Transcript Kein Folientitel - uni

Introduction to
Applied English Linguistics
- winter semester 2002/03 Prof Dr Kurt Kohn
University of Tübingen
Chair of Applied English Linguistics
[email protected]
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.
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
Part I
(1) Getting started
24 Oct
(2) First orientation
24, 31 Oct
(3) Dimensions and models of Language
7, 14, 21 Nov
Getting started
“Teach me and I forget - Tell me and I remember - Involve
me and I learn.” (Benjamin Franklin)
 Lecture with active participation!
back
First Orientation
Structure 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
First Orientation
Phonetic processing & phonological categories
“The eighth tall bottle fell of the tray last night”
“The fifth tall bottle fell of the tray last night”
back
First Orientation
Bottom up & top down
Guess what?
?????????????????????
back
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
First Orientation: What’s in a language?
Linguistic
Knowledge
Discourse
World
Knowledge
next
First Orientation: What’s in a language
Do you have a watch?
No, sorry. But I think it’s about six
figure
First Orientation: What’s in a language?
Linguistic
Knowledge
Communicative
situation
Discourse
Communicative
intentions
World
Knowledge
next
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
First Orientation: What’s in a language?
Linguistic
Knowledge
Communicative
situation
Discourse
World
Knowledge
Communicative
intentions
Dimensions & models of Language
Basic principles of structuralism
Constituent structure
Grammatical competence
Communicative competence
Models
A few interim remarks
Speech act theory
From sentence to utterance meaning
Discourse & discourse processing
Language as cognition
Dimensions & models of Language
Basic 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
Dimensions & models of Language
Basic 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
Dimensions & models of Language
Basic 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”)
Dimensions & models of Language
Basic 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
observable data (corpus
based
on)
Dimensions & models of Language
Basic 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
Dimensions & models of Language
Basic principles of structuralism
In this succession of events, Bloomfield distinguishes three parts (p.
23 ff.):
(A) Practical events preceding 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
Dimensions & models of Language
Basic 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)
Dimensions & models of Language
Basic 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!!)
Dimensions & models of Language
Basic 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
Dimensions & models of Language
Constituent 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.”
Dimensions & models of Language
Constituent structure
John Lyons (1968: 210 ff):
“Sentences are not just linear sequences of elements, but are
made up of ‘layers’ of immediate constituents, each lowerlevel constituent being part of a higher –level constituent.
Dimensions & models of Language
Constituent structure
 (Poor John) (ran away) 
X
Y
Poor
Z
John
ran
Constituent structure and ambiguity:
„They are visiting fishermen“
away
Dimensions & models of Language
Constituent 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)
Dimensions & models of Language
Constituent structure
Distributional classification of constituents
(substitution classes)
Poor John
ran way
Poor John
ran way
Sally
ran away
Poor John
wrote a book
My horse
ran away
Poor John
is eating
She
ran away
Poor John
is a nice guy
NP: noun phrase
VP: verb phrase
back
Models
A few interim remarks
Diagrams
activities & statements
What is a model ?
And what do we need them for?
Maps
activities & statements
Objects – meanings – construction rules
Models
A few interim remarks
Models of language
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
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)
Grammatical competence
Grammar of L
“The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis
of 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)
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)
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)
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)
Grammatical competence
Phrase structure grammar
Derivation:
Phrase structure rules (‘rewrite rules’):
Sentence
Sentence  NP + VP
NP + VP
NP  T +N
T + N + VP
VP  Verb + NP
T + N + Verb + NP
T  the
the + N + Verb + NP
N  man, ball
the + man Verb + NP
Verb  hit, took
the + man + hit + NP
the + man + hit + T + N
Tree diagram
the + man + hit + the + N
the + man + hit + the + ball
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
Grammatical competence
Linguistic (= grammatical ) competence
"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal
speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speechcommunity, 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."
Noam Chomsky 1964: 3
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."
Noam Chomsky 1964: 4
back
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)
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)
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)
Communicative competence
?? Grammatical competence ??
????
Grammatical Competence
as part of
Communicative Competence
????
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Models of Language
Speech 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
Speech act theory
Austin'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
'constative' declaratives
'performative' declaratives
Constatives say things
Performatives do things
The world is round.
I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.
John runs down the street.
I bet it will rain tomorrow.
I declare war on Fantasyland.
I dub thee Sir Walter.
I apologise.
Speech act theory
Felicity 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
I hereby divorce you.
(2)
appropriate persons and circumstances
I declare war on Fantasyland.
B. (1)
correct execution of the procedure
Marriage ceremony: “I it pleases you.” “I’ll do my best.”
(2)
complete execution
I bet you six pence it will rain tomorrow - You're on.
C. (1)
speaker's thoughts, feelings, intentions as required
I find you guilty.
(2)
consequent conduct as specified in the procedure
I promise to be there.
"misfires"
"abuses"
Speech act theory
3 dimensions
 Three different (but inseparable) aspects of meaning can be
distinguished in each utterance (Austin: different 'forces')
It's me again.
1. conveys the proposition that ...
 locutionary force
2. counts as ...
 illocutionary force
3. will have effects on the hearer ...
 perlocutionary force
the speaker has returned to
a place s/he was before
an (intended) apology for
troubling someone a
second time
which are not necessarily
intended (e.g. disturbing
the addressee)
Speech act theory
Indirect 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
Models of Language
From 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
Models of Language
From 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
Models of Language
From sentence to utterance meaning
A: Did you enjoy your holiday?
B: The beaches were crowded and the hotel was full of bugs
Explicatures flesh out a linguistically encoded semantic
representation. While they go beyond the meaning of the
words uttered, they are nevertheless directly dependent on
those meanings.
Implicatures are inferred from these fleshed-out semantic
representations. The recovery of an implicature
presupposes the hearer's understanding of what the
speaker has said.

Pragmatic interpretation: contextual information
and the Principle of Relevance are involved in the recovery
of both explicatures and implicatures.
Models of Language
From sentence to utterance meaning
A: Did you enjoy your holiday?
B: The beaches were crowded and the hotel was full of bugs
" . . . by context we mean the beliefs and assumptions the
hearer constructs for the interpretation of an utterance
either on the basis of her perceptual abilities or on the
basis of the assumption she has stored in memory or on
the basis of her interpretation of previous utterances."
(Blakemore, p. 87)
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Models of Language
Discourse and discourse processing
Halliday, M.A.K. & R. Hasan (1976). Cohesion in English. Longman
Brown, G. & G. Yule (1983). Discourse analysis. CUP
From discourse as object
to discourse as process
Discourse and discourse processing
Cohesion and coherence
Douglas had given him the impression that some danger was
hanging over his head, and he always looked upon his sudden
departure from California, and also his renting a house in so
quiet a place in England, as being connected with this peril. He
imagined
that
some
secret
society,
some
implacable
organization, was on Douglas’s track which would never rest
until it killed him. Some remarks of his had given him this
idea, though he had never told him what the society was, nor
how he had come to offend it. He could only suppose that the
legend upon the placard had some reference to this secret
society.
(The Valley of Fear, p. 50)
Discourse and discourse processing
Language in use
"A text is a unit of language in use. It is not a grammatical
unit like a clause or a sentence; and it is not defined by its
size. A text is sometimes envisaged to be some kind of
super-sentence, a grammatical unit that is larger than a
sentence but is related to a sentence in the same way that
a sentence is related to a clause, a clause to a group and
so on: by CONSTITUENCY, the composition of larger units
out of smaller ones. But this is misleading. A text is not
something that is like a sentence, only bigger; it is
something that differs from a sentence in kind. "
(Halliday & Hasan, p. 1ff.)
Discourse and discourse processing
Discourse as a semantic unit
"A text is best regarded as a SEMANTIC unit: a unit not of
form but of meaning. Thus it is related to a clause or
sentence not by size but by REALIZATION, the coding of
one symbolic system in another. A text does not CONSIST
of sentences; it is REALIZED BY, or encoded in, sentences.
If we understand it in this way, we shall not expect to find
the same kind of STRUCTURAL integration among the parts
of a text as we find among the parts of a sentence or
clause. The unity of a text is a unity of a different kind."
(Halliday & Hasan, p. 1ff.)
Discourse and discourse processing
Texture
Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a
fireproof dish.
“The concept of TEXTURE is entirely appropriate to express
the property of ‘being a text’. A text has texture, and this is
what distinguishes it from something that is not a text. It
derives this texture from the fact that it functions as a
unity with respect to its environment.
What we are investigating in this book are the resources
that English has for creating texture."
(Halliday & Hasan p. 2)
Discourse and discourse processing
Cohesion
Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a
fireproof dish.
But there is one specific kind of meaning relation that is
critical for the creation of texture: that in which ONE
ELEMENT IS INTERPRETED BY REFERENCE TO ANOTHER.
What cohesion has to do with is the way in which the
meaning of the elements is interpreted. Where the
interpretation of any item in the discourse requires making
reference to some other item in the discourse, there is
cohesion." (Halliday & Hasan p.11)
Discourse and discourse processing
”Train desaster”
Train Disaster
Bernard used all his strength to push the speed control towards
"zero", and closed his eyes. It was too late. With a screeching
noise and a deafening crash, the train hit the truck and both
shattered to pieces against the steep bare wall of the mountain.
Chunks of wagons, passenger seats, and parts of bodies were
flung through the air, and landed hard on the rails or rolled
lifelessly down towards the lake. When everything was finally still,
the scene was covered in rubble and dust, as if a battle had taken
place.
"Don't worry, sonny," he heard his father say, "we'll get you a new
one for your birthday. But don't go so fast next time!" The boy
wiped his tears and went to fetch the vacuum cleaner.
World(s) in the Mind
Faces
Tea-potting
Ceci n’est pas une
pipe
Constructing Mental Worlds 1
(remote control and co-operativity)
John was on his way to school.
Last week he had been unable
to control the class.
It was unfair of the math teacher
to leave him in charge.
After all, it is not a normal part
of a janitor's duties.
Constructing Mental Worlds 2
(bottom up & top down)
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I
could see them hitting. They were coming toward where
the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was
hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the
flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag
back and they went to the table, and he hit and the
other hit. They went on, and I went along the fence.
Luster came away from the flower tree and we went
along the fence and they stopped and I looked through
the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.
(William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury)
Constructing Mental Worlds 3
(up the garden path)
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)
Discourse and discourse processing
Discourse as process
"We do not see an advantage in trying to determine constitutive
formal features which a text must possess to qualify as a 'text'.
Texts are what hearers and readers treat as texts."
(Brown & Yule, p. 199)
Mental Modelling / Constructing Mental Worlds
Linguistic knowledge,
Cohesion and coherence
Contextual knowledge
World knowledge
Bottom up & top down
Back to our central question:
What kind of model of language is involved ?
Once again: What’s in a language?
Linguistic
Knowledge
Communicative
situation
Discourse
World
Knowledge
Communicative
intentions