Free International University of Moldova Faculty of Letters Department of Germanic Languages Zinaida Cameneva syntheses in Linguistics Suport de curs la disciplina "Lingvistica" Chişinău – 2014

Lecture 2. Types of linguistics

Linguistics also looks at the broader context in which language is influenced by social, cultural, historical and political factors. This includes the study of evolutionary linguistics, which investigates into questions related to the origins and growth of languages; historical linguistics, which explores language change; sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at language processing in the brain; language acquisition, on how children or adults acquire language; and discourse analysis, which involves the structure of texts and conversations.

Applied Linguistics is the academic discipline, concerned with the relation of knowledge about language to decision making in the real world, the study of language in general.

Throughout history and across the world people have used language to gossip and chat, flirt and seduce, play games, sing songs, tell stories, teach children, worship gods, insult enemies, pass on information, make deals, remember the past, lament the dead. Language use, then, is in many ways a natural phenomenon beyond conscious control. There are also aspects of language use in which we can intervene and about which there are decisions to be made. Applied Linguistics investigates problems in the world in which language is implicated – both educational and social problems (see the material from Home Reading, pp. 93-105).

Since language is implicated in so much of our daily lives there is clearly a large and open-ended number of activities to which applied linguistics is relevant and which are the scopes of applied linguistics. They are areas identified under three headings:

I. Language and education

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  first-language education
  
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  additional-language education, often divided into second-language education and foreign­language education
  
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  clinical linguistics
  
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  language testing.
  

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  workplace communication
  
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  language planning
  
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  forensic linguistic
  

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  literary stylistics
  
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  Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
  
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  translation and interpretation
  
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  information design (meaning the presentation of written language by such means of communication as pictures, schemes, diagrams, plans)
  
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  lexicography.
  

Like any discipline, linguistics looks for generalities underlying actual appearances and in some degree is bound to represent an abstract idealization of language rather than the way it is experienced in the real world. There are different opposed schools to draw upon.

A particularly influential type of idealization is the one used in the generative linguistics introduced by Noam Chomsky from the late 1950s. In his view, the proper subject matter of linguistics should be the representation of language in the mind (competence), rather than the way in which people actually use language in everyday life (performance). Chomsky’s claim is that this internal language is essentially biological rather than social and is separate from outside experience. It must be investigated not through the study of actual language use in context but rather through the consideration of invented sentences intuitively felt to be acceptable examples of the language. The relationship between this highly abstract model and ordinary experience of language is very remote. The question for applied linguistics is whether such a connection can be made and how.

In sociolinguistics, the focus is very much upon the relation between language and society. Sociolinguistics tries to find systematic relationships between social groupings and contexts, and the variable ways in which languages are used.

In functional linguistics the concern is with language as a means of communication, the purposes it fulfils, and how people actually use their language.

Corpus linguistics is a new trend in the investigation of language use. In this approach, vast databanks containing millions of words of actual language in use can be searched within seconds to yield extensive information about word frequencies and combinations. It deals mainly with compiling various electronic corpora for conducting investigations in different linguistic fields such as phonetics, phonology, grammar, stylistics, graphology, discourse, lexicon and many others.

All these approaches to the linguistic study seem closer to the reality of the experience than Chomsky’s, and therefore, more relevant to the problems of applied linguistics. Their purpose is to describe and explain and not, as it is in applied linguistics, to engage with decision making. What is needed in all cases is constant mediation between two discourses of reality: that of everyday life and language experience, and that represented by abstract analyses of linguistic expertise. The two are different and difficult to reconcile.

Applied linguistics is not a matter of matching findings about language with pre-existing problems but of using findings to explore how the perception of problems might be changed.

The methodology of applied linguistics refers to the findings and theories of linguistics, choosing among the different schools and approaches, and making these theories relevant to the problem in hand. At the same time, it must investigate and take into account the experience and needs of the people involved in the problem itself.

Applied linguistics establishes a reciprocal relationship between experience and expertise, between professional concern with language problems and linguistics.

Comparative Linguistics (as a branch of general linguistics) is an explanatory science. It explains the evident fact that languages change in different degrees. The changes that languages undergo and the different degrees of relationship between languages are accounted for in terms of hypotheses which, like any other scientific hypotheses, are subject to revision as a result of the discovery of new evidence or of the adoption of a new way of looking and systematizing the evidence. Language change is not simply a function of time, but also of social and geographical conditions; and we may admit that languages can, under certain conditions, "converge" as well as "diverge" in the course of time. However, none of these modifications is sufficient to invalidate completely either the methods or the earlier conclusions of comparative linguistics, the principles of the comparative method were elaborated in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The earliest comparative philologists inherited the classical view, that the written language was in some sense prior to the spoken, and continued to describe sound changes in terms of changes in the constituent "letters" of the words. However, it was soon appreciated that any systematic account of language development must give theoretical and practical recognition to the principle that letters (in an alphabetic writing-system) are merely symbols for the sounds in the corresponding spoken language, it is one of the fundamental assumptions of modern linguistics that sound, not writing, is the primary medium of language. Comparative philology gave a powerful impetus to the development of phonetics (which was also influenced by the theories of the Indian grammarians which contributed, in their turn, to the formulation of more general and more satisfactory "sound-laws".

No less important was the gradual development, from the middle of the nineteenth century, of a more correct understanding of the relationship between "language" and "dialects". Intensive study of the history of the classical and modern language of Europe made it quite clear that the various regional "dialects", from being imperfect and distorted versions of the standard literary language (as they were frequently thought to be), had developed more or less independently. They were no less systematic – they had their own regularities of grammatical structure, pronunciation and vocabulary – and they were no less suitable as tools for communication in the contexts in which they were used. It became clear, in fact, that the differences between "languages" and closely-related "dialects" are for the most part political and cultural, rather than linguistic. From a strictly linguistic point of view, what are customarily regarded, as "languages" (standard Latin, English, French, etc.) are merely "dialects" which, by historical "accident", have become politically or culturally important. From this point of view, for example, it was linguistically "accidental" that the "dialect" of Rome and the surrounding area should have spread with the growth of the Roman Empire and become the "language" we call Latin: there is nothing in the structure of Latin itself to account for this development. Of course, the use of a particular "dialect" for literature, administration, philosophy and wide range of other purposes and activities may have the result that this "dialect" will develop a commensurately wide vocabulary, incorporating all the distinctions necessary for it to operate satisfactorily in this way. In general, the standard languages of various countries have originated in the "dialects" spoken by the socially-dominant governing classes in those countries.

A further point that has become clear as a result of the investigation of regional "dialects" (in the branch of linguistics referred to as dialectology, or dialect-geography) is the impossibility of drawing a sharp line of demarcation between "dialects" of the same or neighboring languages. For example, there are dialects spoken on both sides of the Dutch-German border which are equally close to (or equally remote from) both standard Dutch and standard German. Judgments on questions of this kind are only too frequently influenced by political or nationalist prejudice. The assumption that all languages have the same structure is no longer generally accepted by linguists. One reason for its abandonment derives from the demonstration by the nineteenth century comparative philologists that all languages are subject to continuous changes; in particular, that classical Greek and Latin were, from a linguistic point of view merely stages in a process of continuous development, and that much of their grammatical structure could be accounted for in terms of reduction or expression of an earlier system of grammatical distinction.
4. Computational Linguistics

Computational Linguistics is the branch of linguistics in which the techniques of computer science are applied to the analysis and synthesis of language and speech.

Computational Linguistics is the study of computing systems for understanding and generating natural languages. Three classes of applications have been central in the development of this field: machine translation, information retrieval, and human-interfaces. Human-machine interfaces in the context of computational linguistics refer to the use of natural language as a mode of communication between the user and the natural language processing. Also included in this section is language data processing, specifically the production of concordances and word indexes for literary and linguistic research. This has been a simple, but very successful application of the computer in computational linguistics.

More effort requires Machine Translation (MT) than any other area of computational linguistics. Hutchins (1986, p. 15) defines MT as "the application of computers to the translation of texts from one natural language into another". MT, which was one of the first non-numerical applications of the computer, has been motivated by a number of concerns, both theoretical and practical: for instance researchers have looked at MT with a view to studying the "basic mechanisms of language and minds. On the other hand, research has been driven by the need to read documents in foreign languages and to improve communication between workers in various fields who do not share the same language".

Hutchins (1986, p. 324) notes the existence of the pragmatists and the perfectionists in MT: the pragmatists are mainly designers of interactive MT systems that require human-machine collaboration; the perfectionists are those that experiment with artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to MT, approaches that aim to be non-interventionist. According to Hutchins, there is broad agreement in MT on approaches to morphological analysis, dictionary searching routines, and syntactic analysis. It is the area of semantics that remains the greatest difficulty, and problems surface whenever information beyond the sentence being analysed is required. For the present, the pragmatic approach prevails. In a recent article, Melby confirms this position and suggests that the pragmatic approach will remain the predominant one until linguistics manages to advance beyond the domain of morphology and syntax to capture the "essence" of natural research.
5. Cognitive Linguistics

Cognitive Linguistics is the study of language in its cognitive function, where cognitive refers to the crucial role of intermediate informational structures in our encounters with the world. Cognitive Linguistics is cognitive in the same way that cognitive psychology is: by assuming that our interaction with the world is mediated through informational structures in the mind. It focuses on natural language as a means for organizing, processing, and conveying that information. Language is seen as a repository of world knowledge, a structured collection of meaningful categories that help us deal with new experiences and store information about old ones.

Cognitive Linguistics has three fundamental characteristics: 1) the primacy of semantics in linguistic analysis; 2) the encyclopedic nature of linguistic meaning; 3) the perspectival nature of linguistic meaning.

The primacy of semantics in linguistic analysis follows from the cognitive perspective itself: if the primary function of language is categorization, then meaning must be the primary linguistic phenomenon. The encyclopedic nature of the linguistic meaning follows from the categorial function of language. The perspectival nature of linguistic meaning implies that the world is not objectively reflected in the language: the categorization function of the language imposes a structure on the world rather than just mirroring objective reality. Specifically, language is a way of organizing knowledge that reflects the needs, interests, and experiences of individuals and cultures. The experientialist position of Cognitive Linguistics vis-a-vis human knowledge emphasizes the view that human reason is determined by our organic embodiment and by our individual and collective experiences.

The founding fathers of the Cognitive Linguistics are George Lakoff, Ronald W. Langacker and Leonard Talmy. Organizationally, the contacts between the people working in the Cognitive Linguistics framework are facilitated by the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA) and its two journals: Cognitive Linguistics and the Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, first was founded by Dirk Geeraerts in 1990 and the second in 2003 under the auspices of the Spanish branch of the ICLA.