LING121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Social Constructionism, Communicative Competence, Sociolinguistics
3 Jun 2018
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Department
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Professor
LING121 Language Myths and Realities !
Descriptive Linguistics, or āBeing Theory Agnosticā !
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 itās diļ¬cult to
test these sorts of theories - aspects of generative linguistics that remain Essentially
unfalsiļ¬able !
-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 !
-ālinguistic universalsā - 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 ļ¬eld work !
Tools for Documenting Languages
-languages that donāt have very long written traditions !
# ā¢# Field notebooks %
# ā¢# Recording, transcribing, translating %
# ā¢# Structured elicitation tasks %
# ā¢# Grammaticality tests/acceptability tests %
# ā¢# 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 !
ā¢Formal narratives (myths and legends, religious texts) ā¢ Procedural texts%
ā¢ Community meetings%
ā¢ Informal conversation%
ā¢ Songs%
ā¢ emails, text messages, facebook%
ā¢ Emic genres (speciļ¬c 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.
