Applied Linguistics and Linguistics

1. Historical Background

Language is a closed system of structural relations; meaning and grammatical uses of linguistics elements depend on the sets of opposition created among all the elements within the system.

Saussure introduced distinctions such as synchronic (at single a specific time) vs. diachronic (historical) analyses of language, and language vs. parole (competence vs. performance). These two influential notions evolved from the structural assumptions on the nature language.

Saussure’s work had a powerful impact on various structural-linguistics groups that emerged across Europe, including the London School of Linguistics, the Geneva School of linguistics, the Copenhagen School of Linguistics, and the Prague School of Linguistics.

Growth of American Linguistics

The growth of American linguistics began when European anthropological linguists arrived in North American to study and record native-American languages before many of those languages disappeared.

Franz Boas established American descriptivist linguistics and trained the leading American structural linguists, in particular Sapir and Bloomfield.  

Philosophical positivism and empiricism also led Bloomfield and others to influence language teaching in accordance with the research findings of scientific linguistics.

Generative Linguistics

Chomsky first devoted considerable time to the notion of competence and performance (what a speaker knows about language vs. how a speaker performs at any given moment using the language.

A linguistic theory that is psychologically based must capture such an insight, and Chomsky´s goal of explaining linguistics competence was intended to capture the generative capacity of human language.

Psychological reality, proposed in the early 1960s, provided a strong impetus for the field of psycholinguistics (language processing and first-language acquisition).

Chomsky has introduced semantics as an important component of a grammar.

Generative semantics was quite popular since it was based on an intuitively appealing notion.

2. Descriptive Syntax

Synchronic descriptive of English were developed by Jesperson, Curme, and Poutsma in the 1920s and 1930s.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the British grammarian/linguists developed major corpuses of the English language which were used, in turn, as resources for an extremely influential modern descriptive grammar of English.

Descriptive grammars of the type developed form corpus data filled a void left by generative grammars for grammatical reference materials that could be used by many others researchers in education, sociolinguistics, psychology, etc. 

3. Functional and Typological Theories

Language has been adapted to the needs of human to communicate, and grammars reflect this adaptation.

The functional aspect of Halliday grammar is best captured by the division of grammar into ideational, interpersonal, and textual components and by his typology of language uses (instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, etc.).

One of the great current appeals of this theory, particularly for applied linguists, is the emphasis on discourse and language function in actual use.

Hallyday’s influence has increased greatly in the last decade as a result of the strong emphasis on discourse and communication now prevalent in applied linguistics.

4. Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics

Anthropological linguistics, grounded in the European structuralism and influenced by Sapir’s later work, expanded their research interests to include the study of discourse use of language In various social context, as well as the study of language change resulting from contact among languages and dialects.

Sociolinguistics was recognized as a major alternative discipline to formal approaches to linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics). Researchers such as Fasold, Shuy and Trudgill helped define sociolinguistics as the study of language variation and its relation to different social context, thus building upon and greatly expanding earlier research on dialect variation and language contact phoneme. 

Written-discourse analysis has more often been the domain of applied linguistics, European text linguistics, and systematic-functional linguistics. These two views of discourse analysis represent an important indication of the distinction between sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.

Applied linguistics, also explore many areas which are not within the domain of sociolinguistics at all: language teaching and language learning second- and foreign-language teaching/learning; language testing and evaluation: language therapy, lexicography; translation, etc. 

5. Linguistics research and applied linguistics

Phonetics and Phonology

The more traditional articulatory phonetics and phonology that still make the greatest contribution to applied linguistics

The traditional articulatory approach is still the basis for most discussion of pronunciation and oral language instruction generally in second-language context.

Morphology

The linguistics research on morphology and on the organization of the lexicon has not initiated any great changes in practical research.

Applied-linguistics research on lexicography, terminology development, second-language acquisition, and language teaching is still employing descriptive approaches that have been in use for some time.

Syntax

Three approaches to syntax appear to have an influence on applied-linguistics research activities.

The descriptive syntax text have been used for grammar courses and for resource references in language policy and planning-particularly in the development of language standards in school, in second-language acquisition, in discourse analysis, in computational stylistics, and in lexicography.

The third major syntactic approach having a strong influence on applied linguistic is the functional-systematic approach of Halliday.

Semantics and Pragmatics

The area of lexical semantics has been important to applied linguistics.

Another area of semantics that has been examined extensively in second-language acquisition contexts is the tense-modal-aspect system in various languages.

Pragmatics has had a much greater impact on applied linguistics, because the issues raised and the theories developed directly inform discourse analysis.

Speech act refers directly either to sets of verbs that do things when uttered in the right context or to the use of utterances in order to convey messages that are only inferrable from a combination of the context and the literal words.

6. Sociolinguistics and discourse analysis

The most important area of research for applied linguistics is the field of discourse analysis, and the contributions of discourse analysis made by sociolinguistics are central. The most powerful foundation for applied research has been the developed of the notion of communication competence. It was first introduced by Hymes in the 1960s.

Other direct contributions from sociolinguistics to applied-linguistics research include the fields of conversational analysis and conversational style.

The study of coherence in text has been an elusive though important concept in applied linguistics, as well as in cognitive psychology and composition research.

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