Linguistics

The rapid growth of the field on applied linguistics over the last twenty years has led to a general observation that applied linguistics must be viewed as an interdisciplinary field; indeed, it is probably impossible to do applied linguistics without incorporating expertise from some related discipline, be it anthropology, psycology, education, sociology, psychometrics, or some other field. The role of linguistics itself in applied linguistics has, however, at times been underestimated. It makes little sense to maintain such a designation as applied linguistics without recognizing the centrality of the core discipline. The fact that such a reltion has come into question at all suggests the sometimes less-than-ideal interaction between the divisions of the fields and reserch theories within linguistics and the sometimes-strident debates accompanying the competition.

What is Pragmatics?

A subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, pragmatics studies how people comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a concrete speech situation which is usually a conversation (hence *conversation analysis). It distinguishes two intents or meanings in each utterance or communicative act of verbal communication. One is the informative intent or the sentence meaning, and the other the communicative intent or speaker meaning (Leech, 1983; Sperber and Wilson, 1986). The ability to comprehend and produce a communicative act is referred to as pragmatic competence (Kasper, 1997) which often includes one's knowledge about the social distance, social status between the speakers involved, the cultural knowledge such as politeness, and the linguistic knowledge explicit and implicit.
Focus and content
Some of the aspects of language studied in pragmatics include:
--Deixis: meaning 'pointing to' something. In verbal communication however, deixis in its narrow sense refers to the contextual meaning of pronouns, and in its broad sense, what the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given speech context.
--Presupposition: referring to the logical meaning of a sentence or meanings logically associated with or entailed by a sentence.
--Performative: implying that by each utterance a speaker not only says something but also does certain things: giving information, stating a fact or hinting an attitude. The study of performatives led to the hypothesis of Speech Act Theory that holds that a speech event embodies three acts: a locutionary act, an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary act (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969).
--Implicature: referring to an indirect or implicit meaning of an utterance derived from context that is not present from its conventional use.
Pragmaticians are also keen on exploring why interlocutors can successfully converse with one another in a conversation. A basic idea is that interlocutors obey certain principles in their participation so as to sustain the conversation. One such principle is the Cooperative Principle which assumes that interactants cooperate in the conversation by contributing to the ongoing speech event (Grice, 1975). Another assumption is the Politeness Principle (Leech, 1983) that maintains interlocutors behave politely to one another, since people respect each other's face (Brown & Levinson 1978). A cognitive explanation to social interactive speech events was provided by Sperber and Wilson (1986) who hold that in verbal communication people try to be relevant to what they intend to say and to whom an utterance is intended.
The pragmatic principles people abide by in one language are often different in another. Thus there has been a growing interest in how people in different languages observe a certain pragmatic principle. Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies reported what is considered polite in one language is sometimes not polite in another. Contrastive pragmatics, however, is not confined to the study of a certain pragmatic principles. Cultural breakdowns, pragmatic failure, among other things, are also components of cross-cultural pragmatics.
Another focus of research in pragmatics is learner language or *interlanguage. This interest eventually evolved into interlanguage pragmatics, a branch of pragmatics which specifically discusses how non-native speakers comprehend and produce a speech act in a target language and how their pragmatic competence develops over time (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993; Kasper, 1995). To date, a handful of cross-sectional, longitudinal and theoretical studies on classroom basis have been conducted and the potentials along the interface of pragmatics with SLA research have been widely felt. Topics of immediate interest to which language teachers at large may contribute seem just numerous. What are some of the pragmatic universals underlying L2 acquisition? What influences L1 exerts on the learner's L2 acquisition? How shall we measure the learner's pragmatic performance with a native pragmatic norm? These are but a few of the interesting ones and for more discussions see Kasper & Schmidt (1996), Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford (1996), Takahashi (1996), House (1996) and Cohen (1996).
History
Although pragmatics is a relatively new branch of linguistics, research on it can be dated back to ancient Greece and Rome where the term pragmaticus’ is found in late Latin and pragmaticos’ in Greek, both meaning of being practical’. Modern use and current practice of pragmatics is credited to the influence of the American philosophical doctrine of pragmatism. The pragmatic interpretation of semiotics and verbal communication studies in Foundations of the Theory of Signs by Charles Morris (1938), for instance, helped neatly expound the differences of mainstream enterprises in semiotics and linguistics. For Morris, pragmatics studies the relations of signs to interpreters’, while semantics studies the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable’, and syntactics studies the formal relations of signs to one another.’ By elaborating the sense of pragmatism in his concern of conversational meanings, Grice (1975) enlightened modern treatment of meaning by distinguishing two kinds of meaning, natural and non-natural. Grice suggested that pragmatics should centre on the more practical dimension of meaning, namely the conversational meaning which was later formulated in a variety of ways (Levinson, 1983; Leech, 1983).
Practical concerns also helped shift pragmaticians' focus to explaining naturally occurring conversations which resulted in hallmark discoveries of the Cooperative Principle by Grice (1975) and the Politeness Principle by Leech (1983). Subsequently, Green (1989) explicitly defined pragmatics as natural language understanding. This was echoed by Blakemore (1990) in her Understanding Utterances: The Pragmatics of Natural Language and Grundy (1995) in his Doing Pragmatics. The impact of pragmatism has led to crosslinguistic international studies of language use which resulted in, among other things, Sperber and Wilson's (1986) relevance theory which convincingly explains how people comprehend and utter a communicative act.
The Anglo-American tradition of pragmatic study has been tremendously expanded and enriched with the involvement of researchers mainly from the Continental countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Belgium. A symbol of this development was the establishment of the IPrA (the International Pragmatic Association) in Antwerp in 1987. In its Working Document, IPrA proposed to consider pragmatics as a theory of linguistic adaptation and look into language use from all dimensions (Verschueren, 1987). Henceforward, pragmatics has been conceptualized as to incorporate micro and macro components (Mey, 1993).
Throughout its development, pragmatics has been steered by the philosophical practice of pragmatism and evolving to maintain its independence as a linguistic subfield by keeping to its tract of being practical in treating the everyday concerned meaning.
Criticisms
A traditional criticism has been that pragmatics does not have a clear-cut focus, and in early studies there was a tendency to assort those topics without a clear status in linguistics to pragmatics.  Thus pragmatics was associated with the metaphor of  'a garbage can' (Leech, 1983). Other complaints were that, unlike grammar which resorts to rules, the vague and fuzzy principles in pragmatics are not adequate in telling people what to choose in face of a range of possible meanings for one single utterance in context. An extreme criticism represented by Marshal (see Shi Cun, 1989) was that pragmatics is not eligible as an independent field of learning since meaning is already dealt with in semantics.
However, there is a consensus view that pragmatics as a separate study is more than necessary because it handles those meanings that semantics overlooks (Leech, 1983). This view has been reflected both in practice at large and in Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics by Thomas (1995). Thus in spite of the criticisms, the impact of pragmatics has been colossal and multifaceted. The study of speech acts, for instance, provided illuminating explanation into sociolinguistic conduct. The findings of the cooperative principle and politeness principle also provided insights into person-to-person interactions. The choice of different linguistic means for a communicative act and the various interpretations for the same speech act elucidate human mentality in the relevance principle which contributes to the study of communication in particular and cognition in general. Implications of pragmatic studies are also evident in language teaching practices. Deixis, for instance, is important in the teaching of reading. Speech acts are often helpful for improving translation and writing. Pragmatic principles are also finding their way into the study of literary works as well as language teaching classrooms.
(See also: communicative competence, sociolinguistics as a source of discipline, psycholinguistics as a source of discipline, competence and performance, discourse analysis, interlanguage, negotiation of meaning, sociolinguistic/sociocultural  competence, procedural/declarative knowledge)

Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield, 1887-1949. Leonard Bloomfield was born in Chicago to immigrants to the United States from Austria-Hungary. He entered Harvard in 1903, finishing his degree in 3 years. At 19, with his Harvard A.B. in hand, he began graduate work in German studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he served as a teaching assistant. Here he met the linguist Eduard Prokosch, then a young instructor, and almost immediately determined to become a linguist. After two years of work at Wisconsin, he went to the University of Chicago to continue his studies in comparative-historical linguistics and Germanics. He also studied Sanskrit; his uncle was Maurice Bloomfield, a well-known professor of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics, from whom he possibly derived some of his interest.

After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1909 at the age of 22, Bloomfield taught German at the University of Cincinnati and then the University of Illinois. In 1913 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Comparative Philology and German at the University of Illinois, and taught there until 1921. At that point he accepted a professorship at Ohio State, where he taught until 1927. In the summer of 1925, he became an Assistant Ethnologist in the Canadian Department of Mines in Ottawa, a position that allowed him to carry out fieldwork on native American languages. In 1927 he took a prestigious position as Professor of Germanic Philology at the University of Chicago. In summers 1938-40 he taught budding linguists at the Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Institute at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1940 he accepted an endowed Sterling Professorship of Linguistics at Yale University, where he remained until his death in 1949.

In 1914, while a young instructor in Urbana-Champaign, Bloomfield published An Introduction to the Study of Language, a scholarly yet popular book that went through many reprints. This book laid out his basic ideas about the nature of language, following on basic Boasian lines, which were becoming characteristic of Linguistics in the U.S.: a focus on spoken language as primary, written language as secondary; observation of language as a present-day reality to speakers, rather than from an external, historical point of view; and an interest in the variety of linguistic systems in the world and in drawing generalizations about human language in the process of observing them. In addition he included two chapters on language change, illustrated with examples from many languages. The book ended with a chapter on the relation of Linguistics to other sciences, a topic that would increasingly concern him.

His next major publication was Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis in 1917, which showed how much he was extending his interests beyond the traditional Indo-European orbit. In 1922 he reviewed Sapir's book Languageapprovingly, finding it to be in accord with the theoretical principles of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose posthumous book he referred to in the review (and finally reviewed himself a few years later). It is clear that Bloomfield saw a new kind of Linguistics emerging, distinct from the comparative-historical tradition in which he was trained; a Linguistics which had a strong empirical focus, particularly on hitherto undescribed languages. We think of this field now as the field of modern descriptive Linguistics, which would come into its heyday under Bloomfield and his disciples. b

Bloomfield worked to develop the new field in various ways. He was instrumental in the founding of the Linguistic Society of America, writing the "Call for the Organization Meeting" for the organizing committee which called the LSA into being, which was published in revised form as "Why a Linguistic Society?" in the first issue of the LSA's new journal, Language (Bloomfield 1925). Second, he began systematizing axioms or postulates for Linguistics as a science, publishing "A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language" (in Language 2, 153-164, 1926). In this work he sought to place Linguistics on a scientific footing as firm as those of the natural sciences.

In his years at Ohio State in particular, Bloomfield came more and more under the influence of logical positivism and of its allied psychological movement, behaviorism, both directly in the main current of 20th century materialism. In the process, he cast off the earlier influence of the 19th century pioneer of psychology Wilhelm Wundt which was prominent in his 1914 book, because of its incompatibility with the new paradigm. In the early 1930s he decided to completely revamp his book and to incorporate behaviorist ideas centrally into it, particularly in the chapters on language use and meaning. The result, appearing in 1933 under the simplified title Language, became a classic in its own right and was used for a generation as a textbook in Linguistics.

Bloomfield was deeply concerned with the advancement of Linguistics as a science. He further developed in his fieldwork the methodologies of linguistic data collection and analysis pioneered by Boas. He used each of the language families he studied as a source of material for the development of linguistic theory, taking it in a rather different direction from Sapir, who assumed the possibility of analyzing semantics and conceptual structure generally. It was Bloomfield who took the new generation of linguists with him, becoming in effect the leader of the field.

In the course of his career, Bloomfield made important empirical contributions to three major subfields of Linguistics: Indo-European comparative-historical linguistics (including work on Sanskrit as well as Germanic); the study of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, principally Tagalog; and descriptive and comparative Algonquian linguistics. His monumental body of work on Algonquian languages forms the largest portion of the descriptive work that he produced, and is considered the starting point for any modern work on the Algonquian language family.

But Bloomfield's most significant influence in the field came from his ideas on the theory of Linguistics, which were carried on in basic respects by a new generation of American structuralists in the 1950s.

Functions of Language

http://esl.about.com/b/2007/03/14/language-functions.htm

Noam Chomsky and Generative Grammar

Avram Noam Chomsky (1928- ) and his followers have transformed linguistics. Indeed, despite many difficulties and large claims later retracted, the school of deep or generative grammar still holds centre stage. Chomsky came to prominence in a 1972 criticism of the behavourist's B.F. Skinner's book Verbal Behaviour. Linguistic output was not simply related to input. Far from it, and a science which ignored what the brain did to create its novel outputs was no science at all. Chomsky was concerned to explain two striking features of language — the speed with which children acquire a language, and its astonishing fecundity, our ability to create a endless supply of grammatically correct sentences without apparently knowing the rules. How was that possible? Only by having a) an underlying syntax and b) rules to convert syntax to what we speak. The syntax was universal and simple. A great diversity of sentences can be constructed with six symbols. Take a cats sits on the mat. Older readers will remember their parsing exercises at school: indefinite article, noun, verb, preposition, definite article, noun. Chomsky uses a similar approach but his "parsing" applies to all languages. But how we convert tothe mat was sat on by a cat? The answer, argued Chomsky, were innate transformation rules by which a fundamental deep structure is converted to the surface sentence. Matters are not usually so straightforward, of course, and the rules can be very complex indeed, but Chomsky and his coworkers have now provided them.

If many languages are now classified along Chomsky lines, why hasn't the approach entirely swept the board, bringing all linguists into the fold of orthodoxy? First there are procedural problems. The American behaviourists, and more so the London school, had a very thorough training in gathering field evidence. Speech was what native speakers actually spoke, not what the anthropologist thought they might accept as correct usage. The Chomskians use introspection (i.e. the linguists themselves decide whether a sentence is good grammar), an approach which can allow "facts" to be fitted to theory and which has somewhat restricted application to the European languages that Chomskians regard themselves as familiar with. Then there is the matter of laboratory testing. Surface sentences that are generated by the more convoluted transformation rules should take speakers longer to produce. The evidence is somewhat contradictory.

But more important than these are the theoretical issues. What are these deep structures and transformation rules — i.e. are they something "hardwired" into the brain or simply a propensity to perform in ways we can view along Chomskian lines? Chomsky is undecided. And, if the structures are real, is this the philosopher's goal: we can base semantics on deep grammar? Some have done so, though Chomsky himself has now abandoned these hopes. Chomsky is not a Structuralist, and there is more to understanding than the ability to recast sentences — an appreciation of the world outside, for example, which we perceive and judge on past experience.

Functional Linguistics: The Prague School

As early as 1911 in Czechoslovakia, and independently of Saussure and Jakobson, Vilém Mathesius (1882- 1945) founded a non-historical approach to linguistics. The Prague School looked at the structural components as they contributed to the entire language. There was a need for a standard language once Czechoslovakia had acquired independence, and Czech had the curiosity of being very different in its colloquial and literary forms. Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) investigated paradigmatic relations between phonemes and classified functions on the purposes they served — keeping words apart, signalling stress, etc.

Like the Russian Formalists, members of the Prague School were keenly concerned with literature, but they were not hermetic in their approach — i.e. did not see literature as a self-enclosed, stand-alone entity, but something reflecting social and cultural usage. That was also a view developed by the American anthropologist William Labor in investigating the colloquial language of New York. He found that listeners to tape recordings could very accurately place speakers by geography and social stratum. As both reflected social movement in the recent past — i.e. history: this was one rare exception to Saussure's assertion that language speakers do not take past usage into consideration.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

One exception was an hypothesis of Edward Sapir (1884-1934) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941). Man's language, they argued, moulds his perception of reality. The Hopi Indians of Arizona plurialize clouds as though they were animate objects, do not use spatial metaphors for time, and have no past tense as such. Do they not view the world in these terms? And there were more spectacular examples. The Bororó of northern Brazil believe they are red parakeets — evidence, said anthropologists, that primitive societies were not aware of logical contradictions. Modern Europeans have words for the seven basic colours of the rainbow, whereas other societies have from two to eleven.

The matter is still debated.The Hopi Indians do not seem to be poor timekeepers, and the Romance languages have a feminine gender for objects not seen as animate: la cerveza for beer, etc. Parakeets is no doubt used methaphorically by the Bororó. Even the evidence of colours, subject of a massive study by Berlin and Kay,seems now not so clear-cut, since language may reflect purpose more than perception. Lakoff, however, (see below) has indeed resurrected Whorf's hypothesis through the concept of commensurability, adducing some striking if limited experimental evidence. Understanding, our ability to translate between diverse languages, is not the only factor. Equally important are use, framing and organization, and behaviour here can be governed by different conceptual systems. Languages widely employ spatial conceptions, for example, and these conceptions differ between cultures.

The Structuralists and the Descriptionists

Structuralists

Saussure's ideas spread first to Russia, being brought there and developed by Ramon Jacobson (1896-1982). Strictly speaking, the product was not Stucturalism, which dates from Jakobson's acquaintance with Lévi-Strauss in the 1960's, but formalism: study of the devices by which literary language makes itself distinctive. Poetry was the great love of the Russian formalists (who knew personally the revolutionary poets) and they looked intensively and dispassionately at the structures and devices that literature employs, whether Pushkin or seemingly artless fairy stories. But as Marxist ideology tightened its grip, the member of the Russian school, never a very tightly knit group, either recanted or fled abroad. Jakobson went to Czechoslovakia and then to the USA, but took with him the very speculative nature of Russian formalism: brilliant theories, but poor documentation and few laboratory studies.

Jakobson made little impact in Prague, which had its own traditions, but in America was able to draw on and develop the ideas of structural anthropology: that the behaviour of societies is governed by deep, scarcely visible rules and understandings. As such, Jakobson's views merged with those of continental philosophy and sociology — with Althusser's reinterpretation of Marx, that language was ideology, a hidden reality, an alternative source of state power. Also with Barthe's attempt to explain the multiplicity of French society from a few underlying suppositions. And with Foucault's genealogy. Meanwhile, Emile Benaviste had rewritten Saussure (as most Structuralists and Post-structuralists were to do) to conceive the signified as not inside individual minds but part of any ever-present social reality. Gradually it is not the individual, nor the society, but language itself that becomes the defining reality: a view that leads on to Posmodernism.

Jakobson had some novel ideas of his own. There was, he proposed, a relatively simple, orderly and universal psychological system underlying the three to eight thousand odd languages in the world. Despite the many ways phonemes (basic units of sound) are produced by human mouths, all could be represented in binary structures (open-closed, back-front, etc.) governed by 12 levels of precedence. Binary structures are written into Lévi-Strauss's views, and these notions fitted with information theory and sound spectrography. But languages in fact use a good deal more than two of any"mouth settings", phonemes do not have an independent existence, and 12 levels will not serve. Chomsky and Halle (1968) proposed 43 such rules, often complex, before abandoning the approach. Jakobson also defined poetic language as the projection onto the horizon syntagmatic axis (how words fit together in a sentence) of the vertical paradigmatic (how word are associated and can replace each other), another audacious theory that proved largely vacuous. 

Descriptionists

The besetting sin of Structuralism (as of current literary theory) is its want of evidence: theories are dreamt up in the study rather than fashioned to meet field observations or laboratory experiment. That criticism cannot be laid at the door of Boas, Bloomfield and other American researchers who in the first half of this century went out to closely observe languages as native speakers use them. Indeed, so concerned were they to avoid the strictures of Logical Possitivism, that they adopted a behaviourist approach, excluding mind altogether. Language was simply inputs and outputs: how the brain handled its data was not something one could observe, and was therefore not science. Huge dossiers of information were built up, particularly on native American languages, but little that resolved itself into laws or general principles. 

Language is a social fact - English Culture Papers

Language is a social fact - English Culture Papers

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure (November 26, 1857 - February 22, 1913) was a Swiss linguist.
Born in Geneva, he laid the foundation for many developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He perceived linguistics as a branch of a general science of signs he proposed to call semiology.
His work Cours de linguistique générale was published posthumously in 1916 by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye based on lecture notes. This became a seminal linguistics work, perhaps the seminal structuralist linguistics work, in the 20th century.
De Saussure emphasized a synchronic view of linguistics in contrast to the diachronic (historical study) view of the 19th century. (For more on historical study of language, see Philology.) The synchronic view looks at the structure of language as a functioning system at a given point of time. This distinction was a breakthrough and became generally accepted. (For further consideration of the importance of history in the study of language, see Linguistics.)

"A sign is the basic unit of langue (a given language at a given time). Every langue is a complete system of signs. Parole (the speech of an individual) is an external manifestation of langue."

Another important distinction is that between syntactic relations, which take place in a given text, and paradigmatic relations.
De Saussure made an important discovery in Indo-European philology which is now known as the laryngeal theory.

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, indeed, it is probably impossible to do applied linguistics without incorporating 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. It makes little sense to maintain such a designation as applied linguistics without recognizing the centrality of the core discipline. The fact that such a relation has come into question at all suggests the sometimes less-than-ideal interaction between the divisions of the field. This question is further magnified by the many competing fields and research theories within linguistics and the sometimes-strident debates accompanying the competition.