Informative Essay on Applied Linguistics
Language can be viewed as a social fact, as a psychological state (mental dictionary), as a set of structures (a grammatical system: a system to what orders the words have to come in if they are to make sense), or as a collection of outputs (utterances/ sentences: spoken or written). Language can be viewed as a set of choices (different ways of saying a sentence), a set of contrasts (an inversion of sentences).
Idiolect (I-language: language of the individual): the language system of an individual as expressed by the way he or she speaks or writes within the overall system of a reticular language. In a broader sense, someone”s idiolect includes their way of communicating; for example, their choice of utterances and the way they interpret the utterances made by others.
In a narrower sense, an idiolect might entail features, either in speech or writing, which distinguish one individual from others, such as o voice quality ( the overall impression that a listener obtains of a speaker”s voice or characteristics of a particular voice that enable the listener to distinguish one voice from another, such as when a person is able to identify a telephone caller) o pitch when we listen to people speaking, we can hear some sounds or groups of sounds in their speech to be relatively higher or lower than others) o speech rhythm (rhythm in speech is created by the contracting or relaxing of chest muscles).
Many linguists prefer to use the term IDIOLECT for the language of an individual. So you do not speak English, you speak your idiolect. That seems simple enough until we ask what English” consists of. Presumably it consists of the sum of all the idiolect of people who we agree are speaking English. Do I-language: an approach to language which sees it as an internal property of the unman mind and as not something external or an attempt to construct grammars showing the way human mind structures language and which (universal) principles are involved.
E-language: an approach to language which describes the general structures and patterns. E-language= Langue (Assure) = Competence (Chomsky): the system of a language, that is the arrangement of sounds and words which speakers of a language have a shared knowledge (agree to use). Langue is the ideal form of a language. Parole (Assure): the actual use of language by people in speech or writing. Competence: a person”s internalized grammar of a language. This means a person”s ability to create and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before.
It also includes a person”s knowledge of what are and what are not sentences of a particular language. For example, a speaker of English would recognize I want to go home as an English sentence but would not accept a sentence such as I want going home even though all the words in it are English words. Competence often refers to the ideal speaker/hearer, that is an idealized but a not real person who would have a complete knowledge of the whole language. Performance: a person”s actual use of language.
A difference is made between a person”s knowledge of the language (competence) and how a person uses this knowledge in producing and understanding sentences (performance). The difference between linguistic competence and linguistic performance can be seen, for example, in the production of long and complex sentences. People may have the competence to produce an infinitely long sentence but when they actually attempt to use this knowledge (=perform) there are many reasons why they restrict the number of adjectives, adverbs, and clauses in any one sentence.
They may run out of breath, or their sterner may get bored or forget what has been said if the sentence is too long. In using language, people make errors or false starts. These may be due to performance factors such as fatigue, lack of attention, excitement, nervousness. Their actual use of language on a particular occasion may not reflect their competence. The errors they make are described as examples of performance. Keywords Language: the system of human communication which consists of the structured arrangement of sounds or written representation into larger unit e. G. Orpheus, word, sentence, utterance. A social fact, a kind of social contract, or a set of structure r as a collection of output. Idiolect: langue for specific group of people or language for individual; only the speaker of this language can understand. Utterance: a unit of analysis in speech which has been defined in various way but commonly as a sequence of words within a single person’s turn at talk that fall under a single intonation contour. Universal grammar: a thorny which claims to account for grammatical competence of every adult no matter what language he or she speaks.
Langue: part of language which is not complete in any individual, but exists only in the collectivity. Parole: language that is used individually. (I-language) E-language: is the “external” manifestation of the “internally’ (mentally) represented grammar of many individual. It is appropriate for social, political, mathematical and logical statement. I-language: language viewed as internal property of human mind or a computational system in human brain. Answer Sq 1 . The author says, “A language is a social fact, a kind of social contract. ” What does this mean?
This means that language is the mean of communication which not only an individual but also all people in the community accept and understand it as a hole. People use language as a contract for their daily life, since language is a social fact that people use to understand each other and purposely set up the proof of their will or promise. 2. What do you understand from the examples that follow? A. Kim kissed crocodile. B. The crocodile kissed Kim. C. Kissed crocodile Kim the. Sentence A and B are understandable; that is, we can say that they are language which is seen as a set of choice and a set of contrast.
A set of choice or contrast means that a group of word are systematically in order that makes us understand what the intention of the sentence is. However, sentence C does not make sense at all, and it is not a language. 3. What is the difference between “speak a grammar” and “speak a language”? Speak a language means to speak a language that make other people understand; that is, it refers to when people in the society speak language of the society (E-language), which they use it as mean of communication.
However, “speak grammar” refers to when an individual speak his or her own language sticking deep inside their mind or brain, and cannot be understood by others. This language is not for society, but for individual only. 4. Assure (1969) make an analogy as saying When orchestra plays a symphony, the symphony exists externally to the way in which it is performed: that existence is comparable to langue in language study. The actual performance, which may contain idiosyncrasies or errors, is to be comparable to parole. ‘ Use this analogy to explain what E-language and I-language are.
This means that E-language is the same as langue, which refers to the language that is externally used in the society and it is accepted as the language of the society, which people use it as the mean of contract and communication. However, I-language s equalized to parole referring to the language existing only in the individual, and usually it is not understood by others and considered as the error of language for people in the society. 5. Language is a set of choice and a set of contrast, yet why cant we always choose to organize the word in utterances in our preferred way?
Even though language is a set of choice and contrast, we cannot Just organize language as we want because our own organization of language can become l- language which is not understood by others. This is because I-language is the language for individual only, and only the speaker can understand it. Chapter 2: Components of Language Phonology is the description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds in a language. Phonology is concerned with the abstract or mental aspect of the sounds in language rather than with the actual physical articulation of speech sounds.
Phonology is concerned with the abstract set of sounds in a language that allows us to distinguish meaning in the actual physical sounds we hear and say. Phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language which can distinguish two words or each one of these meaning-distinguishing sounds in a language. /p/, lb/ are homes of English. O Phoneme has contrastive property. If we substitute one sound for another in a word and there is a change of meaning, then the two sounds represent different phonemes. O English is often considered to have 44 phonemes: 24 consonants and 20 vowels.
Phone is the different versions of the phoneme regularly produced in actual speech ( in the mouth). Allophone is a group of several phones, all of which are versions of one phoneme. For example, the [t] sound in the word tar is normally pronounced with a stronger puff of air (aspirated) than is present in the [t] sound in the word star. Minimal pair is when two words in a language which differ from each other by only one distinctive sound (one phoneme), occurring in the same position, and which also differ in meaning. For example, fan-van, bet-bat, site-side, put-shut are some examples of minimal pairs.
The Sound Patterns of Language Minimal set is when a group of words can be differentiated, each one from the others, by changing one phoneme (always in the same position in the word). For example, bet-set-vet-get-let and big-pig-rig-fig-wig are examples of minimal set. Phonetics’s is the arrangements of the distinctive sound units (phonemes) in a language. For example, in English, the consonant groups /SSP/ and /star/ can occur at the beginning of a word, as in sprout, strain, but they cannot occur at the end of a word.
Syllable is a unit in speech which is often longer than one sound and smaller than a whole word. For example, the word terminology consists of five syllables: term-mi-no-lo- gay. O A syllable contains onset (consonant(s)) and rhyme which has two parts nucleus (vowel) and coda (consonant(s)). The basic structure of the kind of syllable found in English words can be C.V. (green), PVC (eggs), C.V. (them), etc. Consonant cluster is a sequence of two or more consonants. Consonants clusters may occur at the beginning of a word (an initial cluster), at the end of a word (a final cluster) or within a word (a medial cluster).
Co-articulation is the process of making one sound almost at the same time as the next sound. Circulation has two well-known effects: assimilation and elision. O Assimilation occurs when a speech sound changes, and becomes more like another sound which follows or precedes it, or when two sound segments occur in sequence and some aspect of one segment is taken or copied by the other. O Elision is the leaving out of a sound or sounds in speech. O Everyone”s normal beech entails assimilation and elision which should be regarded as some type of sloppiness or laziness.
The point of investigating these phonological processes is not to arrive at a set of rules about how a language should be pronounced, but to try to come to an understanding of the regularities and patterns which underlies the actual use of sounds in language. Words and Word-formation Process -Etymology: the study of the origin and history of a word -Coinage: the invention of totally new terms (Ex: aspirin, nylon, Baseline) -Borrowing: words that is borrowed from other languages (Ex: Piano(lately), Sofa(Arabic),
Yogurt(Turkish)) -Compounding: two separate words are Joint together (bookcase, doorknob, fingerprint, textbook) -Blending: combination of 2 separate forms to produce a single new term. Ex: motel (motor/hotel), smog (smoke/haze) -Clipping: reduction of words more than one syllable to a shorter form. Ex: condo (condominium), bra (brassiere), ad (advertisement) -Facilitation: reduction of words which also change the function, usually from noun to verb.
Ex: emote (from Emotion), donate (from Donation), babysat (from Babysitter) -Conversion: a change in the function of a word, esp. noun becomes verb without any deduction. Ex: Someone has to chair the meeting. Or We bottled the homebred – Acronyms: new words that are formed from initial letters of a set of other words. Ex: CD (compact disk), VS. (video cassette recorder), ATM (automatic teller machine), PIN (personal identification number) -Derivation: the affixes (prefix & suffix) added to the beginning or the end of a word.
Ex: unhappy, misrepresent, Joyful, careless Morphology: the study of forms Morphology Morpheme: a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. Lexical Free functional Morpheme derivation bound inflectional Free morpheme: morpheme that can stand by themselves as single word. – Lexical morpheme: set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs. For example: Car, red, drive. – Functional morpheme: functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronoun. For expo: and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in the, them.
Bound morpheme: morpheme that cannot stand alone and must attached to another forms. – Derivation morpheme: the affixes that make words into a different grammatical category from stem. For expo: -full, -less, re-, UN- Inflectional morpheme: set of bound morphemes to indicate aspects of the aromatically function of a word. 2 inflections attached to nouns, -g’s (possessive) and -s (plural). 4 inflections attached to verbs, -s (3rd person singular), -inning (present participle), -De (past tense) and -en (past participle). Inflections attached to adjectives: -est. (superlative) and -re (comparative). Lymphoma: the group or set of different morphs, all versions of one morpheme OR any of the different forms of a morpheme. For example: -s, -sees, 0 (zero morph). They are all lymphomas of the plural morpheme. Grammar Traditional grammar: a grammar which is usually based on earlier grammar of Latin r Greek and applied to the analysis of newer” languages such as English. Agreement: In English sentence, agreement is based on the category of number, whether the noun is singular or plural.
It is also based on the category of person, that is, first person (involving the speaker), second person (involving the hearer) and third person (involving any others). The form the verb must also be described in terms of tense. The final category is gender. Gender vs. Grammatical gender: Gender” refers to the natural gender or biological gender, that is, male or female and what words agree with it. She, her) refer to female entities, whereas (he, his) refer to male entities. Grammatical Gender” refers to the types of nouns which is considered masculine and feminine.
For example, in Spanish there are article to call a noun in feminine (la) or masculine (la) such el sol ( the sun), la ulna (the moon). It does not imply that the moon”s sex is female or the sun”s male. The grammar simply states this way to use article with different noun. The prescriptive approach: Grammarian in the eighteen century in English create rule for the proper use of English. For example: You must not split an infinitive. You must not end a sentence with a preposition. Therefore, traditional teacher would correct sentences like: Who did you go with? O With whom did you go? However, we should be skeptical of the origin of some of these rules and asking whether they are appropriately applied to the English language. Let”s study this traditional rule Mimi must not split an infinitive”. The book elaborates by using Captain Kirk”s infinitive. To boldly go, to solemnly swear, according to Traditional grammar, is inappropriate. To go boldly, boldly to go should be the appropriate form. In Latin grammar, it is clear that infinitive cannot be separated from a word because Latin infinitives are single words.
However, it is not appropriate to carry this idea over to English where the infinitive form does not consist of a single form, but of two words, to and go. The descriptive approach Analysts collected samples of the language they were interested in and attempted to describe the regular structure of the language as it was used, not according to some view of how it should be used. This is called the descriptive approach. Structural Analysis Structural analysis” main concern is to investigate the distribution of forms in a engage.
The method involves The makes a lot of noise. I heard yesterday. The use of test-frame” that can be sentences with empty slots in them. For example: By developing a set of test-frames of this type and discovering which forms fit the slots in the test-frame, we can produce a description of some aspects of the sentence structures of a language. Immediate Constituent Analysis: is designed to show how small constituents (or components) in sentences go together to form larger constituents. One basic step is determining how words go together to form phrases.
