Katrina Mae L.

Medoza
BSED ENGLISH-CAPAS

ACTIVITY #3

1.Compare and Contrast the following related Concepts in Linguistics

A.Description and Prescription

Description- a study of a language, its structure, and its rules as they are used in daily life by
its speakers from all walks of life, including standard and nonstandard varieties. Focuses on
describing the language as it used, not saying how it should be used.

Prescription- specifies how a language implies a distinction between “good grammar” and
“bad grammar, and its primary focus is on standard forms of grammar and syntactic
construction. Describes when people focus on talking about how a language should or ought to
be used.

B.Synchrony and Diachrony

Synchrony- the study of a language at a given point in time. The time studied may be either
the present or particular point in the past; synchronic analyses can also be made of dead
languages, such as Latin.

Diachrony- refers to the study of how a language evolves over a period of time. Tracing the
development of English from Old English period to the twentieth century.

-the branch of linguistics concerned with the study of phonological, grammatical, and semantic
changes, the reconstruction of earlier stages of languages, and the discovery and application of
the methods by which genetic relationships among languages can be demonstrated.

C.Competence and Performance

Competence- system of linguistic knowledge possesed by native speakers of a language.

According to Chosmky, comptence is the ideal language system that enables speakers to
produce and understand an infinite number of sentences in their language, and to distinguish
grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences.

Performance- was used by Noam Chomsky in 1960 to describe “the actual use of language in
concrete situations”. It is used to describe both the production, sometimes called parole, as well
as the comprehension of language. Performance is defined in opposition to “competence”.

2. Get to know Linguistic and related disciplines

A.Linguistics and Anthropology

-Anthropology is the study of humanity through the application of biology, cultural studies,
archaeology, linguistics, and other social sciences.
Linguistic and Anthropology deals with the place of language in its wider social and cultural
context, and its role in making and maintaining cultural practices and societal structures.

B.Linguistics and Philosophy

-Philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence,
especially when considered as an academic discipline. Philosophy also studies general and
fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values,
reason, mind, and language.

Linguistics and Philosophy focuses on issues related to structure and meaning in natural
language, as addressed in the semantics, philosophy of language, pragmatics and related
disciplines, in particular the following areas:

 Philosophical theories of meaning and truth, reference, description, entailment,

presupposition, implicatures, context-dependence and speech acts.
 Linguistic theories of semantic interpretation in relation to syntactic structure and
prosody, of discourse structure, lexical semantics and semantic change
 Psycholinguistic theories of semantic interpretation and issues of processing and
acquisition of natural language, and the relation of semantic interpretation to other
cognitive faculties
 Mathematical and logical properties of natural language and general aspects of
computational linguistics
 Philosophical questions raised by linguistics as a science

C.Linguistics and Teaching

-Teaching can be defined as engagement with learnings to enable their understanding and
application of knowledge, concepts and processes. It includes design, content selection,
delivery, assessment and reflection.

The use of linguistics in education in education is continuing to grow and is often cross-
disciplinary in nature. Not only is it utilized by language instructors, it is also used in early
childhood development, psychology and anthropology education, as well. Linguistics is not only
the study of language, but also includes the evolution and historical context of language,
speech and memory development. It includes the structure and meaning of speech, and of
written languages as well as understanding of the context in which certain words are used.