Applied linguistics Essay

Applied linguistics 1 History The term applied linguistics dates back at least to the 1940s in the USA when linguists applied analytical methods to the practical problems of producing grammars and phrasebooks and developing language courses. 2 What Is Applied Linguistics?

Applied linguistics: (1) was interdisciplinary, drawing on psychology, sociology, and pedagogy as well as theoretical linguistics; (2) included a range of fields including lexicography, stylistics, speech pathol ogy, translation, language policy, and planning among others; (3) performed a mediating function between theory and practice.?pplied linguistics must take into consideration the nature of language and the nature of the particular world in which language is used, the beliefs, social institutions, and culture of its users, and how these influence language use. Ideally, the job of an applied linguist is to diagnose a problem in real-world language use, bring the insights of linguistics to bear on the problem, and suggest solutions.

3 Relation of Theory and Practice: the Case of Language Teaching The applied linguist stands at the intersection of theory and practice, but it is not always clear how the applied linguist mediates between the two. This suggests a one-way street in which theory is at the starting point, and the applied linguist directs traffic from theory to practice. Influenced by structuralism in linguistics and by behaviorism in psychology, applied linguists believed that language was a collection of discrete learnable structures, speaking was primary, and learning a language was a matter of correct habit formation.

To inculcate correct habits, teachers drilled students incessantly in correct pronunciation and patterned practice of grammatical structures. Under the influence of the theoretical work of Noam Chomsky, applied linguists saw language learning as a cognitive process of hypothesis testing, in which errors indicated the stage of the language learner’s interlanguage. Instead, knowing a language means knowing how to communicate in the language; it involves acquiring communicative competence. A richer model of the relationship among theory, practice, and applied linguistics sees it as a two-way street in which the applied linguist directs traffic from theory into practice and from practice into theory.

Similarly in applied linguistics, practice provides a testing ground for theory, but it is more than that: real-world language use provides new questions and issues requiring new theories. 4 Recent Range of Inquiry Nevertheless, the central characteristics of applied linguistics remain: (1) focus on contextualized language use; (2) application of theory to practice and vice versa; (3) practical problem-based approach; (4) multidisciplinary perspective. 4. 1 Second language teaching and cross-cultural linguistics 2Accurate description of language use with the ultimate goal of teaching has motivated research in cross-cultural discourse and pragmatics.

Concentration on spoken language, combined with speech act theory among others, has engendered numerous research projects in applied linguistics investigating specific speech acts such as making requests and apologies in different languages and cultures. Applied linguists have examined the development of pragmatic competence in second language learners and the possibilities for teaching pragmatics. 4. 2 Language use in context: contributions of discourse analysis Outside the area of language pedagogy, the burgeoning of discourse analysis has provided a means whereby linguistic insight can be applied to real-world situations.

Other institutional and professional settings, too, have come under scrutiny from applied linguists using theoretical constructs to explain how language is used in real-world settings such as commerce, employment, and public services. A field that has developed considerably in recent years in response to societal concerns is the investigation of language and gender. Recent empirical studies have enriched understanding of the interrelationship of language and gender and demonstrated that generalizations about male and female speech are unreliable when the particular communicative contexts in which the speech occurs have not been examined. Other work has examined gender and language cross-culturally and in specific institutional settings.

4. 3 Language maintenance and endangered languages and dialects The work of applied linguists on endangered or minority languages and dialects brings together field linguistics, anthropology, sociolinguistics and education. For example, a longitudinal study of language use and cultural context draws together sociolinguistic research into language use, research in language socialization, and second language acquisition research into educational discourse. It is not only minority languages that are under threat, but also dialects.

2. Contemporary linguistic approaches: Clinical, forensic, computational linguistics (???? )( 29, 30, 25) We have chosen to focus on four relatively popular areas of inquiry: syntactic parsing; discourse analysis; computational morphology and phonology; corpus-based methods. Parsing and discourse analysis have had the longest continuous history of investigation. Computational morphology and phonology began to grow as a separate discipline in the mid-1980s.

Corpus-based approaches were investigated as early as the 1960s. 1 Parsing (??) Parsing is the act of determining the syntactic structure of a sentence. The goal is to represent who did what to whom in the sentence.

Parsing involves tagging 3the words with an appropriate syntactic category and determining their relationships to each other. Words are grouped into phrase-like constituents, which are arranged into clauses and sentences. Machine translation systems employ parsing to derive representations of the input that are sufficient for transfer from the source to target language at either the syntactic or semantic level. A great deal of attention to the application of syntactic parsing models for language modeling for automatic speech recognition.

2 Discourse Analysis. The area of discourse analysis is concerned with inferring the intended meanings of utterances. In order for the dialogue participants to successfully carry out a dialogue, they must be able to recognize the intentions of the other participant’s utterances, and to produce their responses in such a way that will enable the other participant(s) to recognize their intentions.

A recipe is a generic template for performing a particular action. The recipe library contains a collection of generic recipes, and during discourse understanding, the plan inference module attempts to infer utterance intentions and relationships using information provided by this library. 3 Computational Morphology and Phonology Roughly speaking, the topics can be classified into computational morphology, which treats the analysis of word structure; and computational phonology, which, deals with the changes in sound patterns that take place when words are put together. 4 Corpus-based Methods The word corpus in linguistics is typically a collection of texts.

Corpora have been widely used by linguists to identify and analyze language phenomena, and to verify or refute claims about language. However, a corpus also reveals important quantitative information about the distribution of various language phenomena. 29 Clinical Linguistics Clinical linguistics is the application of the linguistic sciences to the study of language disability. 1 Identifying Linguistic Symptoms Attention has now come to be focused on important symptoms of language disability, and to those aspects of the problem which have been ignored or misdiagnosed.

Less noticeable refers to any feature other than the audible qualities of pronunciation, the order and omission of surface grammatical elements, and the actual items which constitute vocabulary. These features exclude most of the properties of phonological systems, the sense relations between lexical items, the constraints operating on discourse in interaction, and the many ramifications of underlying syntactic structure. All of these play a major part in identifying the various kinds of language disability. The use of a clinical linguistic frame of reference has also enabled people to make progress in identifying disorders of language comprehension.

That requires careful testing and the controlling of variables. Disorders of a pragmatic kind, likewise, 4 have often remained undiagnosed, or have been misdiagnosed as problems of a psychological or social behavioral type. 2 The Role of Clinical Linguistics 2. 2 Description A major area of clinical linguistic research has been to provide ways of describing and analyzing the linguistic behavior of patients, and of the clinicians and others who interact with them. 2. 3 Diagnosis An important aim of clinical linguistics is to provide a classification of patient linguistic behaviors.

This can provide an alternative diagnostic model, and one which is more able to provide insights about intervention in cases where there is no clear evidence of any medical condition. 2. 4 Assessment (??). Clinical linguistics has also been much involved in devising more sophisticated assessments of abnormal linguistic behavior.

A diagnosis tells us what is wrong with a patient; an assessment tells us just how seriously the patient is wrong. 2. 5 Intervention The ultimate goal is to formulate hypotheses for the remediation (???) of abnormal linguistic behavior. Not all aspects of a patient’s problem are directly relevant to the need for linguistically based intervention, clinical linguistics can help clinicians to make an informed judgment about what to teach next, and to monitor the outcome of an intervention hypothesis, as treatment proceeds. To a large extent, moving well beyond the patient’s language, to include an investigation of the language used by the person(s) carrying out the intervention, the kind of teaching materials used, and the setting in which the interaction takes place.

3 Linguistic Insights The chief aim of clinical linguistics is to provide the clinician with increasing levels of insight and confidence in arriving at linguistic decisions. The three pillars of any clinical linguistic approach: description grading intervention. All change needs to be regularly monitored, to demonstrate that progress is being made this is the task of assessment. The keeping of comprehensive linguistic records is a further priority, without which the efficacy of intervention can never be demonstrated.

Forensic Linguistics Now linguists also have begun examining voice identification, authorship of written documents, unclear jury instructions, the asymmetry of power in courtroom exchanges, lawyerclient communication breakdown, the nature of perjury, problems in written legal discourse, defamation, trademark infringement, courtroom interpretation and translation difficulties, the adequacy of warning labels, and the nature of tape recorded conversation used as evidence. 1 Trademark Infringement Typically, they respond to requests of attorneys to help them with their law cases.

2 Product Liability 5But the linguist, calling on knowledge of discourse analysis, semantics, and pragmatics, can determine the extent to which the message was clear and unambiguous and point out the possible meanings that the message presents. Once this is done, it is up to the attorney to determine whether or not to ask the linguist to testify at trial. 3 Speaker Identification Linguists have been used by attorneys in matters of voice identification.

If the tapes are of sufficient quality, spectographic analysis is possible. If not, the linguist may rely on training and skills in phonetics to make the comparison. 4 Authorship of Written Documents Law enforcement agencies process provide a psychological profile of the person.

Calling on knowledge of language indicators of such things as regional and social dialect, age, gender, education, and occupation, linguists analyze documents for broad clues to the identity of the writer. Stylistic analysis centers on a writer’s habitual language features over which the writer has little or no conscious awareness. 5 Criminal Cases Suspects are recorded with court authorized wire taps placed that non-e of the speakers is aware of being taped, or by using body microphones and engage suspects in conversation. If the law enforcement agency is concerned about the adequacy of the language evidence that they have gathered, they may call on a linguist to make transcripts of the conversations, analyze them.

The tape recorded conversation itself points to the use of the other tools of the forensic linguist, including syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, dialectology, and discourse analysis. 3. Discourse analysis (17) Discourse analysis is concerned with the contexts in and the processes through which we use oral and written language to specific audiences, for specific purposes, in specific settings. 1 What Is Discourse? A Preliminary Characterization The big D concerns general ways of viewing the world and general ways of behaving, the small d concerns actual, specific language use. Discourse analysis emphasizes that language is not merely a self-contained system of symbols but a mode of doing, being, and becoming.

Discourse research can be divided into 2 major types of inquiries: (1) why some but not other linguistic forms are used on given occasions and (2) what are the linguistic resources for accomplishing various social, affective, and cognitive actions and interactions. 2 Communicative Motivations for the Selection of Linguistic Forms Language is inseparable from other aspects of our life and that the selection of linguistic forms should be explained in terms of authentic human communicative needs (i. e. , social, interactional, cognitive, affective needs). 2. 1 Context 6One of the first questions is what is happening in this stretch of talk, who the participants are, where they are, and why they are there.

Linguistic choices are systematically motivated by contextual factors. Context is a complex of 3 dimensions: First, the field of social action in which the discourse is embedded. Second, the set of role relations among the participants.

And third, the role of language in the interaction. In this view, language is a system of choices made on the basis of a contextual configuration which accounts for field, tenor, and mode. 2. 3 Speech act What kind of speech act utterance is and whether this act is accomplished through direct or indirect means. Speech act theory says that language is used not only to describe things but to do things as well. Further, utterances act on 3 different levels: the literal level (locutionary act), the implied level (illocutionary act), and the consequence of the implied act (perlocutionary act).

2. 4 Scripts / plans Script is to describe the knowledge that we have of the structure of stereotypical event sequences. If such knowledge can be described in a formal way, then we may have a theory of how humans process natural language. 2. 5 Referentiality How entities (?) are referred to in utterances. Some analysts are interested in how referential forms make a stretch of discourse cohesive in form and coherent in meaning.

2. 6 Topicality and thematicity What is an utterance about, what is the starting point of a message, what is the focus of a message. Topic the part of the utterance about which something is said. Prague School linguists developed the functional sentence perspective which says that word order has to do with how informative each element in the utterance is communicative dynamism, or CD. A sentence begins with elements with the lowest CD and ends with those with the highest CD.

Theme is the part of the utterance with the lowest degree of CD. 2. 7 Sequential organization The sequential context of the utterance. Discourse analysts have sought to explain linguistic choices in terms of ethnographic contexts, knowledge structure, rhetorical organization, communicative intentions, textual organization, information management and sequential organization, among others. Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, and More Discourse analysts research various aspects of language not as an end in itself, but as a means to explore ways in which language forms are shaped by and shape the contexts of their use.

Further, discourse analysis draws upon not only linguistics, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences concerned with human communication. Discourse analysis promotes a view of language which says that 7 Resource Center Saved Recents Uploads My Answers Account Products Home Essays Drive Answers Texty About Company Legal Site Map Contact Us Advertise 2016 StudyMode. com HOME >ESSAYS >LINGUISTICS >LINGUISTICS Linguistics Utilized linguistics, Talk analysis, Language By maor87 Apr 18, 2015 6489Words 150Views More information PDF Watch Text View PAGE8 OF 18 terminology use is not simply reflective of other facets of our lives but is also disposition of them.

Since it draws information from different disciplines, in addition, it contributes to interfacing linguistics with other domains of inquiries, in a way that we might right now investigate the construction of culture through dialogue or software computers to build interactive text messages based on each of our understanding of the rules and concepts of individual interaction. That focusses in language since it is used by real persons with true intentions, feelings. 4. Linguistics and pragmatics (16) The Puzzle of Language Make use of: How Do We Ever Understand One another? Pragmatics may be the study of communication the study of how language is employed.

This research is based on the assumption of the division between knowledge of language and the method it is used; and the aim of pragmatics is providing a set of principles which in turn dictate just how knowledge of terminology and basic reasoning socialize in the process of language understanding, to give surge to different sorts of effects which is often achieved in communication. Pragmatics as the use of Conversational Guidelines to Sentence in your essay Meanings The starting point to get studies in pragmatics may be the mismatch between what phrases mean, and what audio speakers mean by making use of them. You have the knowledge of language, which requires the symbolism of words and the ways in which they can incorporate. This is called the encoded meaning.

However, there are pragmatic principles which will enable a hearer to ascertain some diverse interpretation the nonencoded part of that means. Moreover, provided the full assortment of rhetorical effects such as metaphor, irony, etc ., all of which are uses of expressions in context in certain sense, the proposed strategy maintains a all-natural separation among literal uses of words and phrases, which are reflected in sentence-meanings, and the various nonliteral uses to which they may be put.

Understanding of language: sentence-meanings as part specifications of interpretation The condition for this clean view is that we make use of commonsense thinking, whatever this consists in, not merely in working out how come a loudspeaker has said anything, but likewise in establishing what this wounderful woman has said in using the words and phrases chosen. The overall picture of interpretation is that grammar-internal concepts articulate both syntactic and semantic structure for phrases, a semantic structure for any sentence for being an incomplete specs of how it really is understood.

Practical theory talks about how these kinds of incomplete specs are enriched in context to yield the full communicative effect of a great uttered sentence in your essay, whether metaphorical, ironical, etc. The Process of Reasoning: How Do Hearers ever Manage to Choose the Right Model? Grice’s supportive principle and the conversational maxims According to Grice who was the pioneer of the inferential approach to discussion, there is a general assumption maintaining all utterance interpretation that the interpretation of utterances can be described as collaborative enterprise.

This 8collaborative enterprise can be structured by a number of maxims, which audio system are presumed to follow: The maxim of quality: usually do not say that for which you lack data; do not say what you consider to be fake. The maxim of relevance: always be relevant. The saying of variety: make your contribution as educational as is needed, but not much more.

The maxim of manner: always be perspicuous (avoid obscurity, steer clear of ambiguity, end up being brief, always be orderly). Grice articulated the maxims as a means of streamline the overall accounts of the relation between the utilization of language in logical arguments and the conversational use of dialect. Relevance theory This theory claims to characterize practical phenomena in terms of a single cognitive concept, regarding relevance, changing the social underpinnings of Grice’s cooperative principle.

The principle of relevance Optimum relevance gets the right harmony between size and sort of context and amount details derived. The greater information a lot of stimulus produces, the more relevant it is said for being, but the more effort the interpretation of the stimulus requires, the much less relevant it can become. Also to be minimally relevant a stimulus must lead to by least one particular nontrivial inference being made.

However meaning of an take action of communication involves two agents the speaker as well as the hearer. The constraint of balancing cognitive effect with cognitive efforts will also apply at what the hearer does, nevertheless here the task of interpretation is more particular because the hearer has to try to recover the particular speaker designed to convey. You will find two aspects to the job: 1 Solving the information connected with an uttered expression we. e. exercising what terms have been stated and the data that they simply by definition take.

2 Making choices which enrich that encoded information to establish what the speaker experienced intended to express using those words. Relevance and presentation acts On the speech take action view of language, language can best be recognized in terms of acts such as these which in turn speakers perform in applying language. The observation simply by speech work theorists there is more to language than just describing points is quite uncontentious. non-etheless, in relevance theory, where the sort of implications that can be drawn is quite unrestricted, to become alarmed of any kind of special under the radar categories to get such different varieties of act. your five.

Linguistic typology and its directions (14) 1 The Selection of Human being Languages The field of linguistic typology explores the diversity of human dialect in an effort to understand that. The basic basic principle behind typology is that one must look at as wide a range of languages as it can be in order to knowledge both the diversity of 9language and to discover its limits. Typology works on the fundamentally empirical, comparative, and inductive approach in the examine of dialect. That is, typologists examine grammatical data from a wide variety of dialects, and infer generalizations about language from that data.

The basic discovery of typology is the fact there are restrictions to linguistic diversity. By comparing varied languages and discovering widespread grammatical habits, one can attempt to disentangle what is universal regarding the grammars languages from what is distinct to each specific language. a couple of The Nature of Language Universals: Expression Order One of the first areas of sentence structure where it had been recognized there are limits to grammatical diversity was the purchase of words. Word buy is probably the many immediately prominent difference in grammatical patterns from one dialect to the next.

Initial, one need to examine a sample of ‘languages’ in order to infer the range of grammatical diversity and its limits. A variety test collects since broad a variety of ‘languages’ as possible from different geographical areas and different genetic groupings. It is purpose is always to ensure that all possible dialect types happen to be identified. Second, one should be able to recognize phenomena in one language to another as similar. The basic difficulty here is the superb variety of grammatical structures employed in the world’s languages.

The perfect solution to this issue is due to one other insight of structuralism: the basic unit with the language is definitely the sign, a form that conventionally expresses or perhaps encodes a meaning. The foundation for cross-linguistic comparison is a particular linguistic meaning; when that is discovered, we may analyze the different set ups used to encode that which means. Third, we should identify a number of grammatical patterns or perhaps types accustomed to express the linguistic which means being reviewed, and sort languages in accordance to what type(s) is as well as are used in them.

For example, in conveying word purchase of the sentence in your essay, the relative position of subject (S), object (O), and verb (V) are accustomed to classify vocabulary types. Vocabulary structure is dependent upon factors of language employ, such as digesting. Language framework is also dependant on historical interactions among grammatical patterns, which themselves are as a result of similarity in meaning.

Nevertheless , these elements do not distinctively determine a language structure, but compete with one another. Speech residential areas resolve the competing motives in irrelavent, language-particular ways; this leads to the diversity of languages seen in the world. three or more Language Universals and the Formal Encoding of Meaning Term order universals appear to be encouraged in terms of control of linguistic structure in the act of producing and knowing language. Term order is actually a fundamental grammatical property of sentences. three or more.

1 Typological markedness and morphological representation 10Some with the earliest operate typology examined the coding of grammatical and lexical principles in inflected word varieties. The universals go under the name of (typological) markedness. Typological markedness represents an asymmetric pattern of the phrase of that means in grammatical categories throughout languages. Typological markedness provides two central characteristics. First, typological markedness is a home of conceptual categories e. g. singular and plural or more precisely, how individuals conceptual categories are stated in different languages.

For number, the unique is unmarked and the dual is noticeable. Second, unmarked status will not imply that the unmarked affiliate is always kept unexpressed plus the marked affiliate is always expressed by a great overt morpheme. The occurrence / lack of an overt inflection development a conceptual category is merely one symptom of markedness, namely structural code. Typological markedness is found in one more aspect of the coding of concepts in words and constructions. The majority of words in sentences communicate more than one conceptual category.

Pronouns in English, for instance, may express gender as well as quantity. In British, neither the singular nor plural pronouns express number by a distinct inflection; rather number is definitely implicitly stated by distinctive forms just like he and they. The grammatical coding of more, cross-cutting, variations in the novel but not in the plural can be an example of the second symptom of markedness, called behavioral potential. Behavioral potential is also represented simply by an implicational universal: In case the marked member of a category grammatically expresses a crosscutting distinction, thus does the unmarked member. Another property of typological markedness points to the underlying explanation.

The unmarked member is somewhat more frequent than the marked affiliate in vocabulary use. Ideas that take place more frequently in language make use of (e. g. singular) is going to tend to always be expressed by simply fewer morphemes than less frequently developing concepts (e. g. plural). This description for how meaning is encoded in grammatical form is a control explanation, named economy or perhaps economic inspiration.

3. a couple of Hierarchies and conceptual spaces We can illustrate the cross-linguistic distribution of plural markings across classes of pronouns and nouns with the animacy hierarchy. The hierarchy is a succinct way to capture a series of implicational universals: if any school of terms has a plural, then every one of the classes left (or higher) on the pecking order have a plural. These patterns are identified over a conceptual space.

The conceptual space describes a network of relationships between conceptual categories which can be found in the human being mind and which constrains how conceptual categories happen to be expressed in grammar. Grammatical change must follow the links in conceptual space. For instance, a plural observing spreads from left to right inside the animacy space. Conceptual spaces specify what grammatical category groupings are normally found in, and how constructions pass on (or retreat) over time in their application to grammatical groups. If we review absence versus presence of case marking on adjective for the grammatical 11 relationships hierarchy, we discover that absence of case marking occurs for he higher end of the structure, and existence thereof a bit lower on the structure.

The grammatical relations hierarchy also identifies the distribution of verb agreement around languages. Action-word agreement can be associated with the higher end of the grammatical relations structure a chance to trigger verb agreement shows the greater behavioral potential from the grammatical relationship. These details demonstrate that the two grammatical relations hierarchies in fact echo a more deeply cross-linguistic universal pattern, present in many different regions of the sentence structure of different languages. 3. 3 Economy and iconicity Financial motivation: the more frequently used category is more likely to get reduced in expression or left unexpressed.

Iconic determination the structure of language displays the structure of concepts. In the example, each conceptual category, both equally singular and plural, happen to be overtly encoded in the word form. A subtype of iconicity referred to as isomorphism: the correspondence among forms and meanings.

There are two ways in which isomorphism result from human dialects. The 1st way is in the correspondence of forms and meanings inside the combination of terms and inflections in a sentence in your essay. This is referred to as syntagmatic isomorphism. Economic and iconic motivation compete to generate the range of attested and unattested correspondences between contact form and which means.

There are several predicted habits. Overt phrase is iconically motivated: there is a one-to-one messages between connotations and varieties. However , it is just moderately monetarily motivated: it truly is more economical than expressing a meaning exceeding one expression or morpheme, but fewer economical than not conveying the meaning by any means. Non-expression of a particular meaning, such as the singular of English nouns just like car-O (vs. plural book-s), is monetarily motivated: zero expression fails one-to-one messages between forms and connotations.

The third conceivable option, zero marking of both unique and dual, corresponds to the absence of phrase of the category. This option is economically encouraged: either this is can be inferred from circumstance, or it is not really relevant to the communication. There is another financially motivated routine of articulating meaning in form: the combination or perhaps fusion of discrete symbolism in a single contact form. For example , the suffix -s in The english language run-s indicates 3rd person subject, singular subject and present tense, done up a single suffix. In other ‘languages’, inflectional types are found in separate adjonction, as in Turkish.

The second sort of isomorphism is a correspondence between form and meaning inside the inventory of words stored in the mind; paradigmatic isomorphism. 12The possible ways of expression of meanings in words will be limited by economic system and iconicity. Unmotivated likelihood: the existence of multiple word while using same that means, synonymy.

It is far from iconically motivated. A one-to-one match between a word and a meaning is called monosemy. It isiconic ally motivated but not that economically enthusiastic: we would want very many terms to express every single discrete which means. Homonymy is definitely economically encouraged, but it can be not iconically motivated (many unrelated meanings are indicated by a single form).

The most common situation in languages, however , can be polysemy: the grouping of related connotations under a sole form. Polysemy is financially motivated as it subsumes several meanings under a single kind, as with homonymy. It is iconically motivated, for the reason that meanings happen to be related.

5 The Dynamic Approach to Language Universals The most typical word.