LING121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Social Constructionism, Communicative Competence, Sociolinguistics
3 Jun 2018
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LING121 Language Myths and Realities !
Descriptive Linguistics, or “Being Theory Agnostic” !
Week 4a!
Descriptive linguistics, linguistic diversity and linguistic theory !
-theories need to accommodate primary linguistic data !
-Descriptive accounts of language as opposed to prescriptive accounts - secondary, derived
from primary languages!
-We need primary linguistic data - someone needs to go out and collect it and test the theories
put forth !
-UG - struggle - exists at level of competence, if you ignore we people actually say it’s difficult to
test these sorts of theories - aspects of generative linguistics that remain Essentially
unfalsifiable !
-We need data at the end of the day !
-SIL International - responsible for translation bible into many minority languages and
Ethnologue, !
-Tagmemic grammar? !
- From Kenneth Pike!
-Smallest possible unit of grammar !
-Problem with it is that this theory is forgotten - no one knows about it anymore !
-SIL sent lots of people out to describe many languages - descriptive framed within Tamemic
grammar - these grammatical descriptions virtually impenetrable !
Linguistic description and documentary linguistics - people who do this have an intellectual
relationship with linguistic typology !
-‘linguistic universals’ - what we expect all languages to have !
-People who describe languages generally need to understand what is permissible in a language !
-Same people who do typology do field work !
Tools for Documenting Languages
-languages that don’t have very long written traditions !
# •# Field notebooks %
# •# Recording, transcribing, translating %
# •# Structured elicitation tasks %
# •# Grammaticality tests/acceptability tests %
# •# Narrative elicitation tasks (Pear Stories, Frog stories, Family Problems task) -
generate similar types of data for comparison across languages !
Stimulus materials - picture and video stimuli !
What Kind of Texts? !
-and these days we think the more texts you have the more robust your descriptions !
•Formal narratives (myths and legends, religious texts) • Procedural texts%
• Community meetings%
• Informal conversation%
• Songs%
• emails, text messages, facebook%
• Emic genres (specific to the culture) !
Document Summary
Theories need to accommodate primary linguistic data. Descriptive accounts of language as opposed to prescriptive accounts - secondary, derived from primary languages. We need primary linguistic data - someone needs to go out and collect it and test the theories put forth. Ug - struggle - exists at level of competence, if you ignore we people actually say it"s di cult to test these sorts of theories - aspects of generative linguistics that remain essentially unfalsi able. We need data at the end of the day. Sil international - responsible for translation bible into many minority languages and. Problem with it is that this theory is forgotten - no one knows about it anymore. Sil sent lots of people out to describe many languages - descriptive framed within tamemic grammar - these grammatical descriptions virtually impenetrable. Linguistic description and documentary linguistics - people who do this have an intellectual relationship with linguistic typology.
