Delineation of the field
Just as it is difficult to draw the boundary between linguistics and psycholinguistics and between psychology and psycholinguistics, so it is difficult to distinguish sharply between linguistics and sociolinguistics and between sociolinguistics and sociology. There is the further difficulty that, because the boundary between sociology and anthropology is also unclear, sociolinguistics merges with anthropological linguistics.
It is frequently suggested that there is a conflict between the sociolinguistic and the psycholinguistic approach to the study of language, and it is certainly the case that two distinct points of view are discernible in the literature at the present time. Chomsky has described linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology, and neither he nor most of his followers have yet shown much interest in the relationship between language and its social and cultural matrix. On the other hand, many modern schools of linguistics that have been very much concerned with the role of language in society would tend to relate linguistics more closely to sociology and anthropology than to any other discipline. It would seem that the opposition between the psycholinguistic and the sociolinguistic viewpoint must ultimately be transcended. The acquisition of language, a topic of central concern to psycholinguists, is in part dependent upon and in part itself determines the process of socialization, and the ability to use one’s native language correctly in the numerous socially prescribed situations of daily life is as characteristic a feature of linguistic competence, in the broad sense of this term, as is the ability to produce grammatical utterances. In the second half of the 20th century, some work in sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics sought to widen the notion of linguistic competence in this way. So far, however, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics tend to be regarded as relatively independent areas of research.
Social dimensions
Language is probably the most important instrument of socialization that exists in all human societies and cultures. It is largely by means of language that one generation passes on to the next its myths, laws, customs, and beliefs, and it is largely by means of language that the child comes to appreciate the structure of the society into which he is born and his own place in that society.
As a social force, language serves both to strengthen the links that bind the members of the same group and to differentiate the members of one group from those of another. In many countries there are social dialects as well as regional dialects, so that it is possible to tell from a person’s speech not only where he comes from but what class he belongs to. In some instances social dialects can transcend regional dialects. This is notable in England, where standard English in the so-called Received Pronunciation (RP) can be heard from members of the upper class and upper middle class in all parts of the country. The example of England is but an extreme manifestation of a tendency that is found in all countries: there is less regional variation in the speech of the higher than in that of the lower socioeconomic classes. In Britain and the United States and in most of the other English-speaking countries, people will almost always use the same dialect, regional or social, however formal or informal the situation and regardless of whether their listeners speak the same dialect or not. (Relatively minor adjustments of vocabulary may, however, be made: an Englishman speaking to an American may employ the word “elevator” rather than “lift” and so on.) In many communities throughout the world, it is common for members to speak two or more different dialects and to use one dialect rather than another in particular social situations. This is commonly referred to as code-switching. Code-switching may operate between two distinct languages (e.g., Spanish and English among Puerto Ricans in New York) as well as between two dialects of the same language. The term diglossia (rather than bilingualism) is frequently used by sociolinguists to refer to this by no means uncommon phenomenon.
In every situation, what one says and how one says it depends upon the nature of that situation, the social role being played at the time, one’s status vis-à-vis that of the person addressed, one’s attitude towards him, and so on. Language interacts with nonverbal behaviour in social situations and serves to clarify and reinforce the various roles and relationships important in a particular culture. Sociolinguistics is far from having satisfactorily analyzed or even identified all the factors involved in the selection of one language feature rather than another in particular situations. Among those that have been discussed in relation to various languages are: the formality or informality of the situation; power and solidarity relationships between the participants; differences of sex, age, occupation, socioeconomic class, and educational background; and personal or transactional situations. Terms such as style and register (as well as a variety of others) are employed by many linguists to refer to the socially relevant dimensions of phonological, grammatical, and lexical variation within one language. So far there is very little agreement as to the precise application of such terms. (For further treatment of sociolinguistics, see dialect.)
Other relationships
Anthropological linguistics
The fundamental concern of anthropological linguistics is to investigate the relationship between language and culture. To what extent the structure of a particular language is determined by or determines the form and content of the culture with which it is associated remains a controversial question. Vocabulary differences between languages correlate obviously enough with cultural differences, but even here the interdependence of language and culture is not so strong that one can argue from the presence or absence of a corresponding cultural difference. For example, from the fact that English—unlike French, German, Russian, and many other languages—distinguishes lexically between monkeys and apes, one cannot conclude that there is an associated difference in the cultural significance attached to these animals by English-speaking societies. Some of the major grammatical distinctions in certain languages may have originated in culturally important categories (e.g., the distinction between an animate and an inanimate gender). But they seem to endure independently of any continuing cultural significance. The “Whorfian hypothesis” (the thesis that one’s thought and even perception are determined by the language one happens to speak), in its strong form at least, is no longer debated as vigorously as it was a few years ago. Anthropologists continue to draw upon linguistics for the assistance it can give them in the analysis of such topics as the structure of kinship. A later development, but one that has not so far produced any very substantial results, is the application of notions derived from generative grammar to the analysis of ritual and other kinds of culturally prescribed behaviour.
Computational linguistics
By computational linguistics is meant no more than the use of electronic digital computers in linguistic research. At a theoretically trivial level, computers are employed to scan texts and to produce, more rapidly and more reliably than was possible in the past, such valuable aids to linguistic and stylistic research as word lists, frequency counts, and concordances. Theoretically more interesting, though much more difficult, is the automatic grammatical analysis of texts by computer. Considerable progress was made in this area by research groups working on machine translation and information retrieval in the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and a few other countries in the decade between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s. But much of the original impetus for this work disappeared, for a time at least, in part because of the realization that the theoretical problems involved in machine translation are much more difficult than they were at first thought to be and in part as a consequence of a loss of interest among linguists in the development of discovery procedures. Whether automatic syntactic analysis and fully automatic high-quality machine translation are even feasible in principle remains a controversial question.
Mathematical linguistics
What is commonly referred to as mathematical linguistics comprises two areas of research: the study of the statistical structure of texts and the construction of mathematical models of the phonological and grammatical structure of languages. These two branches of mathematical linguistics, which may be termed statistical and algebraic linguistics, respectively, are typically distinct. Attempts have been made to derive the grammatical rules of languages from the statistical structure of texts written in those languages, but such attempts are generally thought to have been not only unsuccessful so far in practice but also, in principle, doomed to failure. That languages have a statistical structure is a fact well known to cryptographers. Within linguistics, it is of considerable typological interest to compare languages from a statistical point of view (the ratio of consonants to vowels, of nouns to verbs, and so on). Statistical considerations are also of value in stylistics.
Algebraic linguistics derives principally from the work of Chomsky in the field of generative grammar (see above Chomsky’s grammar). In his earliest work Chomsky described three different models of grammar—finite-state grammar, phrase-structure grammar, and transformational grammar—and compared them in terms of their capacity to generate all and only the sentences of natural languages and, in doing so, to reflect in an intuitively satisfying manner the underlying formal principles and processes. Other models have also been investigated, and it has been shown that certain different models are equivalent in generative power to phrase-structure grammars. The problem is to construct a model that has all the formal properties required to handle the processes found to be operative in languages but that prohibits rules that are not required for linguistic description.
Stylistics
The term stylistics is employed in a variety of senses by different linguists. In its widest interpretation it is understood to deal with every kind of synchronic variation in language other than what can be ascribed to differences of regional dialect. At its narrowest interpretation it refers to the linguistic analysis of literary texts. One of the aims of stylistics in this sense is to identify those features of a text that give it its individual stamp and mark it as the work of a particular author. Another is to identify the linguistic features of the text that produce a certain aesthetic response in the reader. The aims of stylistics are the traditional aims of literary criticism. What distinguishes stylistics as a branch of linguistics (for those who regard it as such) is the fact that it draws upon the methodological and theoretical principles of modern linguistics.
Applied linguistics
In the sense in which the term applied linguistics is most commonly used nowadays it is restricted to the application of linguistics to language teaching. Much of the expansion of linguistics as a subject of teaching and research in the second half of the 20th century came about because of its value, actual and potential, for writing better language textbooks and devising more efficient methods of teaching languages. Linguistics is also widely held to be relevant to the training of speech therapists and teachers of the deaf. Outside the field of education in the narrower sense, applied linguistics (and, more particularly, applied sociolinguistics) has an important part to play in what is called language planning—i.e., in advising governments, especially in recently created states, as to which language or dialect should be made the official language of the country and how it should be standardized.
John Lyons