Functional theories of grammar (Linguistics)

        A range of functionally-based approaches to the scientific study of language have been termed "functional". The grammar model developed by Simon Dik bears this qualification in its name, Functional Grammar, as does Michael Halliday's Systemic functional grammar.

         Role and Reference Grammar, founded by Robert Van Valin is also considered a functional theory^{[citation needed]}. Another important figure in recent linguistic functionalism isTalmy Givón, but his theorising has not been given a unique name.

Dik characterises functional grammar as follows:

In the functional paradigm a language is in the first place conceptualized as an instrument of social interaction among human beings, used with the intention of establishing communicative relationships. Within this paradigm one attempts to reveal the instrumentality of language with respect to what people do and achieve with it in social interaction. Anatural language, in other words, is seen as an integrated part of the communicative competence of the natural language user.

Because of its emphasis on usage, communicative function, and the social context of language, functional grammar differs significantly from other linguistic theories which stress purelyformal approaches to grammar, notably Chomskyan generative grammar. Functional grammar is strongly associated with the school of linguistic typology that takes its lead from the work of Joseph Greenberg

Generative linguistics

        Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping, meanings.

Generative linguistics deals with the study and application of grammar in a fully explicit way, with a range of different, overlapping meanings by different people.

         Formally, a generative grammar is defined as one that is fully explicit. It is a finite set of rules that can be applied to generate all those and only those sentences (often, but not necessarily, infinite in number) that are grammatical in a given language. This is the definition that is offered by Noam Chomsky, who invented the term,^[1] and by most dictionaries of linguistics. Generate is being used as a technical term with a particular sense. To say that a grammar generates a sentence means that the grammar "assigns a structural description" to the sentence.

        The term generative grammar is also used to label the approach to linguistics taken by Chomsky and his followers. Chomsky's approach is characterised by the use of transformational grammar – a theory that has changed greatly since it was first promulgated by Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures – and by the assertion of a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the same). The term "generative linguistics" is often applied to the earliest version of Chomsky's transformational grammar, which was associated with a distinction between the "deep structure" and "surface structure" of sentences.

Cognitive linguistics

        In linguistics, cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the branch of linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms. It is thus closely associated with semantics but is distinct from psycholinguistics, which draws upon empirical findings from cognitive psychology in order to explain the mental processes that underlie the acquisition, storage, production and understanding of speech and writing.

Cognitive linguistics is characterized by adherence to three central positions. First, it denies that there is an autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind; second, it understands grammar in terms of conceptualization; and third, it claims that knowledge of language arises out of language use.

Cognitive linguists deny that the mind has any module for language-acquisition that is unique and autonomous. This stands in contrast to the stance adopted in the field of generative grammar. Although cognitive linguists do not necessarily deny that part of the human linguistic ability is innate, they deny that it is separate from the rest of cognition. They thus reject a body of opinion in cognitive science which suggests that there is evidence for themodularity of language. They argue that knowledge of linguistic phenomena — i.e., phonemes, morphemes, and syntax — is essentially conceptual in nature. However, they assert that the storage and retrieval of linguistic data is not significantly different from the storage and retrieval of other knowledge, and that use of language in understanding employs similar cognitive abilities to those used in other non-linguistic tasks.

Departing from the tradition of truth-conditional semantics, cognitive linguists view meaning in terms of conceptualization. Instead of viewing meaning in terms of models of the world, they view it in terms of mental spaces.

Finally, cognitive linguistics argues that language is both embodied and situated in a specific environment. This can be considered a moderate offshoot of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, in that language and cognition mutually influence one another, and are both embedded in the experiences and environments of its users.

Areas of study

Cognitive linguistics is divided into three main areas of study:

• Cognitive semantics, dealing mainly with lexical semantics, separating semantics (meaning) into meaning-construction and knowledge representation.
• Cognitive approaches to grammar, dealing mainly with syntax, morphology and other traditionally more grammar-oriented areas.
• Cognitive phonology, dealing with classification of various correspondences between morphemes and phonetic sequences.

Aspects of cognition that are of interest to cognitive linguists include:

• Construction grammar and cognitive grammar.
• Conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending.
• Image schemas and force dynamics.
• Conceptual organization: Categorization, Metonymy, Frame semantics, and Iconicity.
• Construal and Subjectivity.
• Gesture and sign language.
• Linguistic relativity.
• Cultural linguistics.

Related work that interfaces with many of the above themes:

• Computational models of metaphor and language acquisition.
• Conceptual semantics, pursued by generative linguist Ray Jackendoff is related because of its active psychological realism and the incorporation of prototype structure and images.

Cognitive linguistics, more than generative linguistics, seeks to mesh together these findings into a coherent whole. A further complication arises because the terminology of cognitive linguistics is not entirely stable, both because it is a relatively new field and because it interfaces with a number of other disciplines.

Insights and developments from cognitive linguistics are becoming accepted ways of analysing literary texts, too. Cognitive Poetics, as it has become known, has become an important part of modern stylistics.

Controversy

There is significant peer review and debate within the field of linguistics regarding cognitive linguistics. Critics of cognitive linguistics have argued that most of the evidence from the cognitive view comes from the research in pragmatics and semantics on research into metaphor and preposition choice. They suggest that cognitive linguists should provide cognitive re-analyses of topics in syntax and phonology that are understood in terms of autonomous knowledge (Gibbs 1996).

There is also controversy and debate within the field concerning the representation and status of idioms in grammar and the actual mental grammar of speakers. On one hand it is asserted that idiom variation needs to be explained with regard to general and autonomous syntactic rules. Another view says such idioms do not constitute semantic units and can be processed compositionally (Langlotz 2006)

Sociocultural linguistics

     Sociocultural linguistics is a term used to encompass a broad range of theories and methods for the study of language in its sociocultural context. Its growing use is a response to the increasingly narrow association of the term sociolinguistics with specific types of research involving the quantitative analysis of linguistic features and their correlation to sociologicalvariables. The term as it is currently used not only clarifies this distinction, but highlights an awareness of the necessity for interdisciplinary approaches to language, culture and society.

The scope of sociocultural linguistics, as described by researchers such as Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz, is potentially vast, though often includes work drawing from disciplines such associolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and sociology of language, as well as certain streams of social psychology, folklore studies, media studies, social andliterary theory, and the philosophy of language.

Historical precedents

Sociocultural linguists, especially in the United States, take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of language and the social and cultural functions of language use. Althoughgenerative and cognitive linguistics have been dominant in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, American linguists have periodically proposed to bring their studies closer to other fields of social inquiry. For example, in 1929, Edward Sapir urged linguists to move beyond diachronic and formal analyses for their own sake and to "become aware of what their science may mean for the interpretation of human conduct in general" (1929:207).

It is peculiarly important that linguists, who are often accused, and accused justly, of failure to look beyond the pretty patterns of their subject matter, should become aware of what their science may mean for the interpretation of human conduct in general. Whether they like it or not, they must become increasingly concerned with the many anthropological, sociological, and psychological problems which invade the field of language. [Sapir 1929:214]

Forty years later, Dell Hymes (1964) lamented that the socially integrated linguistics Sapir had called for was disappearing. Hymes and others worried that new formal approaches, as well as the push for linguistics as an autonomous field, threatened to once again isolate linguists. At the same time, though, the growth of ethnolinguistics and sociolinguistics offered a venue for the socially engaged linguistics Sapir had called for four decades earlier.

After four more decades, just as Hymes (1964) worried that linguistics had been bleached of its association with the study of human interaction in the wake of formalist studies, scholars noted that sociolinguistics in turn had narrowed to denote only specific types of study. Sociocultural linguistics is thus "the broad interdisciplinary field concerned with the intersection of language, culture, and society" (Bucholtz and Hall 2005:

Language change

Language change, or the evolution of language, is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change: historical linguistics andsociolinguistics. Historical linguists examine how people in the past used language and seek to determine how subsequent languages derive from previous ones and relate to one another. Sociolinguists study the origins of language changes and want to explain how society and changes in society influence language.

Causes of language change

1. economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.
   • the principle of least effort: Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪntʊ] → gonna [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].
2. analogy - reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.
3. language contact - the borrowing of words from foreign languages.
4. the medium of communication
5. cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.

Rudi Keller discusses language change in the context of evolutionary process: "the historical evolution of language", proposing his invisible hand explanation.

Types of language change

All languages change constantly, and do so in many and varied ways. Each generation notes how other generations "talk funny".

Marcel Cohen details various types of language change under the overall headings of the external evolution and internal evolution of languages.

Lexical changes

The study of lexical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology.

The ongoing influx of new words in the English language (for example) helps make it a rich field for investigation into language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately the vocabulary available to speakers of English. Throughout its history English has not only borrowed words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words.

Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words. By the same token, they may tag some words as "archaic" or "obsolete".

Phonetic and phonological changes

The concept of sound change covers both phonetic and phonological developments.

The sociolinguist William Labov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short period in the American resort of Martha’s Vineyard and showed how this resulted from social tensions and processes.^[4] Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have recorded their work, one can observe the difference between the pronunciation of the newsreaders of the 1940s and the 1950s and the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and fashionability of regional accents in media may^{[original research?]} also reflect a more democratic, less formal society — compare the widespread adoption of language policies.

The mapping and recording of small-scale phonological changes poses difficulties, especially as the practical technology of sound recording dates only from the 19th century. Written texts provide the main (indirect) evidence of how language sounds have changed over the centuries . But note Ferdinand de Saussure's work on postulating the existence and disappearance of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European as an example of other methods of detecting/reconstructing sound-changes within historical linguistics.

Spelling changes

Standardisation of spelling originated relatively recently. Differences in spelling often catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewerliterate people: languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the handwritten manuscripts that survive often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal preference.

Semantic changes

Semantic changes include

• pejoration, in which a term acquires a negative association
• amelioration, in which a term acquires a positive association
• widening, in which a term acquires a broader meaning
• narrowing, in which a term acquires a narrower meaning
• 
  

]Sociolinguistics and language change

The sociolinguist Jennifer Coates, following William Labov, describes linguistic change as occurring in the context of linguistic heterogeneity. She explains that “[l]inguistic change can be said to have taken place when a new linguistic form, used by some sub-group within a speech community, is adopted by other members of that community and accepted as the norm.”^[5]

Can and Patton (2010) provide a quantitative analysis of twentieth century Turkish literature using forty novels of forty authors. Using weighted least squares regression and a sliding window approach they show that as time passes, words, both in terms of tokens (in text) and types (in vocabulary), have become longer. They indicate that the increase in word lengths with time can be attributed to the government-initiated language “reform” of the 20th century. This reform aimed at replacing foreign words used in Turkish, especially Arabic- and Persian-based words (since they were in majority when the reform was initiated in early 1930s), with newly coined pure Turkish neologisms created by adding suffixes to Turkish word stems (Lewis, 1999).

Can and Patton (2010), based on their observations of the change of a specific word use (more specifically in newer works the preference of “ama” over “fakat”, where both are borrowed from Arabic and mean “but” in English, and their inverse usage correlation is statistically significant), also speculate that the word length increase can influence the common word choice preferences of authors.

Quantifying language change

Altintas, Can, and Patton (2007) introduce a systematic approach to language change quantification by studying unconsciously-used language features in time-separated parallel translations. For this purpose, they use objective style markers such as vocabulary richness and lengths of words, word stems and suffixes, and employ statistical methods to measure their changes over time.

Applied linguistics

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, linguistics, psychology, computer science, anthropology, and sociology.

Domain

Major branches of applied linguistics include bilingualism and multilingualism, computer-mediated communication (CMC), conversation analysis,contrastive linguistics, deaf linguistics, language assessment, literacies, discourse analysis, language pedagogy, second language acquisition,lexicography, language planning and policies, stylistics, pragmatics, forensic linguistics, and translation.

Major journals of the field include Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, International Review of Applied Linguistics, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Issues in Applied Linguistics, and Language Learning.

[edit]History

The tradition of applied linguistics established itself in part as a response to the narrowing of focus in linguistics with the advent in the late 1950s ofgenerative linguistics, and has always maintained a socially accountable role, demonstrated by its central interest in language problems.

Although the field of applied linguistics started from Europe and the United States, the field rapidly flourished in the international context.

Applied linguistics first concerned itself with principles and practices on the basis of linguistics. In the early days, applied linguistics was thought as “linguistics-applied” at least from the outside of the field. In the 1960s, however, applied linguistics was expanded to include language assessment,language policy, and second language acquisition. As early as the 1970s, applied linguistics became a problem-driven field rather than theoretical linguistics. Applied linguistics also included solution of language-related problems in the real world. By the 1990s, applied linguistics has broadened including critical studies and multilingualism. Research of applied linguistics was shifted to "the theoretical and empirical investigation of real world problems in which language is a central issue.

United States

In the United States, applied linguistics also began narrowly as the application of insights from structural linguistics—first to the teaching of English in schools and subsequently to second and foreign language teaching. The linguistics applied approach to language teaching was promulgated most strenuously by Leonard Bloomfield, who developed the foundation for the Army Specialized Training Program, and by Charles C. Fries, who established the English Language Institute (ELI) at the University of Michigan in 1941. In 1948, the Research Club at Michigan established Language Learning: A Journal of Applied Linguistics, the first journal to bear the term applied linguistics. In the late 1960s, applied linguistics began to establish its own identity as an interdisciplinary field concerned with real-world language issues. The new identity was solidified by the creation of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 1977.

United Kingdom

The British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) was established in 1967. Its mission is "the advancement of education by fostering and promoting, by any lawful charitable means, the study of language use, language acquisition and language teaching and the fostering of interdisciplinary collaboration in this study [...]" 

Australia

Australian applied linguistics took as its target the applied linguistics of mother tongue teaching and teaching English to immigrants. The Australia tradition shows a strong influence of continental Europe and of the USA, rather than of Britain. Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) was established at a national congress of applied linguists held in August 1976. 

Japan

In 1982, the Japan Association of Applied Linguistics (JAAL) was established in the Japan Association of College English Teachers (JACET) in order to engage in activities on a more international scale. In 1984, JAAL became an affiliate of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA).