Functional Linguistics

Now, it's our (I and Sarah) turn. Initially, I chose this topic, because language to me if not only, its major function is to communicate. That's what FL focuses on.

Before I make my summary, I'd like to paste our outline of the presentation.

“Functional grammar is concerned with the identification, classification, and functioning of significant units. It precedes a study of the lexicon, i.e., an examination of each significant unit, not taken care of in the grammar, in its relations to the analysis of man’s experience.”(Martinet, 1994)
“Systemic-functional grammar, … is concerned primarily with the choices that are made available to speakers of a language by their grammatical systems. These choices are assumed to be meaningful and relate speakers' intentions to the concrete forms of a language.” (Wikipedia)

Prague School

• Vilem Mathesius, the senior founder

• Based on anti-atomistic views

• Synchronic analysis of language and its function

• Phonology, syntax (esp. by L. Tesniere), semantics (by R. Jokobson)

• A new approach to the development of language, stylistics, issues of standard language, etc.

Organon Modell of Speech
Karl Bühler (psychologist)
Organum (Greek) means “tool”
Assumption: utterances are psychophysical elements


Speech Act Theory
By the British ordinary language philosophers Austin, Searle, Strawson, Grice, and others
“Speaking a language is engaging in a (highly complex) rule-governed form of behavior” (Searle, 1969:12).

Utterance & Act
Locutionary act:
Producing a recognizable grammatical utterance in the given language.
Illocutionary act:
A certain way in which the speaker is using the language, e.g. “promising”, “warning”, “greeting”, “demanding”, etc.
Five basic categories: (Searle, 1973)
Representatives
Directives
Commissives
Expressives
Declarations

Appropriateness Condition
Asking a Question:
Speaker does not know the answer
Speaker believes it is possible hearer knows the answer
It is not obvious that hearer will provide the answer at the time without being asked
Speaker wants to know the answer

Halliday’s Categories
Adult speech acts
Interpersonal (instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal)
Ideational (heuristic, imaginative, representational)
Textural

Choice
„How are you?“
All possible utterances:
Help!
You're stupid.
Where do I find eggs?
Fine, thanks!
Don't touch the stove, it's hot!
I love you.
Last weekend we went to Hamburg.
...
"Meaning takes place in an environment, not in solitude"
Determinants (Halliday 1975, 65)
Being Part
Context of the situation --> type
Context of the culture“ --> system
Doing Part

Predictability
Utterances are predicatble
Halliday
"A text is meaningful not so much because we do not know what the speaker is going to say, (...) as because we do know."
Considering the characteristics of the ideational and interactional parts
Hymes: „form and content of the message, setting, participants, ends (intent and effect), key, medium, genre and interactional norms“ (Halliday 1975, 129)
Interpretable on social and linguistic level
Halliyday, McIntosh & Strevens (130):
Field --> ongoing activity – subject matter
Tenor --> role relationships – style
Mode --> symbolic/rhetoric channel – genre/instrumentalities

Conclusion
“In the functional paradigm a language is conceptualized as an instrument of social interaction among human beings, used with the intention of establishing communicative relationships. Within this paradigm one attempts to reveal the instrumentality of language with respect to what people do and achieve with it in social interaction. A natural language, in other words, is seen as an integrated part of the communicative competence of the natural language user.” (Dik, 1989)

We started our presentation with an example of communicative failure, which I experienced myself. In China, sometimes we greet each other by asking "Have you had your dinner/meal?"
In this presentation, I learned a "Golden Finger" from Prof. Gibbon, i.e. a research method: when we have two definitions or concepts about one item, we'd better compare them first. While during process of preparing for the presentation, I found I still need to read a lot to gain a rough idea about what language is indeed.

Comparative Philology

Four gentlemen from our class gave us the presentation on this topic. Wow, it's excellent! However, it's a pity that we could not take down all that they said. In order to make my blog complete, I have to get some other materials as well.

From Wikipedia:
Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change. It has four main concerns:

• to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;
• to describe the history of speech communities;
• to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics);
• to develop general theories about how and why language changes.

Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century and grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents, which goes back to antiquity.

At first historical linguistics was comparative linguistics and mainly concerned with establishing language families and the reconstruction of prehistoric languages, using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The focus was on the well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had long written histories. But since then, significant comparative linguistic work has been done on the Uralic languages, Austronesian languages and various families of Native American languages, among many others. Comparative linguistics is now, however, only a part of a more broadly conceived discipline of historical linguistics. For the Indo-European languages comparative study is now a highly specialised field and most research is being carried out on the subsequent development of these languages, particularly the development of the modern standard varieties.

Initially, all modern linguistics was historical in orientation - even the study of modern dialects involved looking at their origins. But Saussure drew a distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, which is fundamental to the present day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however, is now seen to be idealised. In practice, a purely synchronic linguistics is not possible for any period before the invention of the gramophone: written records always lag behind speech in reflecting linguistic developments, and in any case are difficult to date accurately before the development of the modern title page. Also, the work of sociolinguists on linguistic variation has shown synchronic states are not uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers differ in ways which point to language change. Synchronic variation is linguistic change in progress.

The biological origin of language is in principle part of the remit of historical linguistics, but most linguistics regard it as too remote to be reliably established by the comparative method, given the remoteness from historical records. Other techniques, such as mass lexical comparison, are regarded by some as means of overcoming the limitations of the comparative method, but most linguists regard them as unreliable.

The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses about the groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric period. However, it is now recognized that relating language to ethnic identity is problematic, as is relating language history to archaeological or genetic evidence.

Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness.

Relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language, and comparative linguistics aims to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. In order to maintain a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts.

The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is the comparative method, which aims to compare phonological systems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon. In principle, every difference between two related languages should be explicable to a high degree of plausibility, and systematic changes, for example in phonological or morphological systems, are expected to be highly regular. Although the proto-languages reconstructed by the comparative methods are hypothetical, a reconstruction may have predictive power. The most notable example of this is Saussure's proposal that the Indo-European consonant system contained laryngeals, a type of consonant attested in no Indo-European language known at the time. The hypothesis was vindicated with the discovery of Hittite, which proved to have exactly the consonants Saussure had hypothesized in the environments he had predicted.

Where languages are derived from a very distant ancestor, and are thus more distantly related, the comparative method becomes impracticable. In particular, attempting to relate two reconstructed proto-languages by the comparative method has not generally produced results that have met with wide acceptance. A number of methods based on statistical analysis of vocabulary have been developed to overcome this limitation. The theoretical basis of such methods is that vocabulary items can be matched without a detailed reconstruction and that comparing enough vocabulary items will negate individual inaccuracies.

The earliest method of this type was glottochronology, which proposed a mathematical formula for establishing the date when two languages separated, based on percentage of a core vocabulary of 100 (later 200) items that are cognate in the languages being compared. Glottochronology has met with continued scepticism, and is seldom applied today. Even more controversial is mass lexical comparison, which disavows any ability to date developments, aiming simply to show which languages are more and less close to each other, in a method similar to those used in cladistics in evolutionary biology. However, since mass comparison eschews the use of reconstruction and other traditional tools, it is flatly rejected by the majority of historical linguists.

Such vocabulary-based methods are able solely to establish degrees of relatedness and cannot be used to derive the features of a proto-language, apart from the fact of the shared items of compared vocabulary. These approaches have been challenged for their methodological problems - without a reconstruction or at least a detailed list of phonological correspondences there can be no demonstration that two words in different languages are cognate. However, lexical methods can be validated statistically and by their consistency with independent findings of history, archaeology and population genetics.

There are other branches of linguistics that involve comparing languages, which are not, however, part of comparative linguistics:

• Linguistic typology compares languages in order to classify them by their features. Its ultimate aim is to understand the universals that govern language, and the range of types found in the world's language is respect of any particular feature (word order or vowel system, for example). Typological similarity does not imply a historical relationship. However, typological arguments can be used in comparative linguistics: one reconstruction may be preferred to another as typologically more plausible.
• Contact linguistics examines the linguistic results of contact between the speakers of different languages, particular as evidenced in loan words. Any empirical study of loans is by definition historical in focus and therefore forms part of the subject matter of historical linguistics. One of the goals of etymology is to establish which items in a language's vocabulary result from linguistic contact. This is also an important issue both for the comparative method and for the lexical comparison methods, since failure to recognize a loan may distort the findings.
• Contrastive linguistics compares languages usually with the aim of assisting language learning by identifying important differences between the learner's native and target languages. Contrastive linguistics deals solely with present-day languages.

There is also a wide body of publications containing language comparisons that are considered pseudoscientific by linguists; see pseudoscientific language comparison.

What impressed me a lot was the structure of their presentation. They provided amouts of examples to make everything easier-seen.

Introduction to the History of Linguistics(Part 1)

November 27, 2006 16:00-18:00

From this week on, we are going to learn something about the history of linguistics. As we all possess little knowledge about linguistics, let alone history of linguistics, Prof. Gibbon gave us a brief introduction on the braches, from Philology to Computational Linguistics. Therefore, we could get a sense of what we're interested in and make some reports in the later classes.

1.Comparative Philology:

Comparative Philology started in the mid 19th century, mainly studying the history of linguistics. The linguists compared differing language families and their relationship. The early linguists in this area were Brothers Grimm, who composed the "Grimm's Fairy Tales" and other folk tales in order to study the collection of dialects. This is considered as the beginning of modern linguistic methodology. Grimm's law enunciated by the brother Jacob was the first non-trivial systematic sound change ever to be discovered.

2.Functional Linguistics:(my topic)

From the 20th Century, the linguists shifted their focus from the history and develpment of languages to their functions and structures. This is to say, they began to deal with syncronic study instead of diachronic research. In 1924, a Polish linguist named Branislav Molinovski published the first article about Functional Linguistics. And then, in 1930, Prague School was founded, which focused on the different functions of language. In 1960s, a Russian linguist, Roman Jacobson published "Language and Poetics" in America. Later, during the 1960s and 1970s, Halliday, who's recognized as father of Functional Linguistics, founded System Functional Linguistics.

3.Structural Linguistics:

Structural Linguistics focuses on the forms of language. The Swiss linguist Saussure worked in this area. He first raised the statement that language should be studied as science. There're 3 pairs of core-terms in Saussure's theory: sound and meaning, langue and parole, syntactic form and semantic meaning.

4.Generative Linguistics:

Generative Linguistics, with Noam Chomsky as its presentative, studies the principles behind the structures, known as generative grammar. Chomsky believed that man is born with language competence.

5.Computational Linguistics:

Computational Linguistics studies the structure of language. It focuses on how to make a computer analyze and understand language, discourse and text. The practical examples are Google and MS Word.

The First Class

November 13, 2006 16:00-18:00

I had my first class of Linguistic Theory, given by Prof. Gibbon. Wow, to me, it really came too late. It's so different from what other linguistic courses I have ever had. Very interesting! I reckoned I may regard Linguisitics as one of my goal.

The lecture began with the question "What's a model". But we didn't answer it directly. We first came to the basic questions, "what's language", "what's a language", "how many languages are spoken in the world or one country", etc. So, what's language? According to my former knowledge of linguistics, language is a system of arbitrary signs and symbols, which are used to communicate. So what's a language? A language is language that's spoken among a particular group of people. Here Prof. Gibbon introduced the concept of "community language" to us. On the other hand, "the language has its own name among the people who speak it, but also the outside name used by others." (D. Gibbon), e.g. "Deutsch" is named in English "German".

Then we furthered to the discussion on "model". Model is theoretical description, a structure, a formula, which pocesses its own appearance. Here, we got an example of model from Prof. Gibbon: Teddy Bear is a model. It refers to the doll that looks like a bear, but smaller than a bear. At that moment, I was a bit confused. What's the relationship between model and our course "Linguistic Theory"? Aha, it concerns with the linguistic methodology----folks linguistics and scientific linguistics.

---

A little research I did: What is functional linguistics?

Functionalism was raised by Vilem Mathesius (1882-1945) in 1911. The main idea of functional linguistics is "Language is not a self-contained system, but is entirely dependant on the society." Then this idea was developed by Halliday. "By saying that language is part of the social semiotics, Halliday means that the whole of the culture is meaningful , is constructed out of a series of systems of signs." Two group of scholars are doing the research concerning with functional linguistics: Prague School and London School.

---

The question I'm still looking for the answer: What's the relationship between Cognitive Linguistics and Functional Linguistics?