View Of Language Research Articles

Language as program: A reassessment of the nature of descriptive linguistics

The purpose of this paper is to challenge one of the basic tenets of linguistics. The traditional view is that it is the business of linguists to describe language and languages—and/or to theorize about it and them. It is essentially a view of language as an object. While I remain solidly based in linguistics, I draw here on my experience in natural language processing (i.e. of putting English in computers as part of a model of a communicating mind) as I advocate the view that it is more insightful to view language not as object, but as procedure, as process, as program. Note that ‘program’ has no final ‘me’ to signify the sense of ‘computer program’. I invite you to come with me on an exploration of what is involved when someone produces (‘generates’) a sentence, to show why I advocate a model of language that is not static, but dynamic. The model is also, I shall argue, essentially generative (in the sense of ‘productive’) rather than interpretive. Thus a program whose essential design is as it is to enable it to run in one direction—i.e. to turn meanings into sounds—is consulted as the person trying to understand a text attempts the converse task. This is not just ‘to turn sound into meaning’, but to turn the performer's sounds back into the performer's meanings. Hence the logical priority of generation over interpretation. In this new view of language as program, it is no longer possible to draw a clear line between the material of linguistics and the algorithms that determine how we choose between linguistic options; one needs a more complete framework, which is inevitably also more complex, e.g. as described here.

Functional Categories and Language Acquisition

Many theorists (e.g., Hyams 1987; Pinker 1984) working in the framework of generative grammar have assumed the “Continuity Hypothesis”. Under this view language acquisition is made up of a series of continuous stages. The child moves from one stage to another, and at each stage the grammar posited by the child is determined by Universal Grammar (UG). The motivation for the movement from one stage to another comes from a trigger in the language environment which causes the child to restructure her grammar, and so move on to the next stage. The Continuity Hypothesis has provided an explanation for the acquisition of many linguistic structures; however, in many instances it has been difficult to explain exactly which data in the language environment act as a trigger, and why they have an effect on the child’s grammar.

Cultural Content in Introductory Linguistics

Beyond acquainting students with language structure, an undergraduate survey course in anthropological linguistics must trace the cross-fertilizing relationships that bind it to other specialties within anthropology. In particular, it must show how linguistic data illuminate cultural phenomena and how social factors constrain language usage. To accomplish the objective of integrating cultural with linguistic content, I favor a holistic approach that views language and culture as forming a continuum of coded communication. HOLISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, TEACHING STRATEGIES, LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Assessment and Evaluation

Research and development in the assessment of language abilities in the past decade have been concerned both with achieving a better understanding of the nature of language abilities and other factors that affect performance on language tests and with developing methods of assessment that are consistent with the way applied linguists view language use. The way language testers conceptualize language abilities has been strongly influenced by the broadened view of language proficiency as communicative competence that has emerged in applied linguistics. And while this view of language proficiency provides a much richer conceptual basis for characterizing the language abilities to be measured, it has presented language testers with a major challenge in defining these abilities and the interactions among them with sufficient precision to permit their measurement. Language testing researchers have also been influenced by developments in second language acquisition, investigating the effects on test performance of other factors such as background knowledge, cognitive style, native language, ethnicity, and sex. Finally, language testing research and practice have been influenced by advances in psychometrics, in that more sophisticated analytic tools are being used both to unravel the tangled web of language abilities and to assure thhat the measures of these abilities are reliable, valid, efficient, and appropriate for the uses for which they are intended.

Discourse‐Centered Approach to Language and Culture

The Sapir‐ Whorf hypothesis, as usually formulated, searches for isomorphisms between grammar and culture and views language as either providing the means for thought and perception, or, in its stronger form, conditioning thought, perception, and world view. In this article I consider discourse to be the concrete expression of language‐culture relationships. It is discourse that creates, recreates, focuses, modifies, and transmits both culture and language and their intersection, and it is especially in verbally artistic and playful discourse, such as poetry, magic, verbal dueling, and political rhetoric, that the resources provided by grammar, as well as cultural meanings and symbols, are activated to their fullest potential and the essence of language‐culture relationships becomes salient.

English for Academic Listening: Teaching the Skills Associated with Listening to Extended Discourse

ABSTRACT Many ESL and bilingual students at our universities face problems in the transition from “special” programs, in which they listen and interact in settings with trained language specialists, to university courses, in which they are taught by professionals in other areas.Research in discourse analysis has acquainted us with the need to view language as it is actually used before developing materials to teach its usage. This article presents a brief review of literature available to most ESL professionals regarding the skills associated with listening, and provides an overview of one successful approach.

SEMANTICS AND TEXT MEANING: RETROSPECTS AND PROSPECTS

The activity of “doing semantics” is a specialized mode of being meaningful. The relation between that mode and the general mode of ordinary discourse should be clarified within a framework that integrates past trends in semantic modelling with each other and with possible future ones. This paper proposes to view language as a complex system of control levels with characteristic distributions of determinacy. Here, meaning is described as a processing event whose structure is formed by the maintenance of control and the limiting of indeterminacy. Known properties of complex physical and biological systems offer some clues about how such operations might occur.

REVOLUTIE IN DE TAALFILOSOFIE?

Summary In Western culture the philosophy of language of Aristotle has been very influential for a long time. The 20th century has seen a change in the philosophy of language. In this, our century many philosophers have been critical of traditional Western philosophy of language. In the underlying paper I shall discuss the criticism of Austin and Heidegger and compare Austin's new visions with Heidegger's new visions on the philosophy of language. In doing so I hope to contribute to the dialogue between phenomenological and Anglo-Saxon philosophy. In traditional Western philosophy of language Aristotle's role is important. According to Aristotle words are signs of representations in our mind and representations in our mind are signs of things. Not all meaningful sentences are of equal importance according to Aristotle, for in philosophy descriptive sentences are the authentical sentences. Traditional Western philosophy of language has an instrumental view on language According to this view language is an ...

Native Reactions to Non-Native Speech: A Review of Empirical Research

Recent research considers native reactions to various aspects of non-native speech and associated judgments regarding such speakers. The studies discussed here view listeners, speakers, and language from a variety of perspectives employing both objective and subjective research paradigms. Interlocutor variables which have been found to influence linguistic perceptions include age, social status, degree of bilingualism, and educational level. Even the linguistic sophistication of the listener may be important.Studies of error gravity, which treat the perceived seriousness of error types in learners' interlanguage, may now be contrasted with data from several related and unrelated languages. The relative intelligibility of language samples has also been investigated as has the role of comprehension in the information of linguistic judgments.Research reflecting listeners' personal impressions and reactions shows that non-natives tend to be downgraded in contexts ranging from the classroom to the workplace. This area of experimentation would be enhanced by exploration of the issues through studies in natural sociolinguistic contexts.

Twelve Steps to Using Generative Sentences and Sentence Combining in the Composition Classroom

The academic journals are full of articles on value of generative sentences and sentence combining in composition classroom.1 Instructors who wish to integrate both techniques into their current teaching strategies may find useful following step-by-step method of instruction-a method which requires little new technical terminology, and which has been used by many teachers, both experienced and inexperienced, over last four years. Students learn to write clear sentences with relatively short main clauses, to add details and make interand intra-paragraph transitions by means of a variety of free modifiers, and to use parallel and non-parallel structures meaningfully. All of material is simple enough to be presented on blackboard, though dittos are helpful; and teachers may present material intensively in several class meetings, or else in conjunction with other material (e.g., journal writing, analysis of model essays, discussion of invention and other general rhetorical topics) over twelve or more class periods (one step per class hour). We wish to emphasize that our remarks here are for most part neither novel nor exhaustive; our intention is simply to show how, within a coherent, traditional framework, students may be led to generate clearer, more efficient, and more imaginative sentences, using sentencecombining exercises to complement instruction in generating sentences. Step One. Students must first learn to view language as a system of structures; that is, they must become a little more conscious of structural cues by which they make sense of everyday speech and writing. To this end, instructors may begin by reviewing traditional, meaning-oriented definitions for parts of speech, since most college students have encountered these definitions at some point in their schooling. In traditional terms, of course, a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing, a verb shows action or state of being, an adjective modifies a noun, and an adverb modifies a verb. The problem with such definitions is that they do not explain

Luandino Vieira's Short Fiction: Decolonization in the Third Register

The central theme of Luandino Vieira's short fiction is the «anthropological» daily existence in the musseques, slums, which surround the city of Luanda. The socio-political question of the epoch—the liberations movements and the repression by the colonial rulers—do not escape the author's view. Prior to the publication of Luandino's works, the language of Angolan fiction was indistinguishable from that of standard Portuguese fiction. The relationship of Quimbundo, the Bantu dialect of Luanda, and Portuguese is the key to the originality of Luandino's works. This becomes quite evident in the collections Velhas estorias and No amigamente na vida. Language register is Luandino's prime consideration. The «establishment» figures of the stories speak in Portuguese, while the people of the musseques function in Quimbundo. When the two social groups come into contact so do their languages. The result is a third register of speech, one which reflects the PortugueseQuimbundo heritage and results in a new literary language. The basic contribution of Quimbundo is within the lexico-semantic area. In addition to a large number of Bantu words, new shades of meaning are given to common Portuguese terms through innovations in their traditional meaning and usage, as well as through their recreation along African language principles. Portuguese contributes its wealth of morphemes—principally suffixes—which enhance the Quimbundo vocabulary. Syntax is similarly recreated. Although Luandino's short fiction has been called hermetic, it does present an epoch of Angolan society. Its existence is an affirmation of national independence. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol4/iss2/10 LUANDINO VIEIRA'S SHORT FICTION: DECOLONIZATION IN THE THIRD REGISTER* IRWIN STERN Columbia University Contemporary linguistic theory views language as a human artifact, that is, an utensil of man's existence which can be shaped according to his changing conditions and needs.' The languages-incontact phenomenon readily attests to this attitude. We can speak of the influence of ancient Greek on Latin, of Arabic on Spanish, or of French on old English with the resultant linguistic modification or enrichment of Latin, Spanish, and English as some outstanding examples of this phenomenon at work. It has been only within the last quarter century that any serious critical consideration and attention has been given to the literary product of modern examples of languages-in-contact, or to what has been called «bilingual literature.» 2 African literatures in the twentieth century offer an ample area for the study of the literary aspect of the languages-in-contact phenomenon. Indeed, some investigation has been carried out into the significance of this literature in Africa.' Such has not been the case for Angolan literature. Because of the 1974 Portuguese revolution, Angolan independence, and the publication of the works of a major contemporary Angolan writer, such an evaluation can now be effected. That writer is Jose Luandino Vieira, pseudonym of Jose Vieira Mateus da Graca.

Antonymy, Language, and Value in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

CRITICISM ANTONYMY, LANGUAGE, AND VALUE IN CONRAD's HEART OF DARKNESS I Arnold Krupat . . .Conrad's writing. . . has a critical place in the history of the duplicity of language which since Nietszche, Marx and Freud has made the study of the orders of language so focal for the contemporary understanding. Conrad's fate was to have written fiction great forits presentation, and not only for what it was representing. 1 Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness has been interpreted from nearly every conceivable perspective, noris there, even now—the recentarticles by Ian Watt are significant instances—an abatement of commentary on the story.2 It is only from the mid-'sixties, however—from thebeginnings of widespread American attention to French "new criticism" with its exaltation of the linguistic model as the paradigm for the study of literature—that American attention to "the orders oflanguage" inHeartof Darkness may be dated. The application of certain structuralist and post-structuralist insights to the story may well appear to some as superfluous as it is inevitable: but this may also offer some further understanding of the story's well-known problematics.3 What I understand Conrad to be trying to do inHeart ofDarkness is to "represent" the discovery of moral value. This effort is founded upon a view oflanguage which assumesa directcorrelationbetween the word (or sign) and its referent (either a concrete quantity, a "thing," or an abstract quality, a "moral value") enabling an "imitation" of a fairly stable, ontologically prior "reality." Such an "imitation" need hardly offer itself as a straightforward mirroring of the "world"; rather, as Cesare Segre writes, because the writer "privileges only certain aspects of reality, emphasizing themin relation tohis personalvision ofthe world," literary mimesis can offer a "critical representation," one polemical, or obviously deformed.4 We can determine the kind and quality of the "representation " by examining its mode of "presentation," the distinctive features of diction and syntax, or its "style." "Representation" and "presentation" are conceived of as complementary andcontinuous: the "vision" requires a certain style to convey it and only the peculiarities of that style can convey the "vision," or constitute the work's "meaning." Literary language is thus cognitive and constative according to this view which we may call the mimetic or semantic view of language. To adhere to this view of language is what Conrad's experience as a writer everywhere revealed to be impossible. The contemporary not only of Nietszche, Marx, and Freud, Conrad is the contemporary of Mallarmé The Missouri Review ¦ 63 and Saussure as well; and he, too, feels the slippage between word and referent characteristic of his period.5 Conrad suspects what the Swiss professor of linguistics will assert,6 the necessity to break the unitary sign (or word) into its constituent parts, the signifier and the signified, and to shift the emphasis to what can be specified with some assurance, the order of the signifier, and away from what cannot, the order—the ontological and epistemologjcal status—of the signified. This movement to what may be called the semiological view of language has important consequences for the representational project. For, as Fredric Jameson has written, "Ultimately, if the process of thought bears not so much on adequation to a real object or referent, but rather on the adjustment of the signified to the signifier...then the traditional notion of 'truth' itself becomes outmoded."7 Itis, from here, only a short step to the assertion of the unqualified "primacy of the signifier," and—I cite now a more recent formulation by Jameson—the "conclusion that therefore the 'referent '... does not exist."8 This, of course, is exactly the "conclusion" of those who adopt the radical form of the semiological model we may call, from Derrida, the grammatological. Thus Hillis Miller unequivocally states that "all referentialityinlanguageisa fiction."9At this point, to speak of"representation " in literature is simply to make a categorical error; and "presentation " can indicate no more than the production of the "text" as locus for the play of an infinite galaxy of self-reflexive signifiers. To Nietzsche's question, Who speaks? there is only Mallarmé's answer, The Word.10 But—to return to Nietzsche—there can be no "correct...

Variable Rules in the Acquisition of English Contractions

Variable rules, a quantitative method of language analysis, offer psycholinguists a means to view language acquisition as a process with order and continuity underlying apparent randomness. Few studies outside of sociolinguistics, however, have made use of such a method. The study outlined in this article illustrates possible uses of such rules in the characterization of interlanguage grammars. The specific case studied is the variability in contraction patterns of ESL students. Using a methodology similar to Labov (1972a) and Cedergren and Sankoff (1974), the study finds: 1) correlation between the frequency and variety of six ESL students' contractions and their general proficiency in ESL; 2) evidence for the influence of a rule feeding contraction; 3) evidence for the formation of idiosyncratic word classes and rules in interlanguage grammars. Two issues in interlanguage theory are discussed in relation to the acquisition of contractions: rule permeability and rule simplicity. The final section deals with the significance of variable rules for psycholinguistics and the importance of contractions and other weak forms in the teaching of ESL.

Language competency, dyslexia, and learning disability

Theories of dyslexia are characterized by the special emphasis they place on either linguistic or nonlinguistic factors as causes of reading disability. 1 This paper will discuss emerging evidence in favor of the linguistic interpretation of dyslexia. The works of linguistic philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, who argue that our personal language reflects our experiences and percep tions of reality, lend support to a linguistic theory of dyslexia. Linguistic philosophers view language as the window through which we perceive meaning in our world (Engle 1970; Wittgenstein 1953, 1958, 1961a, 1961b). When symbols represent real events or thought, language is critical for interpretation. The underlying hypothesis for a linguistic theory of dyslexia is that, regardless of the nature of a child's learning handicap (e.g., perceptual, motor, or memory deficits), the specific problem will eventually manifest itself in language functioning and, as such a child approaches the task of reading, these cumulative verbal deficits will hamper his success in decoding and comprehension (Clinkert 1977). To understand the verbal deficit hypothesis, one must allow an extension of the ordinary definition of language to include the concept of semiotics. Semiotics expands the notion of conventional language to include signs and symbols,2 so that mathematics, for example, is a language with a specialized syntax and vocabulary.

Concepts of language and meaning: A comparative study

This essay reviews treatments of language and meaning in recent speech communication literature and outlines the approach to these subjects taken by ordinary language philosophers. Speech scholars view language as a system of symbols and meaning as a matter of symbols representing or naming objects, ideas, or behavioral responses. Ordinary language philosophers contend that words do not function in any single way; specifically, meaning is not simply referring and words are not simply names. The philosophers treat language‐using as situationally dependent behavior governed by informal logical rules.

IMPLICATIONS OF RECENT PSYCHOLINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENTS FOR THE TEACHING OF A SECOND LANGUAGE

Traditional psychological theories about language acquisition emphasize the role of reinforcement provided by environmental agencies and view language as a set of vocal habits that are conditioned to stimuli in the environment. Imitation and practice of new forms are the processes by which language behavior develops and generalization of learned forms is supposed to account for the novel uses of language. Recent developments in linguistics have influenced our conception of the structure of language, hence the nature of the knowledge that the child has to acquire. A radically new psycholinguistic theory of language acquisition has been proposed which emphasizes the developmental nature of the language acquisition process and attributes to the child specific innate competencies which guide his discovery of the rules of the natural language to which he is exposed. Imitation, practice, reinforcement, and generalization are no longer considered theoretically productive conceptions in language acquisition. The implications of these new ideas for the teaching of a second language lie in the need for controlled exposure of the student to linguistic materials in a manner that will facilitate his discovery of the significant features of the language. “Shaping” of phonological skills, discrimination training on sound “units” and pattern drills are rejected in favor of “transformation exercises” at the phonological, syntactic and semantic levels.