Theoretical linguistics in the pre-university classroom ed. by Alice Corr and Anna Pineda (review)

Any attempt to draw a principled dividing line between Theoretical Linguistics (TL) and Applied Linguistics (AL) would presumably start from oppositions established along the following two main axes: 1. The form versus function axis, which subsumes a number of oppositions, ranging from that of quantity versus quality to the opposition between integrative versus non-integrative models of language description; 2. The scientific methodology axis, along which an opposition can be established between formal and empirical linguistics.

One of my aims in this chapter, which complements the preceding one, is to motivate a distinction between two terms that are currently employed by most linguists as synonyms and to use this terminological distinction as a peg upon which to hang some comments about the present state of linguistics. The terms in question are ‘linguistic theory’ and ‘theoretical linguistics’. Another aim is to comment further upon the theoretical term ‘language-system’ in relation to Saussure's terms ‘langue’ and ‘langage’. The distinction between ‘linguistic theory’ and ‘theoretical linguistics’ is by no means the only terminological distinction that I shall be drawing, here and in other chapters of this book. I do not wish to give the impression, however, that my sole (or primary) concern is at any point purely terminological. I am much more interested in the metatheoretical or methodological issues that the use of one term rather than another, or of one term in addition to another, helps us to identify. As far as the terms ‘theoretical linguistics’ and ‘linguistic theory’ are concerned, I wish to suggest that, if they are kept distinct, each of them can be usefully employed to refer to what have now emerged, or are in process of emerging, as two rather different, but equally important, sub-branches of linguistics. When my Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (1968a) was published, more than twenty years ago, it was hailed by Bar-Hillel as “the first [book of its kind] … to carry the long overdue adjective ‘theoretical’ in its title” (1969: 449).

Three avenues of theoretical research provide insights for discovering abstract properties of language that are subject to disorder and amenable to assessment: (1) the study of universal grammar and its acquisition; (2) descriptions of African American English (AAE) Syntax, Semantics, and Phonology within theoretical linguistics; and (3) the study of specific language impairment (SLI) cross-linguistically. Abstract linguistic concepts were translated into a set of assessment protocols that were used to establish normative data on language acquisition (developmental milestones) in typically developing AAE children ages 4 to 9 years. Testing AAE-speaking language impaired (LI) children and both typically developing (TD) and LI Mainstream American English (MAE)-learning children on these same measures provided the data to select assessments for which (1) TD MAE and AAE children performed the same, and (2) TD performance was reliably different from LI performance in both dialect groups.

Pedagogical Linguistics publishes work on educational applications of theoretical and descriptive linguistics. The general aim of the journal is to bring the formal and the functional strands of linguistics together in order to establish a forum where they can cross-fertilize each other with the aim of discussing and developing linguistics’ potential contribution to language pedagogy. Pedagogical Linguistics publishes research originating in theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and linguistic approaches to acquisition which outlines the didactic and educational relevance of recent research findings. The primary audience for this journal are researchers interested in state-of-the-art approaches to questions of language acquisition and linguistic theory that find applications in pedagogy, as well as a more general audience whose training is in education and pedagogy. Pedagogical Linguistics publishes its articles Online First.

This paper has to do with the dichotomy generalism vs. particu-larism in linguistics; that is, the distinction between "theoretical linguistics" and the actual study of languages. I will urge (a) that theoretical linguistics is generally working with data containing errors of fact or of perspective, (b) that this is not necessarily due to mere carelessness but inheres in the practice of theoretical lin-guistics itself, (c) that this fact overrides normal principles of theory reduction which otherwise would prohibit restricted linguistic theories2 in favor of general linguistic theories, (d) that general linguistic theories must be replaced by restricted linguistic theories if linguistic theories are to be constructed on the basis of error-free data, and (e) that the effect of this conclusion on the field ought to be to remove "theoretical linguistics"3 as an activity in-dependent of the actual study of languages.

I The Place of Linguistics in the Science of Language.- 1 Linguistics as Linguistics Applied.- Linguistics or Applicable Linguistics?.- The Scope of versus The Meaning of Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics, and The Term Applied Linguistics.- Theory in Toward an Integrated Applicable References.- 2 The Interrelations between Theoretical and Preamble.- Basic Dimensions in the Classification of Scientific Subdisciplines.- Limitations of Scope of Current Linguistic Theory.- Implications for Linguistics of Lacunae in Contemporary Linguistic Theory.- Linguistics as a Generator of Non-Applied Insight.- An Avenue toward a Sharper Delimitation of Theoretical and An Illustration of the Division from Contrastive Analysis.- The Essence of Application.- Concepts Related to Application.- versus Conceptual Borrowing.- versus Applicability.- versus Practice or Use.- The Position of Linguistics within Linguistics as a Whole.- The Boundary between Pure and The Branching and the Matrix Model of the Organization of Disciplinary Autonomy and Interdisciplinarity.- Summation.- References.- 3 The Need for Integration of and Theoretical Linguistics: Research Objects, Research Goals.- Background and Present State: Linguistics, Science, and the Human Sciences.- Non Convergent Types of Relationship.- Paradigmatic Relationship.- Inclusive Relationship.- Derivative Relationship.- Adversary Relationship.- Goal-Oriented Relationship: A First Step toward Convergency.- Integral Relationship.- Substantiation.- Concluding Remark: Between Scientism and Relativism.- References.- 4 The Integrity of The Growth of Levels of Application.- Theory, Description, Application.- Opposition and Interdependencies.- A Case in Point.- and Use.- Conclusion.- References.- II From to Theory.- 5 Practice into Theory versus Theory into Practice.- Past Relationships of Theory and Application.- Abductive Approaches.- Social Constructivism.- Examples from Linguistics in a Law Court Setting.- Hierarchical Inferencing.- The Speech Act of Complaining.- Conclusion.- References.- 6 The Erosion of the Boundaries between Theoretical and Linguistics: Evidence from Speech Act Theory.- Preliminaries.- Speech Act Theory at the Interface of TL and AL.- The Interaction Between the Cooperation Principle and the Politeness Principle.- The Social Dimension of Speech Acts as the Object of Microsociolinguistics.- Individual Communicative Competence as the Object of Psycholinguistics.- On Language Structure and Language Use.- Conclusions.- References.- 7 Linguistics and Mother Tongue Education.- The Influence of Traditional Linguistics on MTE.- Linguistics to MTE.- Theoretical Works.- Classroom Applications.- Causes of the Set-Back of The Paradigm Shift in the Study of Language.- Renewal of MTE.- Diversity of Applications.- The Pendulum Syndrome.- MTE: A Distinct Field of Study.- The Application Perspective.- The Utilization Perspective.- MTE as a Field Study.- References.- 8 How Language Planning Theory Can Assist First-Language Teaching.- Language Planning Theory.- Nationalism and Nationism.- Language Planning in The Status of L1 Language Teaching.- The Stages of Standardization.- Selection.- Codification.- Elaboration.- Acceptance.- What are the L1 Problems?.- Four Disputable Areas.- Literature.- Creativity.- Critical Discrimination.- Classroom Language.- The Language Planner's Approach to These Dispute Areas.- Creativity Revisited.- Critical Discrimination Revisited.- Classroom Talk.- Results of Two Language Planners Views of These Disputes.- The Proper Concerns of First-Language Teaching.- References.- 9 Disputing: The Challenge of Adversative Discourse to the Cooperative Principle.- The Inadequacy of the Cooperative Principle for Dispute Resolution.- Sources of Miscommunication.- The Context of Adversative Discourse.- The Phases of Negotiation.- Approach to Negotiation.- Linguistic Aspects of Negotiation.- Conclusion.- References.

Large language models are better than theoretical linguists at theoretical linguistics, at least in the domain of verb argument structure; explaining why (for example), we can say both The ball rolled and Someone rolled the ball, but not both The man laughed and *Someone laughed the man. Verbal accounts of this phenomenon either do not make precise quantitative predictions at all, or do so only with the help of ancillary assumptions and by-hand data processing. Large language models, on the other hand (taking text-davinci-002 as an example), predict human acceptability ratings for these types of sentences with correlations of around r = 0.9, and themselves constitute theories of language acquisition and representation; theories that instantiate exemplar-, input- and construction-based approaches, though only very loosely. Indeed, large language models succeed where these verbal (i.e., non-computational) linguistic theories fail, precisely because the latter insist – in the service of intuitive interpretability – on simple yet empirically inadequate (over)generalizations.

Introduction The scope of quantitative studies of speech For some sociolinguists the work we shall be describing in this chapter is sociolinguistics (see, for example, Trudgill 1978: 11), though the value of the work covered in the preceding chapters is generally acknowledged. The development of quantitative studies of speech has coincided with that of sociolingustics and, for many linguists whose main interest is the structure of language, this part of sociolinguistics apparently makes the most relevant contribution, providing new data which need to be reconciled with current linguistic theories. Quantitative studies of speech seem particularly relevant to theoretical linguistics because they involve precisely those aspects of language – sounds, word-forms and constructions – which theoretical linguists consider central. In chapter 2 we discussed the notion ‘speech variety’, covering the notions ‘language’, ‘dialect’ and ‘register’, but many theoretical linguists think that these concepts are not problematic, and therefore not particularly important. In chapter 3 we explored the relations of language to culture and thought, an area that theoretical linguists have traditionally left to anthropologists and psychologists. Chapter 4 was about discourse, and showed (among other things) that speakers match their speech to fit the needs of the occasion. The aspects of speech referred to were mainly on the fringe of what many linguists would call language structure – vocatives, greetings, alternative pronoun-forms and so on, not to mention non-verbal behaviour.

For three decades theoretical linguistics has had little impact on language teaching, although sociolinguistics has been employed in curriculum design and test construction. Applied linguistics has been eclectic and has seldom applied pure linguistic research. Theoretical linguists, for their part, have not encouraged attempts to apply their results. Theory and practice were separated largely because the theoretical results were so tentative. However, recent theoretical advances suggest important applications for linguistic theory in foreign language teaching and in the testing of proficiency. The acquisition of a nonnative language is probably subject to biological constraints that are closely related to those factors that guide and control first language acquisition. Methodology and test construction must allow for this. Research must determine precisely what the factors are and how they interact. Theoretical linguists interested in such research should be included in interdisciplinary teams working on foreign language learning and testing.

Saussure as seen by his contemporaries In 1908 the Linguistic Society of Paris (Societe Linguistique de Paris) dedicated a volume of Melanges to Ferdinand de Saussure, then aged fifty and professor at the University of Geneva (Saussure, 1908). A very brief and unsigned preface stated that, since the few years that he had spent in Paris between 1881 and 1891 had been decisive for the development of French linguistics, the Society was happy to dedicate to him one of the first volumes of its new series. The Society also wished to thank the eminent Swiss linguists who had joined Saussure's earlier pupils in paying their respects to the author of the Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles en indo-europeen . Two things are now striking even if they were not so at the time. First, no attempt was made in the preface or elsewhere to distinguish between the two main activities of Saussure: teaching and research in comparative and historical linguistics ( grammaire comparee ) and teaching and research in general or theoretical linguistics. Secondly the articles collected in the volume were all, with one exception, articles in Indo-European comparative linguistics. They include work by established scholars of considerable fame like Antoine Meillet in Paris or Jacob Wackernagel in Basle, but these were historical and comparative linguists rather than theoretical linguists. The one exception is a paper by one of Saussure's pupils and colleagues, indeed one of the editors of the Cours , Albert Sechehaye, who discusses the role of stylistics in the theory of language. Yet Saussure's current fame is tied to his views on theoretical linguistics.

This chapter introduces Linguistics in Schools (LiS) as an educational movement and research field, and discusses the place of ‘theoretical linguistics’ (or TLiS) within it. The chapter serves to situate the TLiS project as it is understood in the present book in terms of i) its relationship to the discipline of linguistics (and beyond); and ii) its rationale, as expressed by advocates of incorporating theoretical linguistics into pre-university education. It also considers some wider aspects of implementing TLiS in practice. Insights from the volume’s component chapters are interwoven throughout these discussions. The chapter ends with an outline of the thematic and structural organization of the volume, and offers synopses of the collection’s individual contributions.

This workshop is an attempt to bring together a range of linguists and computational linguists who operate across or near the computational "divide", to reflect on the relationship between the two fields, including the following questions: • What contributions has computational linguistics made to linguistics, and vice versa? • What are examples of success/failure of marrying linguistics and computational linguistics, and what can we learn from them? • How can we better facilitate the virtuous cycle between computational linguistics and linguistics? • Is modern-day computational linguistics relevant to current-day linguistics, and vice versa? If not, should it be made more relevant, and how? • What do linguistics and computational linguistics stand to gain from greater cross-awareness between the two fields? • What untapped areas/aspects of linguistics are ripe for cross-fertilisation with computational linguistics, and vice versa? On the basis of exploring answers to these and other questions, the workshop aims to explore possible trajectories for linguistics and computational linguistics, in terms of both concrete low-level tasks and high-level aspirations/synergies. In its infancy, computational linguistics drew heavily on theoretical linguistics. There have been numerous examples of co-development successes between computational and theoretical linguistics over the years (e.g. syntactic theories, discourse processing and language resource development), and significant crossover with other areas of linguistics such as psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics. Throughout the history of the field, however, there has always been a subset of computational linguistics which has openly distanced itself from theoretical linguistics, perhaps most famously in the field of machine translation (MT) where there is relatively little in the majority of "successful" MT systems that a linguist would identify with. In the current climate of hard-core empiricism within computational linguistics it is appropriate to reflect on where we have come from and where we are headed relative to the various other fields of linguistics. As part of this reflection, it is timely to look beyond theoretical linguistics to the various other fields of linguistics which have traditionally received less exposure in computational linguistics, including sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, neurolinguistics and evolutionary linguistics.

This chapter introduces Linguistics in Schools (LiS) as an educational movement and research field, and discusses the place of ‘theoretical linguistics’ (or TLiS) within it. The chapter serves to situate the TLiS project as it is understood in the present book in terms of i) its relationship to the discipline of linguistics (and beyond); and ii) its rationale, as expressed by advocates of incorporating theoretical linguistics into pre-university education. It also considers some wider aspects of implementing TLiS in practice. Insights from the volume’s component chapters are interwoven throughout these discussions. The chapter ends with an outline of the thematic and structural organization of the volume, and offers synopses of the collection’s individual contributions.

Lexical disambiguation is one of the oldest problems in natural language processing. There are three main types of lexical ambiguity: part-of-speech ambiguity, homonymy, and polysemy, typically divided into two tasks in practice. While this division suffices for engineering purposes, it does not align well with human intuition. In this article, I use lexical ambiguity as a representative case to demonstrate how insights from theoretical linguistics can be helpful for developing more human-like meaning and knowledge representations in natural language understanding. I revisit the three types of lexical ambiguity and propose a structured reclassification of them into two levels using the theoretical linguistic tool of root syntax. Recognizing the uneven expressive power of root syntax across these levels, I further translate the theoretical linguistic insights into the language of category theory, mainly using the tool of topos. The resulting unified categorical representation of lexical ambiguity preserves rootsyntactic insights, has strong expressive power at both linguistic levels, and can potentially serve as a bridge between theoretical linguistics and natural language understanding.

An Introduction to Language (Fifth Edition) by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993. xvi + 544 pp. Reviewed by Rachel Lagunoff University of California, Los Angeles There have been considerable problems of communication between theoretical linguistics and other disciplines concerned with the study of natural language, and it seems that many psychologists, students of artificial intelligence, applied linguists, and literary critics have abandoned the idea that they could learn very much from the results reached in theoretical linguistics—so much the worse for theoretical linguistics and so much the worse for the interdisciplinary study of natural language. Peter Bosch Agreement and Anaphora In an interdisciplinary field such as applied linguistics, it is important for students to have a good grounding in whichever base disciplines they choose to work within. Although there is debate as to how important theoretical linguistics is to applied linguistics (see for example, IAL 1990), no one can deny that the study of language is central to applied linguists' concerns. Once it is agreed that the study of a particular subject is important, the next problem is how to present it to students new to the field in a way that is interesting as well as informative. Large numbers of people in our society seem to have a fear of grammar, no doubt bred in primary and secondary school classrooms~a fear which follows them well into college. Thus an introductory linguistics textbook must be user-friendly in order to be effective. An Introduction to Language is such a textbook, the new (fifth) edition being friendlier than ever. y Issues in Applied Linguistics © Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 5 No. 1 1994 149-154