Chapter 5

Applied linguistics and language use

• Researching areas outside institutional language learning: correctness, forensic linguistics,
applied stylistics, lexicography and artificial languages
• The role of applied linguistics is to recognise that these problems often cause deep passions and
may need to be viewed as issues in which language plays only a part
• Applied linguistics exists to try to explain the passions and suggest sol - utions to the problems
• Language problems in the institutionalised settings of school, work (including the office, the
hospital, the factory), conferences, the media and so on, are very rarely problems only of
language. In many cases they involve individuals and groups who have problems in interacting
with one another and in making decisions about policy
• Being correct for the user of English means conforming to the rules and conventions of
Standard English. The learner of English as a second or foreign language must first master the
rules; thereafter he/she too must cope with the conventions (or norms) which are the basis of
English instruction at school for the first-language user.
• Another demonstration of correct English is said to be effective writing, which displays clear
thinking. Writing a coherent text longer than a sentence is one of the hardest of all the skills
schools set out to teach.
• Given the difficulty of constructing a good piece of writing, it is not surprising
that even well-known writers can fail to achieve the clarity they desire
After all, for the applied linguist, being correct matters, not only for the sake of
clarity but also because language is embedded in social life.
Non-discriminatory language attempts to be neutral as to group membership. Its
neutrality distinguishes it from discriminatory language, which is defined in a
booklet issued by the Equal Opportunities Unit of the University of Melbourne
as: ‘that which creates or reinforces a hierarchy of difference between people …
includ - ing sex and gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, political or
religious beliefs and physical, intellectual or psychiatric disability’
(EOU 1998: 5).
• The correctness issue presents itself as a language problem to the applied linguist
in two ways. First, as an issue which, as we have seen, is constantly drawn to the
attention of students in particular and of the public more generally.
• The applied linguist has a professional responsibility to take a serious interest in
all aspects of the issue, including public concern.
• Second, the applied linguist, in person or in writing, is properly called on for
guidance about the choices of usage students, and indeed all of us, must make.
• Is the response again to be that these decisions are unimportant because the matter
seems so often apparently trivial?
• The applied linguist who works on languages for specific purposes (e.g. English
for chemical engineers, Japanese for tourist guides, German for musicology) must
seek advice on the content of those disciplines from specialists in these fields.
Similarly, with forensic linguistics, the applied linguist needs advice about the
workings of the law, insofar as they affect the way in which evidence is to be
given.
• Gibbons concludes his chapter on ‘Language and the Law’ (2004) thus: Language
and the law (sometimes also known as Forensic Linguistics) is an important and
fast developing area of applied linguistic concerns. All the issues discussed here
are of major significance to those involved, whether they are people who cannot
understand the legislation impacting on their lives, witnesses whose testimony is
distorted by linguistic pressure tactics, minorities whose language cannot be used
or who are subject to group vilification, or the guilty or innocent convicted by
language evidence. All these areas are open to examination and action by applied
linguists
• That may very well be the case but it does not resolve the ambiguity basic to all stylistic
endeavour, which is whether its purpose is (in both literary and non-literary texts) to
examine and describe the ways of working that the texts exemplify; or whether in
addition it is to add to our understanding of the meaning of those texts.
• Recent treatments of stylistics have moved on from the study of the form of linguistic
utterances to a wider interest in pragmatics or, as it is sometimes called, pragmastylistics.
• The necessary emphasis on reader response makes sense when the readers are all highly
educated native speakers of the language of the text. But in the majority of cases in
which applied linguistics interests itself, most of the readers are either unwilling readers
or have both inadequate target language proficiency and limited cultural knowledge on
which literary texts typically draw. And since the purpose of a course in applied stylistics
is not primarily to foster literary appreciation or even an interest in literature for its own
sake (such aims may be pursued elsewhere in a general course of applied linguistics), it
becomes necessary for the teaching to 106 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
provide both the information that will be lacking to the second-language reader and also
to find ways of simulating the interaction with the text by the student which the ideal
reader would give
• For would-be lexicographers, learning linguistics boils down to choices. Each topic in
linguistics has more or less importance according to the types of dictionaries involved,
the intention of the authors, and above all the target
• Artificial languages have two major advantages over natural languages: they are not the
property of any state who claim priority of possession since it is their mother tongue;
and they can be constructed on a logical basis. If an artificial language is composed
entirely of invented elements (and therefore known as an a priori artificial language), it
is more likely that it will fulfil the logical criterion (since it can be designed as if it were
some kind of mathematics); if it is based in part on elements of grammar and vocabulary
from one or more natural languages, it is known as an a posteriori artificial languag
• The most successful artificial languages are Volapuk, Esperanto and Interlingua.
Schleyer’s Volapuk combined a priori and a posteriori elements: the vocabulary was
largely taken from European languages, mainly English, modified so as to make it easier
to learn by ‘old people, children and Chinese’: thus ‘red’ became ‘led’ and ‘rose’ ‘lol
• And since the focus of the applied linguist is on language in context, he/she is likely to
regard artificial languages with a jaundiced eye.