had been a professor of philosophy and rector of Moscow University.

Troubetzkoy was a member of an aristocratic family with a long and renowned intellectual tradition. His interest in ethnography and folklore was present since adolescence. At the age of fifteen, he published his first article in Ethnological Society in Moscow.Troubetzkoy was in its infancy essentially ethnological training, with special relevance of Russian folklore, Caucasian and Finno-Ugric. The influence of this discipline is observed in its interpretation of language as a product closely related to religion, folklore and culture in general.

In 1908 he was admitted to the philological-historical school of the University of Moscow. During this period, he trained in the study of Indo-European languages. Like other linguists of the time, made a stay in Germany during the years 1913-1914. In 1916, he taught Sanskrit at the University of Moscow, which temporarily abandoned in 1917 for health reasons. In the Caucasus surprised by the Bolshevik uprising.

Saussure: language as social fact

The study of 19th-century historical linguistics some existing concept of inappropriate language, Saussure recognized the need to clarify the essence of language is proposed language is a social fact that far-reaching, it fails to arouse sufficient attention to contemporary scholars, thesis. The activities of his speech as a starting point, the relatively abstract language and speech, and argues the language as a social fact of the similarities and differences with other social systems. Saussure's exposition will help limit the linguistic study of a real object, and recognize the nature of linguistic signs, which will lead a new linguistic

 Against some improper notions of language held in the historical linguistics in the nineteenth century, Saussure finds it necessary to identify the nature of language. Saussure asserts that language, precisely langue, is a social fact, a viewpoint far-reaching yet largely neglected by scholars at his time. An elaborate analysis of language leads Saussure to extract langue in contrast to parole and then to address the similarities and dissimilarities between langue and other institutions. Saussure's elaboration on language as a social fact helps to define the real object of linguistics and identify the nature of linguistic sign, thus orienting linguistics towards a new horizon. 

Ferdinand de Saussure (Saussure) in the 'Course in General Linguistics' in the several references to the proposition that language is a social fact. Perhaps because of his exposition is more fragmented, the lack of systematic, this proposition has failed to arouse sufficient interest contemporary scholars. In fact, Saussure's linguistic theory of social facts are not simply a general discussion, but rather implies a profound ideological content of the proposition, derived from his view of language was a profound historical linguistics reflection by Whitney (Whitney ) the impact of linguistic thought and sociological method of great debate at the time of infection. 

                                                                    Ferdinand de Saussure

Sociolinguistics and Discourse analysis

The most important area of research for applied linguistics is the field of discourse analysis, and the contributions of discourse analysis made by sociolinguistics are central.

For the last ten years, it has been a major focus of language teaching, curriculum design, language testing, classroom centered research, and the study of language use and language problems in professional contexts.

Other direct contributions from sociolinguistics to aaplied-linguistics research include the fields of conversational analysis and conersational style.

The stress placed on discourse analysis by sociolinguistics, the emphasis given to written discourse analysis by Hallidean functional linguistics, and the emerging interest in language comprehension research in cognitive psychology have all combined to focus applied-linguistics research on problems and issues in the analysis of written discourse.

Semantic and Pragmatics

Semantics has been important to applied linguistics. Research in second-language acquisition and lexicography have both used lexical semantics as a resource for research on how words may be related, and on how they differ in various ways.

Another area of semantics that has been examined extensively in second-language acquisition contexts is the tense-modal-aspect system in various languages and its influence on learning second languages.

Pragmatics has had much greater impact on applied linguistics, primarly because the issues raised and the theories developed directly inform discourse analysis.

The term speech acts refers directly either to sets of verbs that do things when uttered in the right context or the use of utterances in order to covey messages that are only inferrable from a combination of the context and the literal words means complaint.

Morphology and Syntax

Linguistic research on morphology and on the organization of the lexicon has not initiated any great changes in practical research over the last twenty years. Applied-linguistics research on lexicography, terminology development, second language acquisition, and language teaching is still employing descriptive approaches that have been in use for some time.

Syntax

These approaches to syntax appear to have an influence on applied-linguistics research activities. Comsky's earlier approaches to syntax are still proving influential in that many introductions to syntax courses in applied-linguistics programs are modification on both past and current Comskean linguistics.

The descriptive syntax texts have been used for grammar courses and for resource references in language policy and planning- particularly in the development of language standards in schools, in second-language acquisition, in discourse analysis, in computational stylistics, and in lexicography.

Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics and phonology still make the greatest contribution to applied linguistics. The traditional articulatory approach is still the basis for most discussion of pronunciation and oral language instruction generally in second-language contexts.

Phonetics and phonology have undergone a number of changes over the last 25 years, and phonology in particular has been subject to major theoretical revisions.

Applied Linguistics and Linguistics

The rapid growth of the field of applied linguistics over the last twenty years has led to a general observation that applied linguistics must be viewed as an interdisciplinary field; ineed, it is probably impossible to do applied linguistics without incorpporating expertise from some related discipline, be it anthropology, psychology, education, sociology, psychometrics, or some other field. The role of linguistics itself in applied linguistics has, however, at times been underestimated.  

Historical Background

Modern linguistics necessarily begins with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and his General course on linguistics (1916). His systematic structural approach to language has been a foundation for virtually al of linguistics since that time.

These latter two influential notions evolved from the structural assumptions on the nature of language de Saussure's work had a powerful impact on various structural-linguistic groups that emerged across Europe, including the London School of Linguistics, the Geneva School of Linguistics, the Copenhagen School of Linguistics, and the Prague School of Linguistics. 

The Prague School and the London School are still important sources of linguistic research, and both have had a considerable influence on later developments in American Linguistics. The Prague School, begun in 1926, provided the foundations for most later phonological theory and created the now commonplace notion of distinctive features in their analyses. London School was primarily the product of J.R. Firth, who in 1944 became the first professor of linguistics in Great Britain. 

  

Growth of American Linguistics

American linguistics has been historically central to the emergence of the discipline generally as synchronic descriptive research on many languages received its greatest academic support and research funding in the United States. Franz Boas established American descriptivist linguistics and trained the leading structural linguists. Sapir, with perhaps the most enduring legacy of these early scholars, wrote a highly influential book, Language (1921). Bloomfield wrote a book, also callede Language (1993), which profoundly changed the course of American linguistics for the next 30 years. 

 Franz Boas 

Bloomfield

Generative Linguistics

The major changes introduced by Chomsky's theories were:

1. To challenge basic discovery procedure for linguistic research deriving from behavioral assumptions.

2. To reject the belief that language acquisition is habit formation;

3. To include intuitions and semantic information as admissible linguistic data;

4. To center linguistic research on syntax

5. To reject an item-arrangement approach in favor of an item-process approach (e.g., with transformations and the assumption of a deep structure syntactic level);

6. To devise a set of criteria for evaluating competing grammars; and

7. To propose as the goal of linguistic research the search for lingustic universals, the discovery of which could then represent arguments for the biological predispositions that humans appear to have to learn language structure.

Chomsky

Current Generative Theory

Chomsky quickly recognized the limitations of early semantic-based approaches, and from the late 1960's to the 1970's, he argued for a theory of grammar that was first known as the "extended standard theory", and later as the "revised extended standard theory". Chomsky's goals were to focus on the conditions and constraints that influenced grammatical structure generally - to restrict the power of theoretical grammar so that it would conform to these conditions and constraints operating on language.  

Descriptive Syntax

The descriptivist approach initiated by Saussure and developed in the United States under Boas did not dissapear wih the rise of the behaviouristically oriented American structural linguistics. In Europe synchronic descriptions of English were developed by Jeperson, Curme and Poutsma in the 1920's and 1930's. In the United States, many anthropological linguists continued descriptive research on native-American languages with the behavioristically oriented linguists representing only part of the range of research, though the most influential at the time.

During the late 1960's and early 1970's, these British grammarians/linguists developed major corpuses of the English language which were used, in turn, as resources for an extremely influential modern descriptive grammar of English , A grammar contemporary English. 

The Study of Language

The discipline of linguistics can be likened to a parthway which is being cut through the dark and mysterious forest of language. There have been three major directions in linguistics in the past two centuries. 

Nineteenth century: historical linguistics

Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made major contributions to the study of language. Plato is said to have been the first person to distinguish between nouns and verbs. 

Sir William jones, read a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta pointing out that Sanskrit (the old Indian language), Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all had striking structural similarities. So impressive were these likenesses that these languages must spring from one common source, he concluded. 

Early- to mid- 20th century: descriptive linguistics

The term “structural linguistics” is sometimes misunderstood. All linguistics since de Saussure is structural, as “structural” in this broad sense merely means the recognition that language is a patterned system composed of interdependent elements, rather than a collection of unconnected individual items. 

Bloomfield considered that linguisticcs should  deal objectively and 

systematically  with observable data. He concluded, “the weak point in 

language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far

beyond its present state".   

By around 1950 linguistics had lost touch with other disciplines and become an 

abstruse subject of little interest to anyone outside it. It was ready for a

revolution.

Leonard Bloomfield                                               Ferdinand de Saussure

Mid-to late-20th century: generative linguistics and the search for universals

In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. Noam Chomsky, then aged twenty-nine

a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a book called

Syntactic Structures. He has, in the opinion of many, transformed linguistics

from a relatively obscure discipline of interest mainly to PhD students and 

future missionaries into  a major social science of direct relevance to

psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and others.

A grammar which consists of a set of statements or rles which specify which

sequences of a language are possible, and which impossible, is a generative

grammar. 

                                                         Chomsky