Applicable Linguistics for Language Teachers (original) (raw)
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At the Interface between Hierarchical Structuralism and Language Teaching
2009
Supposedly, the general perception is that as structural linguistics owes no debt to language teaching, so language teaching studies and practices owe none to structural linguistics. This seems so simply because structuralism has no obvious echo in the kind of language teaching of our time. In point of fact the profession is heavily indebted for the theories and fi ndings of structuralism. Just think that professionals in the fi eld of second language teaching today are fully corpus-minded in discussing usage and, to that degree, alert to the danger of normative strictures on it. There they are already being structuralist. This paper is an attempt to throw a certain amount of light on second language teaching on the basis of the structural linguistic idea of marked versus unmarked. Empirical studies demonstrate that marked forms are harder to cognitively process and more error-prone than unmarked forms. A fuller awareness of this realization on teachers’ part is likely to work in fa...
2021
This book is an introduction into English linguistics, aimed primarily at students who are just beginning their studies as well as those more advanced, who can use it to revise some of the more basic linguistic concepts, not only pertaining to English linguistics, but also linguistics in general. The book is divided into 14 chapters, dealing in turn with the most important topics in English linguistics: the history of linguistics, the levels of language and their description, phonetics and phonology, spelling and orthography, morphology, syntax, lexicology and lexicography, text linguistics, pragmatics, standard and varieties, history of the English language, historical (diachronic) linguistics, and, finally, the last chapter introduces the contrastive approach to language, focusing on English and German specifically. These chapters are followed by suggestions for further reading, as well as by some useful appendices and indices. After a brief introduction, the book begins with an overview of the most important figures and movements in the history of linguistics. The chapter starts in antiquity, mentioning Plato, the naturalists and conventionalists, as well as the Romans. It moves on to the Middle Ages, at which point the narrative begins to focus on Britain. The next section describes the situation in the Early Modern period, characterised by the publication of the first grammars as well as monolingual dictionaries (of the socalled "hard words"). The nineteenth century, the age of comparative and historical linguistics, is discussed next. Finally, the chapter provides a summary of the more recent movements in linguistics, i.e. in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It describes the innovations brought by Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism and transformational-generative grammar in more detail, mentioning other movements and areas of linguistics only briefly. The chapter is very easy to read and is clearly meant to ease the reader into the topic. All the crucial concepts and terms are written in bold, something that is maintained throughout the rest of the book as well. Many of them appear again in later chapters and are explained in more detail there. The following chapters aim to introduce the basic areas of linguistic analysis, dedicating a chapter to each. They are more generally linguistic, though the majority of examples are provided from English. Chapter 3 explains the concept of the levels of language. The authors list phonology, orthography and morphology as the three basic levels and provide definitions of the most fundamental terms, such as the word, phoneme, morpheme and grapheme. The chapter is very short, but provides a good basis for the following three chapters, which deal with each area in turn. Chapter 4 is concerned with phonetics and phonology. It firstly provides more detailed definitions of the basic terms, and then moves on to transcription, the production of sounds, phonotactics, suprasegmental phenomena, and, finally, the English syllable. Chapter 5 tackles spelling and orthography in English, discussing the issue of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, which seems very unreliable in English. The authors, however, provide many examples which show that, frequently, that is not the case. The next chapter focuses on morphology,
The Traditional , Structural And Cognitive Approach To Linguistics
2017
This paper traces the historical development of linguistics, and the related disciplines that have emerged. An attempt is made to give a fair idea of some of the major concerns of linguists by acquainting with different dimensions of linguistics, and with serval interdisciplinary fields relating to linguistics. The traditional, structural and cognitive approach to linguistics are studied.
1-Nature and Methodology of Grammar Writing
2006
Esa Itkonen (2003) embarks on no lesser a task than to construct a philosophy of linguistics. This has been a major concern of his for decades (e.g. Itkonen 1972, 1974, 1978). Now, his intention is to “explicate the concept language, understood as the logical prerequisite for studying various aspects of particular languages” (2003:13; emphasis original). His central claim is that grammars composed in all cultures and all historical periods are remarkably uniform and that “this is the fact” (ibid.; emphasis original) that philosophers of linguistics must explain before doing anything else. In developing his argument, Itkonen voices strong views on many other important topics such as ontology (What levels should one postulate in grammar description? What kinds of entities populate those levels?) and methodology (What are the proper practices for the grammarian to acquire knowledge about grammatical constructions?).
Form and formalism in linguistics
2019
Notions of "form" have a long history in Western thought on language. When linguistics emerged as an institutionalized discipline in the early decades of the nineteenth century, its practitioners could look back on a multitude of senses and uses of "form", embedded in a variety of conceptual schemes. Even though many nineteenth-century linguists sought to emphasize the novelty of their work and imagined a radical break with the "pre-scientific" past (see Morpurgo Davies 1998: chap. 1), both their everyday practice and their theoretical views were permeated by an intellectual inheritance stretching back over centuries, in which "form" occupied a central place. On a practical level, "form" has long been employed in a general sense to refer to the perceptible outer appearances of linguistic expressions, especially in connection with the inflectional variants of words. On a deeper theoretical level, there has often been an effort to find underlying motivations for these appearances and so conceive of "form" in senses loaded with metaphysical and epistemological significance. This was the path taken by such movements as the medieval Scholastics and the Enlightenment-era General Grammarians (see Law 2003: chaps. 8 and 11), whose successors in the ninetenth century-despite often disavowing their predecessors-were similarly engaged in a search for the cognitive, biological or aesthetic bases of linguistic form. A particularly prominent figure in nineteenth-century discussions of form in language was Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), whose writings served as the point of departure for many later scholars. For Humboldt and his followers, there is a sense in which all language is form and nothing else, in that language is the representation we make of the world which, in Kantian fashion, we shape according to our perceptive faculties. "The essence of language", writes Humboldt (1905 [1820]: 17), "consists in pouring the material of the phenomenal world into