APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND 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.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

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 of generative 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.

GROWTH OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS

American linguistics has been historically central to the emergence of the discipline generally as synchronic descriptive research on many languages received its greatest academic support and research funding in the United States.

The growth of American linguistics began when European anthropological linguistics arrived in North American to study and record native-American languages bedore many of those languages disappeared.

GENERATIVE LINGUISTICS

Generative linguistics includes a set of explanatory theories developed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. It opposes the behaviourist theory and structuralism.

Generative theory is distinguished from other traditions by distinguishing competence and performance, which distinguishes in the act of speech its linguistic capacity. Thus, under this approach, each speaker has a linguistic organ specialized in the analysis and production of complex structures forming the speech. In other words, every language form an observable structure, result of an innate system (read "genetic"), and universally shared. It is therefore necessary, according to this school of thought, to understand the structure of this system and its behavior.

CURRENT GENERATIVE THEORY

In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences. In most approaches to generative grammar, the rules will also predict themorphology of a sentence.

Generative grammar originates in the work of Noam Chomsky, beginning in the late 1950s. Early versions of Chomsky's theory were called transformational grammar, and this term is still used as a collective term that includes his subsequent theories. There are a number of competing versions of generative grammar currently practiced within linguistics. Chomsky's current theory is known as the Minimalist program. Other prominent theories include or have included head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, categorial grammar, relational grammar, link grammar and tree-adjoining grammar.

Chomsky has argued that many of the properties of a generative grammar arise from an "innate" universal grammar. Proponents of generative grammar have argued that most grammar is not the result of communicative function and is not simply learned from the environment (see poverty of the stimulus argument). In this respect, generative grammar takes a point of view different from cognitive grammar, functional and behaviorist theories.

Most versions of generative grammar characterize sentences as either grammatically correct (also known as well formed) or not. The rules of a generative grammar typically function as an algorithm to predict grammaticality as a discrete (yes-or-no) result. In this respect, it differs from stochastic grammar, which considers grammaticality as a probabilistic variable. However, some work in generative grammar (e.g. recent work by Joan Bresnan) uses stochastic versions of optimality theory

DESCRIPTIVE SYNTAX

 The descriptivist approach initiated by De Saussure and developed in the United States under Boas did not disappear with the rise of the behavioristically oriented American structural linguistics. In the United States, many anthropological linguistics continued descriptive research on native-American languages.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, these British grammarians/linguistics developed major corpuses of the English language which were used, in turn, as resources for an extremely influential modern descriptive grammar of English.

At the present time, this line of linguistic research is becoming more popular as the use of computers in analyzing the corpuses increases Sociolinguistic research  comparing oral and written varieties of language make extensive use of descriptive grammars.

FUNCTIONAL AND TYPOLOGICAL THEORIES

Functional linguists interested in the shapping influence of chafe, Hawkins, Kuno and Thompson.

A functional linguistic id concerned about discouse.

Holliday’s influence emphasis on discourse and communication, competence performance and language has been adadpted to the needs of humans.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTIC:

Grouded in European structuralism and influence by Sapir’s.

It study discourse uses of language in various social context.

SOCIOLINGUISTIC:

It was recognize as a major alternative discipline to formal approaches to linguistic.

Phonetics: phonology; morphology; syntax; pragmatics and semantics.

It stuy of language variation and its relations to different social context.