The study, use and spread of language

Bloomfield proposes that the empirical science of language should study a real rather than a fancied object. 

Language conceived as a normative ideal does not constitute an empirical object; language as a universal phenomenon can only be established inductively; one can 

observe actual speech----and its actual effects on hearers---without preconceptions, so the Behaviorist approach provides a model. 

Speech communities are best observed behavioristically. Density of communication can be empirically observed, quantified, and correlated with geography, social stratification, occupation, success in cooperation, and consequences in describable speech differences. 

There are behavioral correlates for determining traditional concerns about language: 

(1)The literary standard 

(2)The colloquial standard 

(3)The provincial standard 

(4)Sub-standard 

(5)Local dialect 

The phoneme. Sound-production can be described empirically. Phonetics is the branch of science that deals with it. 

What phonetics provides is an objective record of gross acoustic features, only part of which are distinctive for particular languages, while phonology, or practical phonetics, determines which features are the distinctive ones. 

Phonetic basis. This predominantly phonetic account ‘may be viewed as a kind of basis which may be modified in various ways’. 

Modification, presumes some standard from which a departure is made, and the criteria for establishing the base can vary, legitimately or inconsistently. 

For instance, it might be inconsistent to shift, in phonology, from subjective, or objective production to subjective reception or objective disturbance of the air, or from objective measurement to subjective standards.

Ethnography of Speech

The role of speech in human behavior has always been honored in anthropological principle, if sometimes slighted in practice. The importance of its study has been declaimed, surveyed with insightful detail, and accepted as a principle of field work.

Concept of Ethnography

That the study of speech might be crucial to a science of man has been a recurrent anthropological theme. 

Is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group, but revealing more of basic processes because more out of awareness, less subject to overlay by rationalization. Some anthropologists have seen language, and hence linguistics, as basic to a science of man because it provides a link between the biological and sociocultural levels. Some have seen in modern linguistic methodology a model or harbinger of a general methodology for studying the structure of human behavior.

The Ethnography was pioneered in the field of socio-cultural anthropology but has also become a popular method in various other fields of social sciences—particularly in sociology, communication studies, history. —that studies people, ethnic groups and other ethnic formations, their ethnogenesis, composition, resettlement, social welfare characteristics, as well as their material and spiritual culture.

It is often employed for gathering empirical data on human societies and cultures. Data collection is often done through participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, etc. Ethnography aims to describe the nature of those who are studied (i.e. to describe a people, anethnos) through writing

Ethnography of communication or Speaking

The Ethnography of communication (EOC) is a method of discourse analysis in linguistics, which draws on the anthropological field of ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, it takes both language and culture to be constitutive as well as constructive.

In their book Qualitative Communication Research Methods, communications scholars Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor (2002) explain "Ethnography of communication conceptualizes communication as a continuous flow of information, rather than as a segmented exchange of messages“. According to Deborah Cameron (2001), EOC can be thought of as the application of ethnographic methods to the communication patterns of a group.

EOC can be used as a means by which to study the interactions among members of a specific culture or, what Gerry Philipsen (1975) calls a "speech community." Speech communities create and establish their own speaking codes/norms.

The meaning and understanding of the presence or absence of speech within different communities will vary. Local cultural patterns and norms must be understood for analysis and interpretation of the appropriateness of speech acts situated within specific communities.

Thus, “the statement that talk is not anywhere valued equally in all social contexts suggests a research strategy for discovering and describing cultural or subcultural differences in the value of speaking. 

Speaking is one among other symbolic resources which are allocated and distributed in social situations according to distinctive culture patterns”

The London School

Linguistic description evolves a standard language since eleventh century.
In the sixteenth century the practical linguistic was flourished in England.

Practical Linguistics

Orthoepy- it is the codification and teaching the correct pronunciation.
lexicography- it is the invention of shorthand systems, spelling reform, and the creation of artificial ‘philosophical languages.’
They induce in their practitioners a considerable degree of sophistication about matters linguistics.

Phonetics

Henry Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the working of the vocal organs. He was concerned with the systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform.

Sweet was among the early advocates of the notion of the phoneme, which was a matter of practical importance as the unit which should be symbolized in an ideal system of orthography.

Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of through training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech- sound. 

He invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels.

Linguistics 

J.R. Firth turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject. Firth said that the phonology of a language consist of a number of system of alternative possibilities which come into play at different points in phonological unit such a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another.

A phonemic transcription, represent a fully consistent application of the particular principles of orthography on which European alphabetic scripts happen to be more or less accurately based. 

Firth´s theory allows for an unlimited variety of systems, the more distinct systems a given description recognizes the more complex that description will be.

Languages do not display too great a variety of phonological ‘systems’: thus we do not on the whole find languages with quite different kinds and numbers of consonants before each distintic vowel.

Trubetzkoy assumes that the range of sounds found in the special neutralizing environment will be related in a regular way to the range found in other environments.

School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas)

It was founded in 1916.
London linguistics was a brand of linguistics in which theorizing was controlled by healthy familiarity with realities of alien tongues.

A Firthian phonologycal analysis recognizes a number of ‘systems’ of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units.

The terminological distinction between ‘prosodies’ and ‘phonematic units’ could as well be thought of as ‘prosodies’ that happen to be only one segment long.

In Firthian terms the syllable plays an essential role as the domain of a large number of prosodies.

Like the polysystemic principle, prosodic analysis is a good dissolvent of pseudoquestions, in this case questions about the direction of dependencies which are in fact mutual.

The concept of the prosodic unit in phonology seems, so attractive and natural that it is surprising to find that it is not more widespread. In fact just one American Descriptivists, Zellig Harris, did use a similar notion; but Harris’s ‘long components’ though similar to Firth’s prosodies, are distinct and theoretically less attractive. 

It is a characteristic of the Firthian approach to be much more concerned with the ‘systems’ of choices between alternatives which occur in a language than with the details of how particular alternatives are realized.

Thus Henderson makes a formal statement of the possible combinations of her Vietnamese prosodies, but she discusses the phonetic realization of the prosodies informally, tacitly suggesting that aspect of her exposition is not part of the analysis proper. 

Nowhere in Chomsky and Halle’s Sound pattern of English will one find a statement of the pattern of possible phonological shapes of English syllables or words.
Firth insisted that sound and meaning in language were more directly related that they are ussually taken to be.

For Firth, a phonology was a structure of system of choices were systems of meaning.

Firth meant that each individual choice point in grammar had its own individual semantic correlates, and this just cannot be taken seriously.
¢Linguistics of the London School have done much more work on the analysis of intonation that have Americans of any camp and the Brithis work.

To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we muste exmine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski, professor of Anthropology at the London School.

The most important aspect of Malinowski´s theorizing, as distinct for his purely ethnographic work, concerned the functioning of language.

For Malinowski, to think of language as a ‘means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener’ was a myth: to speak, particulary in a primitive culture, is not to tell but to do.
Word are tools, and the ‘meaning’ of a tool is its use.

Firth accepted Malinowski’s viwe of language. Firth uses the word ‘meaning’, wich occurs frequently in his writings, in rather bizarre ways. 

Firthian phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choices which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentencesthat one’s language makes available
To make this clearer, we may contrast the systemic approach with Chomsky´s approach to grammar. A Chomskyan grammar defines the class of well-formed senteces in a language by providing a set of rules for rewriting symbols as other symbols.

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The Descriptivists

The descriptivist approach to linguistic science is most closely associated with the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1887 - 1949). Descriptivism originated in America at the beginning of this century and was a major paradigm for research right up until the 1960s. The inspiration for descriptivism was the urgent need to produce a lasting record of the native languages of North America, since many of them were under immediate threat of extinction. To this end, the American anthropologist Franz Boas spearheaded an early survey and published the results in the classic Handbook of American Indian Languages, in 1911. Nowadays, it is no surprise to learn that linguists study all manner of strange and exotic languages from around the world. Yet it was only with the pioneering work of Boas that such languages were accorded equal status with more familiar objects of study like Latin, Greek and German. In this respect, descriptivism represented a sharp break with the traditions of European linguistics.

The initial surprise, which never ceased to impress descriptivists, was the enormous range of linguistic diversity they unearthed. Seemingly, each new language they came across possessed quite unique structures and categories. For example, it was discovered that in Kwakiutl, a language indigenous to British Columbia, verbs are not inflected to indicate the time of action, as in most European languages, but to indicate whether or not the speaker actually witnessed an event in person, or only learned of it from another person, from the available evidence, or even from a dream. Remarkably, these differences of perspective are encoded in the syntax of the language. In English we would require long, possibly unwieldy phrases to convey what, in Kwakiutl, would be encoded in the grammar via verb inflections.

In order to cope with the barrage of alien concepts and constructions in their analyses, descriptivists made strenuous efforts to set aside their preconceptions about language. Methods of analysis appropriate for Latin and Greek could easily give a distorted picture when applied to a native American language. A fundamental aim was to devise an objective approach, a set of ‘discovery procedures’, which could be applied to any language, in order to interpret it correctly and produce an accurate description. This technique failed in its assumption that any set of procedures or techniques of analysis are entirely independent of the object studied. In fact, it will always be the case in any science that the methods of investigation employed will reflect to some extent the expectations and prejudices of the scientist.

In contrast with current preoccupations in linguistics (see universal grammar), a notable feature of descriptivism is its disdain for the idea that certain universal linguistic concepts and categories are inherent in all human languages. Bloomfield asserted the opposing ‘infinite diversity’ view with the observation that the very next language one came across might well contradict any universal tendencies hitherto observed, and that it was therefore futile to study languages with a view to discovering underlying universal characteristics. MS

Further reading R.A. Hall, Leonard Bloomfield: Essays on His Life and Work; , D. Hymes and , J. Fought, American Structuralism.

Pragmatics

A branch of linguistics concerned with the use of language in social contexts and the ways in which people produce and comprehend meanings through language.

• "What does pragmatics have to offer that cannot be found in good old-fashioned linguistics? What do pragmatic methods give us in the way of greater understanding of how the human mind works, how humans communicate, how they manipulate one another, and in general, how they use language?
  
  "The general answer is: pragmatics is needed if we want a fuller, deeper, and generally more reasonable account of human language behavior.
  
  "A more practical answer would be: outside of pragmatics, no understanding; sometimes, a pragmatic account is the only one that makes sense, as in the following example, borrowed from David Lodge's Paradise News:

  'I just met the old Irishman and his son, coming out of the toilet.'
  'I wouldn't have thought there was room for the two of them.'
  'No silly, I mean I was coming out of the toilet. They were waiting.'

Social Language Use (Pragmatics)

You have invited your friend over for dinner. Your child sees your friend reach for some cookies and says, "Better not take those, or you'll get even bigger." You're embarrassed that your child could speak so rudely. However, you should consider that your child may may not know how to use language appropriately in social situations and did not mean harm by the comment.

An individual may say words clearly and use long, complex sentences with correct grammar, but still have a communication problem - if he or she has not mastered the rules for social language known as pragmatics . Adults may also have difficulty with pragmatics, for example, as a result of a brain injury or stroke.

Pragmatics involve three major communication skills:

• Using language for different purposes, such as
  • greeting (e.g., hello, goodbye)
  • informing (e.g., I'm going to get a cookie)
  • demanding (e.g., Give me a cookie)
  • promising (e.g., I'm going to get you a cookie)
  • requesting (e.g., I would like a cookie, please)
• Changing language according to the needs of a listener or situation, such as
  • talking differently to a baby than to an adult
  • giving background information to an unfamiliar listener
  • speaking differently in a classroom than on a playground
• Following rules for conversations and storytelling, such as
  • taking turns in conversation
  • introducing topics of conversation
  • staying on topic
  • rephrasing when misunderstood
  • how to use verbal and nonverbal signals
  • how close to stand to someone when speaking
  • how to use facial expressions and eye contact

These rules may vary across cultures and within cultures. It is important to understand the rules of your communication partner.

An individual with pragmatic problems may:

• say inappropriate or unrelated things during conversations
• tell stories in a disorganized way
• have little variety in language use

It is not unusual for children to have pragmatic problems in only a few situations. However, if problems in social language use occur often and seem inappropriate considering the child's age, a pragmatic disorder may exist. Pragmatic disorders often coexist with other language problems such as vocabulary development or grammar. Pragmatic problems can lower social acceptance. Peers may avoid having conversations with an individual with a pragmatic disorder.