jueves, 31 de mayo de 2012
Sociolinguistics, Neurolinguistics and Stylistics
Sociolinguistics is the study of how language serves and is
shaped by the social nature of human beings. In its broadest conception, sociolinguistics
analyzes the many and diverse ways in which language and society entwine. This
vast field of inquiry requires and combines insights from a number of
disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, psychology and anthropology.
Sociolinguistics examines the interplay of language and
society, with language as the starting point. Variation is the key concept, applied
to language itself and to its use. The basic premise of sociolinguistics is
that language is variable and changing. As
a result, language is not homogeneous — not for the individual user and not
within or among groups of speakers who use the same language.
By studying written records, sociolinguists also examine how
language and society have interacted in the past. For example, they have
tabulated the frequency of the singular pronoun thou and its replacement you in
dated hand-written or printed documents and correlated changes in frequency
with changes in class structure in 16th
and 17th century England. This is
historical sociolinguistics: the study of relationship between changes in
society and changes in language over a period of time.
Neurolinguistics
is a branch of linguistics dealing mainly with the biological basis of the
relationship of the human language and brain. Although the very name of this
science was coined relatively recently, the issues investigated by it were
analyzed already in the nineteenth century. The first attempts to account for
the parts of brain responsible for the ability to produce speech were made on
the basis of unfortunate accidents in which people suffered some damage to head
and brain, thus enabling scientists to exclude the damaged brain parts from
linguistic investigations if the injured remained capable of language
production.
Since that
time on the basis of posthumous analysis of brains of people with some language
dysfunctions it has been determined that the left hemisphere of the brain plays
a major role in language comprehension and production, and especially some of
its areas that are more or less above the left ear.
Neurolinguistics
deals with various language disorders known as ‘aphasia’ which is impairment of
language functions because of some brain damage leading to difficulties in
either producing or understanding linguistic forms. There are different
aphasias depending on the language impairment and the damaged part of brain. Thus
Broca’s aphasia is characterized by a reduced amount of speech, slow pace of
speaking and distorted articulation. Wernicke’s aphasia is characterized by
quite fluent, yet incomprehensible speech and difficulties in finding
appropriate words. Conduction aphasia is connected with damage to arcuate
fasciculus and it is connected with mispronouncing words, disrupted rhythm, large
number of hesitations and pauses.
Stylistics
can be by and large described as the study of style of language usage in
different contexts, either linguistic, or situational. Yet, it seems that due
to the complex history and variety of investigated issues of this study it is
difficult to state precisely what stylistics is, and to mark clear boundaries
between it and other branches of linguistics which deal with text analysis.
What has
been the primary interest of stylistics for years is the analysis of the type, fluctuation,
or the reason for choosing a given style as in any language a single thought
can be expressed in a number of ways depending on connotations, or desired
result that the message is to produce. Therefore, stylistics is concerned with
the examination of grammar, lexis, semantics, as well as phonological
properties and discursive devices. It might seem that the same issues are
investigated by sociolinguistics, and indeed that is the case, however
sociolinguistics analyses the above mentioned issues seen as dependant on the
social class, gender, age, etc, while stylistics is more interested in the
significance of function that the style fulfills.
Moreover, stylistics
examines oral and written texts in order to determine crucial characteristic
linguistic properties, structures and patterns influencing perception of the
texts. Thus, it can be said that this branch of linguistics is related to
discourse analysis, in particular critical discourse analysis, and pragmatics. Owing
to the fact that at the beginning of the development of this study the major
part of the stylistic investigation was concerned with the analysis of literary
texts it is sometimes called literary linguistics, or literary stylistics. Nowadays,
however, linguists study various kinds of texts, such as manuals, recipes, as
well as novels and advertisements. It is vital to add here that none of the
text types is discriminated and thought to be more important than others. In
addition to that, in the recent years so called ‘media-discourses’ such as
films, news reports, song lyrics and political speeches have all been within
the scope of interest of stylistics.
Charles Fillmore: Grammatical Cases
Charles Fillmore was
one of the first linguists to introduce a representation of linguistic knowledge
that blurred this strong distinction between syntactic and semantic knowledge
of a language. He introduced what was termed case structure grammar and this
representation subsequently had considerable influence on psychologists as well
as computational linguists.
Linguistic knowledge is organized around verbs or more precisely, a verb
sense. (A verb may have more than one sense or meaning and these are
represented separately. For example, to run for office is a different sense of
run than to run to first base, and these would be two different representations
in a case grammar.)
Associated with
each verb sense is a set of cases. Some of the cases are obligatory and others
are optional. A case is obligatory if the sentence would be ungrammatical if it
were omitted. For example, John gave the book is ungrammatical.
The
cases associated with a verb seem to be associated with questions that we one
would naturally ask about an event. Who did what to whom when? The
representation seems well adapted to the retrieval of the information provided
in a sentence. This feature was particularly appealing to psychologists and
computational linguists
A second interesting
feature is that the same representation is provided to both the active and
passive forms of the sentence. This feature would be consistent
with a finding that we rarely recall the exact syntactic form of the sentence
but do recall the basic information provided by the sentence.
One of the
consistent findings in human sentence understanding is that we seem to draw
these inferences automatically. And, we rarely remember whether or not such
information was explicitly stated in the sentence. This observation is
consistent with some of the features of a frame-based representation as
suggested by case structure grammar
Another aspect of
the case grammar representation is that it can be effectively used to parse
incomplete or noisy sentences. For example, while John gave book is not
grammatical, it is still possible to create an appropriate case grammar parse
of this string of words. However, case grammar is not a particularly good
representation for use in parsing sentences that involve complex syntactic
constructions.
Generative Grammar
Generative grammar is a notion that was developed in 1950s by Noam Chomsky. Although numerous scholars disagreed with Chomsky’s claims he gained many supporters and the idea was both developed and challenged at the same time. His works have exerted considerable influence onpsycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics as well as language methodology, and with time ‘generative grammar’ received broader meaning than it initially had.
Based partially on mathematical equations generative grammar is a set of rules that provide a framework for all the grammatically possible sentences in a language, excluding those which would be considered ungrammatical. A classical generative grammar consists of four elements:
A limited number of nonterminal signs;
A beginning sign which is contained in the limited number of nonterminal signs;
A limited number of terminal signs;
A finite set of rules which enable rewriting nonterminal signs as strings of terminal signs.
The rules could be applied in a free way and the only requirement is that the final result must be a grammatically correct sentence. What is more, generative grammar is recursive, which means that any output of application of rules can be the input for subsequent application of the same rule. That should enable generating sentences as the daughter ofthe father of the brother of his cousin.
Chomsky considered language to be a species-specific property which is a part of the human mind. Chomsky studied the Internal-language, a mental faculty for language. He also wanted to account for the linguistic competence of native speakers and the linguistic knowledge of language present in language users’ minds. As he argued:
People know which sentences are grammatically well formed in their native language
They have this knowledge also of previously unheard sentences
So they must rely on mentally represented rules and not only on memory
Generative grammars might be regarded as models of mentally represented rules
The ability to acquire such sets of rules is most probably uniquely human.
Moreover, Chomsky argued that people posses a kind of Language Faculty which is a part of human natural biological qualities. The innate linguistic knowledge that enables practically any child to learn any of about 6000 existing languages (at a given point in time) is sometimes known as theUniversal Grammar. This theory is often supported by the arguments that creole languages are created in a natural way and their users invent their own linguistic systems. What is more, it appears that creole languages share certain features even despite the distances that not allows for contact of two different creoles.
References:
References:
Brown K. (Editor) 2005. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics – 2nd Edition. Oxford: Elsevier.
Wilson R. A. (Editor) 1999. The MIT encyclopedia of cognitive sciences. London: The MIT Press.
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