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.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Functions of language
Functional linguistics: the Prague School
Roman Osipovich Jakobson ia a scholar of Russian origin. He was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistics Circle. Jakobson’s intellectual interests are broad and reflect those of the Prague School as a whole; he has written a great deal, for instance, on the structural approach to literature.
The essence of Jakobson’s approach to phonology is the notion that there is a relatively simple, orderly, universal “psychological system” of sounds underlying the chaotic wealth of different kinds of sound observed by the phonetician.
Speech-sounds may be characterized in terms of distinct and independent or quasi-independent parameters, as we shall call them. Thus the height within the oral cavity of the highest point of the tongue is one articulatory parameter and the position of this point on the front/back scale is another parameter. These two parameters represent choices which are to some extent independent of one another, but not wholly so: the more “open” a vowel is- that is, the more the tongue is depressed into a flat mass in the bottom of the mouth- the less meaningful it is to speak of a particular “highest point” and hence the less difference there is between front and back vowels. Position of the soft palate is a third articulatory parameter, this is more independent of the former parameters than they are of each other: any vowel can be “nasal” or “oral”, though the independence is not absolute- there is a tendency, because of the way in which the workings of the relevant muscles interact, for nasal vowels to be relatively open rather than relative close.
One of the lessons of articulatory phonetics is that human vocal anatomy provides a very large range of different phonetic parameters – far more, probably, than any individual language uses distinctively.
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.
Semantics 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.
Syntax
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.
The third major syntactic approach having a strong iinfluence on applied linguistics is the functional-systemic approach of Halliday. Many applied linguists have received their basic syntactic training in this approach on to their students.
In Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States, the movement to have schoolchildren write from the earliest grades, commonly referred to as the whole language approach, has drawn support for its ideas at least in part from the work of Halliday.
Halliday has argued that children learn language when its use has a meaningful purpose for them.
Morphology
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.
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.
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.
Descriptive grammar definition
Descriptive grammar definition
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.
Generative Linguistics
Chomsky's theories represented, and still represent, both a strong break with American structural linguistics and, a basic continuity with ideas traceable back to de Saussure and beyond.
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.
Growth of American Linguistics
American linguistics has been historically central to the emerge of the discipline generally as synchronic descriptive research on many languages received its greatest academic support and research funding in the United States. The growth of American linguistics began when European anthropoligical linguists arrived in North America to study and record native American languages before many of those languages dissapeared. The leading figure in this migration was Franz Boas, who first came to North America in the 1880's. Boas established American descriptivist linguistics and trained the leading American structural linguists, in particular Sapir and Bloomfield.
Bloomfield wrote a book, also called Language which profoundly changed the course of American linguistics foe the next 30 years. Bloomfield combined insights from anthropological linguistics with the the-pervasive views of behavioral psychology and with philosophical empiricism and positivism, to develop American research from the mid-1930's to the mid 1960's.
About Bloomfield
About Franz Boas
About Bloomfield
About Franz Boas
Applied Linguistics and Linguistics (Historical Background)
Modern Linguistics necessarily begins with the work od Ferdinand de Saussure and his General course on linguistics. The central continuing notion is that language is a closed system of structural relations, meanings and grammatical uses of linguistic elements depend on the sets of oppositions created among all the elements within the system.
De Saussure introduced distinctions such as synchronic (at a single specific time) vs diachronic (historical) analyses of language, and langue vs parole (competence vs performance).
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. Course in general linguistics
Mid -to late- 20th century: generative linguistics and the search for universals.
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.
Comsky points out that anyone who knows a language must have internalized a set of rules which specify the sequences permitted in their language.
A grammar which consists of a set of statements or rules which specify which sequences of language are possible, and which impossible, is a generative grammar, Chomsky initiated the era of generative linguistics.
The particular type of generative grammar favoured by Chomsky is a so-called transformational one.
Chomsky has not only initiated the era of generative grammars. He has also redirected attention towards language universals.
He argues that linguistics should concentrate on finding elements and constructions that are available to all languages, whether or not they actually occur. language universals
Early- to mid- 20th century: Descriptive Linguistics
Linguistics began to concentrate on describing single languages at one particular point in time. If any one person can be held responsible for this change of emphasis was the Swiss scholar who is sometimes labelled "the father of modern linguistics" Ferdinand de Saussure
De Saussure's crucial contribution was his explicit and reiterated statement that all language items are essentially interlinked. This was an aspect of language which had not been stressed before. Nobody had seriously examined the relationship of each element to all the others.
His insistence that language is carefully built structure of interwoven elements initiated the era of structural linguistics.
De Saussure's crucial contribution was his explicit and reiterated statement that all language items are essentially interlinked. This was an aspect of language which had not been stressed before. Nobody had seriously examined the relationship of each element to all the others.
His insistence that language is carefully built structure of interwoven elements initiated the era of structural linguistics.
The study of language
Linguistic Ideas The discipline of linguistics can be linkened to a pathway 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.
1786 is the year which many people regard as the birthdate of linguistics. 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.
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