Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon Feb 11, 2008 12:41 am

Naitivists think that the language instinct peters out. Therefore, having large numbers of adults who learn language better than kids would rather refute this notion, since Joseph Conrads must currently only be regarded as freaks. I suggest that there are in fact many such adults, however nearly all adults (including Conrad) have a dodgy accent, so the nativists do not accept that they have learned a language as well as children. However, most adults eventually gain an accent that can be understood, and is good enough for communicative puropses. Adults can make use of L1 to push ahead of the speed of progress of children, but L1 influences accent, since it is very hard not to relate sounds to the phonemes you already know.

I am currently engaged in Korean learning combat with my son, and his grammar as well as accent often outshines mine. However he spends half his day in mental and physical rehearsal of simple Korean phrases. I'm, on the other hand, here doing this. However, if you give an adult 24 hours of free time and put a gun to their heads and make them continually learn Korean, they easily could beat him. He can't count past ten for a start.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Mon Feb 11, 2008 8:10 am

The ability to acquire a language naturally disappears with puberty. However the ability to learn a second language remains throughout life, which is why in fact adolescents learn a second language faster than pre-adolescents.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon Feb 11, 2008 11:08 pm

As we have already discussed, there is no real proof of that ability vanishing. Genie, who was diagnosed as retarded at 2 years of age, and one or two "wild" children cannot prove that. Deaf people may represent better proof, but if they have learned to communicate before learning sign language, then sign language is a second language for them. If they (or anyone else) have grown up without communication at all, then they are presumably very damaged individuals on encountering sign language, with bizarre internal worlds.

In order to learn a second language well, as we all should have noticed in our jobs, you have to get your mind into the right place. The same may apply to first language learning. Teenage/adult people without language perhaps lose their minds in a rather general sense.

In any case, even if nativists are correct, children obviously need absolutely massive amounts of input for a specific language and blunder about with it a great deal. It sure ain't an instinct like sneezing.

It seems to me that those who make the nativist argument never look honestly into the normal language learning situation of children, and nor do they ever deal with the differences that we would naturally expect to find when we compare somebody who is learning a language when a different language structure is already in place, and somebody who is learning to communicate full stop. The latter thing is a pressing need, very different.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Feb 15, 2008 1:34 pm

woodcutter wrote:In fact, I don't think there is any consensus at all on what a transformational tree diagram from a Chomskyite actually represents. It seems clear that it is not supposed to represent an actual mental operation that we perform when making a sentence, but what then is it? Deciding on that ought to have huge relevance to SLA.

Just thought that this might be of interest:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 01552.html

womblingfree · Post by **womblingfree** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 4:13 pm

Language professionals should have an awareness of at least the basics of Applied Linguistics.

As for pure Linguistics, that's a specific discipline and if studied in isolation can be a hinderance rather than a help in language education.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 3:13 am

womblingfree wrote:Language professionals should have an awareness of at least the basics of Applied Linguistics.

As for pure Linguistics, that's a specific discipline and if studied in isolation can be a hinderance rather than a help in language education.

I pretty much agree, if by Linguistics you mean the generative syntax-heavy stuff; that is, there are brands of linguistics that have much more in common with AL (=TESOL?), such as the more functional approaches to grammar (not necessarily just Hallidayan, but also including RRG (Role and Reference Grammar), Cognitive Linguistics etc).

ouyang · Post by **ouyang** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 4:07 pm

Just thought that this might be of interest:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 01552.html

When I checked out the site referenced (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/ ... agrams.htm) from the link above about sentence diagrams, I was struck by a couple of things. Reed-Kellog treated infinitives like prepositional phrases. The "to" in "to go" was placed on a diagonal line just like the "to" in "to the store", "go" and "store" were both placed on a horizontal line.

Verbal-object complements were a mish-mash of different schemes. This is an area which modern grammarians/linguists avoid, and there doesn't seem to be any consensus about it. For example, in "I want her to stay" and "We got her to stay" and "He made her stay" the object phrases "her to stay" and "her stay" would be placed on extremely different diagrams.

Some grammars might classify the first sentence as a complex catenative verb phrase and the next two as causative verbs, but it seems to me that the relationship between the components of the object phrases is essentially the same in each sentence.

So, as useful as the reed-kellog diagrams were, I think they had some significant flaws. I don't think the transformational tree diagrams attempt to resolve all of these problems either. They simply show the hierarchy within phrases and not the functional relationships between them.

I don't think componential analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Componential_analysis addresses this either.

However, I did like the author's characterization of syntactic analysis,

In the third grade, everything seemed to be carved in stone, but in college and graduate school, the field was written on water. There was no stable description of the phenomena. The theory kept changing, not only in terms of explanations but in terms of the entities and relations of the basic descriptions. Doing syntactic analysis felt like trying to lay out a garden on an avalance. Exciting, at least at first, but it always seemed like a gamble whether you could get any significant piece of work done before everything changed out from under you."

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 2:03 am

I'm not sure that applied linguistics really has any definite basics either, and I was happy that my online study tended towards theory. Knowing a lot of facts about language can only help you, and headache inducing grammar helps too, as long as you don't run off and force advanced, questionable ideas down tender throats.

The basic idea of applied linguistics tends towards being an old-things-bad/new-things-good fashion driven misapplication of the general idea that communicative activities are important - which is not a bad idea in itself.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 12:50 am

The basic idea of applied linguistics tends towards being an old-things-bad/new-things-good fashion driven misapplication of the general idea that communicative activities are important - which is not a bad idea in itself.

Disclaimer; the above vapid quote was bought at knock-down price from Overgeneralizations R Us, your friendly neighborhood substitute for thinking.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 1:14 am

Welcome back, Mr A.D.Hominem

What are the fundamentals of applied linguistics? They ask that question at the beginning of applied linguistics courses of course, but nobody seems to agree very much. It can be seen to refer only to teaching, or to practical applications elsewhere, and can also be seen to include the whole field of linguistics, or even other things on top on that.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 12:59 pm

---" It can be seen to refer only to teaching, or to practical applications elsewhere, and can also be seen to include the whole field of linguistics, or even other things on top on that."------

Correct; though how you manage to square that with your previous statement is beyond me.

Here is an excellent article on the subject from Roger Shuy, whose speciality is forensic linguistics. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 03056.html

womblingfree · Post by **womblingfree** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 4:04 pm

woodcutter wrote: What are the fundamentals of applied linguistics?

Sociolinguistics? Psycholinguistics? Intercultural communications? Discourse analysis? Material development? Teacher education? Ethnographic research? etc, etc.

Applied linguistics refers to branches of linguistics that deals with the practical application of language.

That is the fundamental point.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 12:32 am

Yes, I think that latter point makes some sense, that was the definition I gave at university, and it was narrower than the one looked for I think. Aside from teaching/materials development, the branches you mention are theoretical disciplines for the most part. Pursuing pure linguistics - researching the truth about language - will cause practical applications to pop up all over the place though, just as any science will.

In fact though, the reason the subject of "applied linguistics" exists on top of that (most sciences don't have an important "applied" branch in the same way) is to train language teachers really.

womblingfree · Post by **womblingfree** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 2:46 am

woodcutter wrote:Persuing pure linguistics - researching the truth about language - will cause practical applications to pop up all over the place though, just as any science will.

In fact though, the reason the subject of "applied linguistics" exists on top of that (most sciences don't have an important "applied" branch in the same way) is to train language teachers really.

'Pure linguistics' is just as 'theoretical' as any applied aspect, if not more so as it largely deals with idealised notions of structure with little to no relation to language as it is actually used.

In fact Chomskyist notions of linguistics have been far more prevalent in influencing language education over the past 50 years, despite the fact that they were never designed or intended to do so.

Most sciences do have an applied branch. The idea that applied linguistics exists to train language teachers is like saying that biological research exists to train dentists.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 3:25 am

But, yes, exactly. Applied linguistics in practice has raided supposedly purely intellectual theories and brought them into the classroom in a dubious way. The application of theory in teaching has been a mess, and the "left-wing" or "progressive" bias, for want of better terms, has been the most constant thing.

I have never met anyone qualified in applied biology. Dentists study dentistry, and teachers should ideally study teaching. Applied linguistics is a bit of a joke, but the good thing about it is that it is a chance to study vaguely relevant pure linguistics while pretending to study teaching, and avoid enduring 2 years of torture with CELTA instructor type people, who will annoy you endlessly about Krashen, Asher, and "the silent way", and tell you teacher-talking-time is bad, only English in the classroom! etc etc.