Applied Linguistics

Applied Linguistics

Language, the principal means used by human beings to communicate with one another. Language is primarily spoken, although it can be transferred to other media, such as writing. If the spoken means of communication is unavailable, as may be the case among the deaf, visual means such as sign language can be used. A prominent characteristic of language is that the relation between a linguistic sign and its meaning is arbitrary: There is no reason other than convention among speakers of English that a dog should be called dog, and indeed other languages have different names (for example, Spanish perro, Russian sobaka, Japanese inu). Language can be used to discuss a wide range of topics, a characteristic that distinguishes it from animal communication. The dances of honey bees, for example, can be used only to communicate the location of food sources. While the language-learning abilities of apes have surprised many—and there continues to be controversy over the precise limits of these abilities—scientists and scholars generally agree that apes do not progress beyond the linguistic abilities of a two-year-old child.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Several of the subfields of linguistics that will be discussed here are concerned with the major components of language: Phonetics is concerned with the sounds of languages, phonology with the way sounds are used in individual languages, morphology with the structure of words, syntax with the structure of phrases and sentences, and semantics with the study of meaning. Another major subfield of linguistics, pragmatics, studies the interaction between language and the contexts in which it is used. Synchronic linguistics studies a language's form at a fixed time in history, past or present. Diachronic, or historical, linguistics, on the other hand, investigates the way a language changes over time. A number of linguistic fields study the relations between language and the subject matter of related academic disciplines, such as sociolinguistics (sociology and language) and psycholinguistics (psychology and language). In principle, applied linguistics is any application of linguistic methods or results to solve problems related to language, but in practice it tends to be restricted to second-language instruction.

Language learning is not communicative, it is the result of direct instruction in the rules of the language and it certainly is not on age appropriate activity for young learners in language learning, student have conscious knowledge of the new language and can talk about that knowledge. They can fill in the blanks on a grammar page. Research has shown however, that knowing grammar rules does not necessarily result in good speaking or writing. A student who has memorized the rules of the language may be able to succeed on a standardized test of English language but may not be able to speak or write correctly.

Language acquisition is a universal process regardless of home language. Babies listen to sounds around them, they begin to imitate them and eventually start producing words. Language acquisition assures knowledge in a first language and encompasses the process on individual goes through as he or she learns the element of new language, such as vocabulary, phonological components, grammatical structure and writing systems.

Descriptive linguistics is the study and analysis of spoken language. The techniques of descriptive linguistics were devised by German American anthropologist Franz Boas and American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir in the early 1900s to record and analyze Native American languages. Descriptive linguistics begins with what a linguist hears native speakers say. By listening to native speakers, the linguist gathers a body of data and analyzes it in order to identify distinctive sounds, called phonemes. Individual phonemes, such as /p/ and /b/, are established on the grounds that substitution of one for the other changes the meaning of a word. After identifying the entire inventory of sounds in a language, the linguist looks at how these sounds combine to create morphemes, or units of sound that carry meaning, such as the words push and bush. Morphemes may be individual words such as push; root words, such as berry in blueberry; or prefixes (pre- in preview) and suffixes (-ness in openness).

Graphology, study and analysis of handwriting to assess the writer's traits or personality. In contrast, the field of scientific handwriting analysis for legal identification is designed to determine authenticity of a signature or document such as a will or manuscript, without concern for the writer's personality. For the study of handwriting, responsible graphologists minimally require a full-page ink specimen, written spontaneously under normal physical conditions, by a person able to write with facility. Before the analysis, the graphologist must know the writer's age, sex, and nationality, none of which is revealed by the writing.

four levels of linguistics description in language  Can be seen as follows;

1.    Graphology

2.    Phonetics and Phonology

3.    Syntax

4.    morphology

1.    Graphology

Graphology as a means of delineating personality stems from the fact that people almost always write differently from the models taught them in school. How the writer combines characters from left to right and from top to bottom on the page creates a unique writing pattern. Theoretically, the writing, made up of more than 20 elements, such as degree of slant, breadth and height of letters, and space between lines, letters, and words, represents the different, yet interrelated, aspects of the writer's personality

2.    Phonetics and phonology

Phonetics is the field of language study concerned with the physical properties of sounds, and it has three subfields. Articulatory phonetics explores how the human vocal apparatus produces sounds. Acoustic phonetics studies the sound waves produced by the human vocal apparatus. Auditory phonetics examines how speech sounds are perceived by the human ear. Phonology, in contrast, is concerned not with the physical properties of sounds, but rather with how they function in a particular language. The following example illustrates the difference between phonetics and phonology. In the English language, when the sound k (usually spelled c) occurs at the beginning of a word, as in the word cut, it is pronounced with aspiration (a puff of breath). However, when this sound occurs at the end of a word, as in tuck, there is no aspiration. Phonetically, the aspirated k and unaspirated k are different sounds, but in English these different sounds never distinguish one word from another, and English speakers are usually unaware of the phonetic difference until it is pointed out to them. Thus English makes no phonological distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated k. The Hindi language, on the other hand, uses this sound difference to distinguish words such as kal (time), which has an unaspirated k, and khal (skin), in which kh represents the aspirated k. Therefore, in Hindi the distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated k is both phonetic and phonological.

3.    Syntax

Syntax is the study of how words combine to make sentences. The order of words in sentences varies from language to language. English-language syntax, for instance, generally follows a subject-verb-object order, as in the sentence “The dog (subject) bit (verb) the man (object).” The sentence “The dog the man bit” is not a correct construction in English, and the sentence “The man bit the dog” has a very different meaning. In contrast, Japanese has a basic word order of subject-object-verb, as in “watakushi-wa hon-o kau,” which literally translates to “I book buy.” Hixkaryana, spoken by about 400 people on a tributary of the Amazon River in Brazil, has a basic word order of object-verb-subject. The sentence “toto yahosïye kamara,” which literally translates to “Man grabbed jaguar,” actually means that the jaguar grabbed the man, not that the man grabbed the jaguar.

A general characteristic of language is that words are not directly combined into sentences, but rather into intermediate units, called phrases, which then are combined into sentences. The sentence “The shepherd found the lost sheep” contains at least three phrases: “the shepherd,” “found,” and “the lost sheep.” This hierarchical structure that groups words into phrases, and phrases into sentences, serves an important role in establishing relations within sentences. For instance, the phrases “the shepherd” and “the lost sheep” behave as units, so that when the sentence is rearranged to be in the passive voice, these units stay intact: “The lost sheep was found by the shepherd

4.    Morphology

The linguist’s next step is to see how morphemes combine into sentences, obeying both the dictionary meaning of the morpheme and the grammatical rules of the sentence. In the sentence “She pushed the bush,” the morpheme she, a pronoun, is the subject; push, a transitive verb, is the verb; the, a definite article, is the determiner; and bush, a noun, is the object. Knowing the function of the morphemes in the sentence enables the linguist to describe the grammar of the language. The scientific procedures of phonemics (finding phonemes), morphology (discovering morphemes), and syntax (describing the order of morphemes and their function) provide descriptive linguists with a way to write down grammars of languages never before written down or analyzed. In this way they can begin to study and understand these languages.

Reference

1.    Comrie, Bernard. Language. 2009.

2.     Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008.