Introduction to Applied English Linguistics - winter semester 2002/03 -

1. Introduction to Applied English Linguistics- winter semester 2002/03 - PART I Prof Dr Kurt Kohn University of Tübingen Chair of Applied English Linguistics kurt.kohn@uni-tuebingen.de This lecture is organised in two parts. In the first part, I will give a review of main trends in the development of modern linguistic theory: structuralism, generative grammar, pragmatics, discourse analysis. Particular attention will be given to complementary models of language (system, knowledge, use) with an emphasis on cognitive approaches. In the second part, I will give an introduction to theoretical and empirical dimensions of applied linguistics from the perspective of second language research. This mainly includes second language learning and teaching, bilingualism and bilingual education, translation and interpreting.

2. Contents PART I (1) Getting started 24 Oct (2) First orientation 24, 31 Oct (3) Dimensions of language 7, 14, 21 Nov PART II (4) Translation & interpreting 5 Dec (5) Second language acquisition & learning 12, 19 Dec (6) Second language teaching 9 Jan (7) Bilingualism and bilingual education 16 Jan (8) Language testing 23 Jan (9) Prof Nigel Holden: The language of management 30 Jan (?) (10) Language learning with multimedia & web 6, 13 Feb

3. Part I (1) Getting started 24 Oct (2) First orientation 24, 31 Oct (3) Dimensions and models of Language 7, 14, 21 Nov

4. Getting started “Teach me and I forget - Tell me and I remember - Involve me and I learn.” (Benjamin Franklin)  Lecture with active participation! back

5. First OrientationStructure and Meaning What do little boys and girls do when they are somping (pomping, momping) aimlessly in the school yard? “The farmer killed the bear” “Agricola necavit ursum” “Old men and women are dangerous” “They are visiting fishermen” “Flying planes can be dangerous” back

6. First OrientationPhonetic processing & phonological categories “The eighth tall bottle fell of the tray last night” “The fifth tall bottle fell of the tray last night” back

7. First OrientationBottom up & top down Guess what? ????????????????????? back

8. First Orientation: What’s in a language Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former . . . . . . Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax-free. Douglas Adams, Hitch-hiker’s guide to the galaxy figure

9. First Orientation: What’s in a language? Cognitive Processing Linguistic Knowledge Discourse World Knowledge Comprehension Production next

10. First Orientation: What’s in a language Do you have a watch? No, sorry. But I think it’s about six figure

11. First Orientation: What’s in a language? Cognitive Processing Linguistic Knowledge Communicative situation Communicative intentions Discourse World Knowledge Comprehension Production next

12. First Orientation: What’s in a language Do you smoke? No thanks. Oh, I wasn’t offering. I just wanted to know if you did. Harry Kemelman, Sunday the Rabbi stayed home. figure

13. First Orientation: What’s in a language? Cognitive Processing Linguistic Knowledge Communicative situation Communicative intentions Discourse World Knowledge Comprehension Production Social interaction

14. Dimensions & models of Language Basic principles of structuralism Constituent structure Models A few interim remarks Grammatical competence Communicative competence Speech act theory From sentence to utterance meaning Discourse & discourse processing Language as cognition

15. Dimensions & models of LanguageBasic principles of structuralism Leonard Bloomfield (1933). Language. London: George Allen & Unwin. “Paul’s Principles Hermann Paul (1880). Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle  suffers from faults that seem obvious today, because they are significant of the limitations of nineteenth-century linguistics.” (p. 16) . “One of these faults is Paul’s neglect of descriptive language study. He admitted that descriptions of languages were necessary, but confined his actual discussion to matters of linguistic change.”  descriptive (i.e. synchronic) language study

16. Dimensions & models of LanguageBasic principles of structuralism “The other great weakness of Paul’s Principles is his insistence upon ‘psychological’ interpretation. He accompanies his statements about language with a paraphrase in terms of mental processes which the speakers are supposed to have undergone. The only evidence for these mental processes is the linguistic process; they add nothing to the discussion, but only obscure it.” (p.17)  empirical (i.e. non-psychological, non-mentalistic study of language

17. Dimensions & models of LanguageBasic principles of structuralism “In order to describe a language one needs no historical knowledge whatever; in fact, the observer who allows such knowledge to affect his description, is bound to distort his data. Our descriptions must be unprejudiced, if they are to give a sound basis for comparative work. The only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations.” (p. 19/20)  synchronic description  inductive generalizations (based on observable data)  discovery procedures (e.g. Z. Harris. “From morpheme to utterance”)

18. Dimensions & models of LanguageBasic principles of structuralism “The discrimination of elegant or ‘correct’ speech is a by-product of certain social conditions. The linguist has to observe it as he observes other linguistic phenomena. The fact that speakers label a speech-form as ‘good’ nor '‘correct'’, or else as ‘bad’ or ‘incorrect’, is merely a part of the linguist’s data concerning this speech-form. Needless to say, it does not permit him to ignore part of his material or to falsify his records: he observes all speech-forms impartially.” (p. 20)  description vs. prescription  (inductive generalizations based on) observable data (corpus

19. Dimensions & models of LanguageBasic principles of structuralism “Jack and Jill are walking down a lane. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple in a tree. She makes a noise with her larynx, tongue, and lips. Jack vaults the fence, climbs the tree, takes the apple, brings it to Jill, and places it in her hand. Jill eats the apple.” (p. 22

20. Dimensions & models of LanguageBasic principles of structuralism In this succession of events, Bloomfield distinguishes three parts (p. 23 ff.): (A) Practical eventspreceding the act of speech. = speaker’s stimulus S (practical stimulus) (B) Speech = r . . . . s (linguistic substitute stimulus/reaction) (C) Practical events following the act of speech = hearer’s response R (practical reaction) Two human ways of responding to a stimulus: speechless reaction: S  R reaction mediated by speech: S  (r . . . . . s)  R

21. Dimensions & models of LanguageBasic principles of structuralism “The difference between the two types is evident. The speechless reaction occurs always in the same person as does the stimulus; the person who gets the stimulus is the only one who can make the response. The response, accordingly, is limited to whatever actions the receiver of the stimulus can make. In contrast with this, the reaction mediated by speech may occur in a person who did not get the practical stimulus; the person who gets a stimulus can prompt another person to make a response, and this other person may be able to do things which the speaker cannot.” (p. 26) “The speech-occurrence, s . . . . r, is merely a means by which S and R may occur in different individuals.” (p. 26)

22. Dimensions & models of LanguageBasic principles of structuralism “Human speech differs from the signal-like actions of animals, even of those which use the voice, by its great differentiation. Dogs, for instance, make only two or three kinds of noise – say, barking, growling, and whining: a dog can set another dog acting by means of only these few different signals. Parrots can make a great many kinds of noise, but apparently do not make different responses to different sounds. Man utters many kinds of vocal noise and makes use of the variety: under certain types of stimuli he produces certain vocal sounds, and his fellows, hearing these same sounds, make the appropriate response. To put it briefly, in human speech, different sounds have different meanings. To study this co-ordination of certain sounds with certain meanings is to study language.”(p. 27) (also compare de Saussure!!)

23. Dimensions & models of LanguageBasic principles of structuralism “A group of people who use the same system of speech-signals is a speech-community. . . . . . . Every child that is born into a group acquires these habits of speech and response in the first years of his life.” (p. 29)  the learning is based on repetition and imitation (pp. 29-31) back

24. Dimensions & models of LanguageConstituent structure Bloomfield (1933) on immediate constituents: “Any English-speaking person who concerns himself with this matter, is sure to tell us that the immediate constituents of Poor John ran away are the two forms poor John and ran away; that each of these is, in turn, a complex form; that the immediate constituents of ran away are ran and away; and that the constituents of poor John are poor and John.”

25. Dimensions & models of LanguageConstituent structure John Lyons (1968: 210 ff): “Sentences are not just linear sequences of elements, but are made up of ‘layers’ of immediate constituents, each lower-level constituent being part of a higher –level constituent.

26. Dimensions & models of LanguageConstituent structure  (Poor John) (ran away) X Y Z Poor John ran away Constituent structure and ambiguity:„They are visiting fishermen“

27. Dimensions & models of LanguageConstituent structure Distributional analysis Every linguistic unit (...) is to a greater or lesser degree restricted with respect to the contexts in which it can occur. This fact is expressed by saying that every linguistic unit (below the level of sentences) has a characteristic distribution. If two (or more) units occur in the same range of contexts they are said to be distributionally equivalent (or to have the same distribution).“ (John Lyons 1968:70)

28. Dimensions & models of LanguageConstituent structure Distributional classification of constituents(substitution classes) Poor John ran way Poor John wrote a book Poor John is eating Poor John is a nice guy Poor John ran way Sally ran away My horse ran away She ran away NP: noun phrase VP: verb phrase back

29. What is a model ? Models A few interim remarks And what do we need them for? Diagramsactivities & statements Mapsactivities & statements Objects – meanings – construction rules

30. Models of language Models A few interim remarks And what we need them for (Poor)A(John)N NP (ran)V(awayP)VPS • Phrase structure Grammar: • Objects & meanings & construction rules • Activities & statements back

31. Grammatical competence Grammar of L Noam Chomsky (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague:Mouton. Noam Chomsky (1964). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. “From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense, since each natural language has a finite number of phonemes (or letters in its alphabet) and each sentence is representable as a finite sequence of these phonemes (or letters), though there are infinitely many sentences.” Noam Chomsky (1957: 13)

32. Grammatical competence Grammar of L “The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysisof a language L is to separate the grammatical sequences which are the sentences of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L and to study the structure of the grammatical sequences. The grammar of L will thus be a device that generates all of the grammatical sequences of L and none of the ungrammatical ones.” Noam Chomsky (1957: 13)

33. Grammatical competence Grammar of L “. . . we assume intuitive knowledge of the grammatical sentences of English and ask what sort of grammar will be able to do the job of producing these in some effective and illuminating way. We thus face the familiar task of explication of some intuitive concept – in this case, the concept ‘grammatical in English’, and more generally, the concept ‘grammatical’.” Noam Chomsky (1957: 13)

34. Grammatical competence Grammar of L “First, it is obvious that the set of grammatical sentences cannot be identified with any particular corpus of utterances obtained by the linguist in his field work. Any grammar of a language will project the finite and somewhat accidental corpus of observed utterances to a set (presumably infinite) of grammatical utterances.” “In this respect, a grammar mirrors the behavior of the speaker who, on the basis of a finite and accidental experience with language, can produce or understand an indefinite number of new sentences. “Indeed, any explication of the notion ‘grammatical in L’ (i.e., any characterization of ‘grammatical in L’ in terms of ‘observed utterances of L’) can be thought of as offering an explanation of this fundamental aspect of linguistic behavior.” Noam Chomsky (1957: 15)

35. Grammatical competence Grammar of L “Second, the notion ‘grammatical’ cannot be identified with‘meaningful’ or ‘significant’ in any semantic sense. Sentences (1) and (2) are equally nonsensical, but any speaker of English will recognize that only the former is grammatical.“ (Chomsky 1957: 15) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Furiously sleep ideas green colorless “Third, the notion ‘grammatical in English’ cannot be identified in any way with the notion ‘high order of statistical approximation to English’.” (Chomsky 1957: 15/16) “One requirement that a grammar must certainly meet is that it be finite. Hence the grammar cannot simply be a list of all morpheme (or word) sequences, since there are infinitely many of these.” (1957: 18)

36. Grammatical competence Phrase structure grammar Derivation: Sentence NP + VP T + N + VP T + N + Verb + NP the + N + Verb + NP the + man Verb + NP the + man + hit + NP the + man + hit + T + N the + man + hit + the + N the + man + hit + the + ball Phrase structure rules (‘rewrite rules’): Sentence  NP + VP NP  T +N VP  Verb + NP T  the N  man, ball Verb  hit, took Tree diagram

37. Grammatical competence Limitations of PSG (1) Conjunction the scene – of the movie – was in Chicago the scene – of the play – was in Chicago the scene – of the movie and of the play – was in Chicago the – liner sailed down the – river the – tugboat chugged up the – river the – liner sailed down the and tugboat chugged up the - river (2) active-passive relation (3) Flying planes can be dangerous  surface structure / deep structure  transformational rules

38. Grammatical competence Linguistic (= grammatical ) competence "Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in allying his knowledge of the language in actual performance." NoamChomsky1964: 3

39. Grammatical competence Linguistic (= grammatical ) competence "We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations).” In actual fact, it performance obviously could not directly reflect competence. A record of natural speech will show numerous false starts, deviations from rules, changes of plan in mid-course, and so on. The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance. Hence, in a technical sense, linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior." NoamChomsky1964: 4 back

40. Communicative competence The initial observation Hymes, D. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (eds.). Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. "Consider now a child with just that ability. A child who might produce any sentence whatever – such a child would be likely to be institutionalized: even more so if not only sentences, but also speech or silence was random, unpredictable." (Hymes 1972: 4)

41. Communicative competence The scope "We have then to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others. This competence, moreover, is integral with attitudes, values, and motivations concerning language, its features and uses, and integral with competence for, and attitudes toward, the interrelation of language with the other code of communicative conduct viz. social interaction." (Hymes 1972: 277-278)

42. Communicative competence A model Canale, M. & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1/1, 1-47. "Communicative competence is composed minimally of grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and communication strategies, or what we will refer to as strategic competence." (Canale & Swain 1980: 27)

43. Communicative competence?? Grammatical competence?? ???? Grammatical Competence as part of Communicative Competence ???? back

44. Models of LanguageSpeech act theory Austin, J. L. (1952/62). How to do things with words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. R. (1979). Expression and meaning. Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Speakers use language to perform acts; they e.g. They make statements They ask questions They make requests They issue warnings They make predictions

45. 'constative' declaratives 'performative' declaratives Speech act theoryAustin's argument • background: truth-conditional semantics of declarative (!) sentences ! ! The world is round. I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth. ? ? • As a consequence, Austin distinguishes between Constatives say things The world is round. John runs down the street. Performatives do things I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth. I bet it will rain tomorrow. I declare war on Fantasyland. I dub thee Sir Walter. I apologise.

46. Speech act theoryFelicity conditions according to Austin These are conditions performatives must meet if they are to succeed. Austin distinguishes three main categories: A. (1) conventional procedure with conventional effect (2) appropriate persons and circumstances I hereby divorce you. I declare war on Fantasyland. B. (1) correct execution of the procedure (2) complete execution Marriage ceremony: “I it pleases you.” “I’ll do my best.” I bet you six pence it will rain tomorrow - You're on. C. (1) speaker's thoughts, feelings, intentions as required (2) consequent conduct as specified in the procedure I find you guilty. I promise to be there. "misfires" "abuses"

47. Speech act theory3 dimensions • Three different (but inseparable) aspects of meaning can be distinguished in each utterance (Austin: different 'forces') 1. conveys the proposition that ... It's me again. the speaker has returned to a place s/he was before • locutionary force 2. counts as ... an (intended) apology for troubling someone a second time • illocutionary force 3. will have effects on the hearer ... which are not necessarily intended (e.g. disturbing the addressee) • perlocutionary force

48. Speech act theoryIndirect speech acts Open the window. Can you open the window. I want you to open the window. Don’t you think it’s rather hot in here? back

49. Models of LanguageFrom sentence to utterance meaning Blakemore, D. (1992). Understanding utterances Sperber,D. & D. Wilson (1986). Relevance theory A:Did you enjoy your holiday? B:The beaches were crowded and the hotel was full of bugs

50. Models of LanguageFrom sentence to utterance meaning A: Did you enjoy your holiday? B: The beaches were crowded and the hotel was full of bugs Blakemore distinguishes between · (1) Explicatures: assumptions that are explicated, ie explicitly communicated, eg The beaches at the holiday resort that the speaker went to were crowded with people and the hotel where he stayed was full of insects ·  (2) Implicatures : assumptions that are implicated, ie implicitly communicated, eg The speaker did not enjoy his holiday