1. Lecture # 8

2.  Applied Linguistics uses knowledge of how languages work within different applied settings.  It examines the structure of language & its role in communication.  It explores how children acquire language.  It studies how second language learners develop skills.

3.  It talks about the practical application of language  Use in language, Psychology & Neuro- surgery, communication media, law, philosophy, mathematics, sociology  Study for personal satisfaction  Study useful in several fields

4.  Definition: The evolution of language in human society and its role in the formation of culture is studied in anthropological linguistics.  This is another aspect of language, society and culture.

5.  The structure of language has a social and cultural basis in the same way as other customs, conventions, and codes such as those related to dress and food.  Each culture organizes its world in its own way giving names to objects, identifying areas of significance or values and suppressing other areas.

6.  Language becomes a way of embodying the world view and beliefs of a culture and the things that that culture holds sacred.  A culture with family relationships most significant will have many kinship terms.  Each relationship will have a particular term.  Compare kinship terms in English with those in Urdu. Example: Grandfather, Grandmother etc.

7.  Similarly terms for colours, emotions, natural phenomena, and so on are differently organized in every culture, and reveal a lot about that culture  The study of these cultural elements is called ‘ehtnography’ of a culture.  A specific way of communication in a culture is studied as the ethnography of communication

8.  Anthropological studies have explored the relation between language and culture.  Language is invented to communicate and express a culture.  The language begins to determine the way we think and see the world

9.  We cannot go beyond this language – it is the very means by which we understand and think about the world  The above idea given by the linguist B.L. Whorf  Whorf gave hypothesis: We dissect nature along the lines laid by our native language.

10.  The debate is still on but it’s true to some extent that we see the world according to the terms specified by our own language.  These aspects still being discussed by anthropological linguists, philosophers of language and ethnographers

11.  Definition: The study of the style of literary texts  Taking the view of register (language used in different fields – religious sermons, sports commentary, law etc), we can study the styles of literary texts.  We may describe its features at levels of phonology, syntax, lexis, etc.

12.  We distinguish one text from the other  We appreciate how it achieves some special features and effects through the use of language.  This kind of study is termed as ‘Literary stylistics’

13.  Literary writers use the system of language in their own way- by deliberate choice ( out of the whole range of words they choose one which is effective)  Some techniques used are: deviating from or violation of the rules of grammar (eg. ‘He danced his did’ in Cummings’ poem)

14. Techniques of poets (contd..)  Inverting the normal order of words in a sentence (e.g. ‘Home is the sailor…’)  Creating a pattern by repeating some items (e.g. the sound /f/ in ‘the furrow followed free) By such techniques they manipulate language to convey themes forcefully & effectively

15.  In stylistics texts read carefully with attention to the features of language used  Particular features identified and listed under headings of ‘lexis’, ‘grammar’, ‘phonology’, & ‘sound patterns’  After getting details, they are co-related or brought together for interpreting a text

16.  The writers try to link ‘what’ is being said with ‘how it is being said’  It is through the latter that writers can fully convey their complex ideas and feelings  Stylistic analysis also helps in better understanding of how metaphor, irony, paradox, ambiguity etc. operate in literary texts (they are effects of language and building up of a coherent linguistic structure)

17.  Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language.  As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methodology and theory from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, neurobiology, communication disorders, neuropsychology and computer science.

18.  Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information related to language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology and computer modeling.

19.  One of the first people to draw a connection between a particular brain area and language processing was Paul Broca, a French surgeon.  He conducted autopsies on numerous individuals who had speaking deficiencies, and found that most of them had brain damage (or lesions) on the left frontal lobe, in an area now known as Broca’s area.

20.  Broca's research possibly the first to offer empirical evidence for such a relationship, and has been described as "epoch-making" and "pivotal" to the fields of neurolinguistics and cognitive science.

21.  Later, Carl Wernicke, after whom Wernicke’s area is named, proposed that different areas of the brain were specialized for different linguistic tasks.  Broca's area specialized at handling the motor production of speech, and Wernicke's area handling auditory speech comprehension

22.  Broca and Wernicke – work on Aphasiology  Established idea of language study through study of physical characteristics of brain.  The coining of the term "neurolinguistics" attributed to Harry Whitaker, who founded the Journal of Neurolinguistics in 1985.

23. Neurolinguistics as a discipline  Neurolinguistics closely related to the field of psycholinguistics  Much work in neurolinguistics involves testing and evaluating theories put forth by psycholinguists and theoretical linguists.  In general, theoretical linguists propose models to explain the structure of language and how language information is organized.

24.  Psycholinguists propose models and algorithms to explain how language information is processed in the mind.  Neurolinguists analyze brain activity to infer how biological structures (populations and networks of neurons) carry out those psycholinguistic processing algorithms.

25.  Neurolinguistics research is carried out in all the major areas of linguistics.  The main linguistic subfields, and how neurolinguistics addresses them, are given in the table that follows:

26. SubfieldDescription Research questions in neurolinguistics Phonetics study of speech sounds how the brain extracts speech sounds from an acoustic signal, how the brain separates speech sounds from background noiseacoustic Phonology the study of how sounds are organized in a language how the phonological system of a particular language is represented in the brain MorphologyMorphology and lexicology lexicology the study of how words are structured and stored in the mental lexiconmental lexicon how the brain stores and accesses words that a person knows Syntax the study of how multiple- word utterances are constructed how the brain combines words into constituents and sentences; how structural and semantic information is used in understanding sentencesconstituents Semantics the study of how meaning is encoded in language

27.  Anthropological Linguistics The evolution of language in human society and its role in the formation of culture  Literary Stylistics The study of the style of literary texts  Neurolinguistics the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language.