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.