APPLIED LINGUISTICS THE UNMARKED FORM
The influence of English on the development of applied linguistics cannot be exaggerated (Phillipson 1992). In the medieval university Latin played the same role. In order to develop an educated work-force for whom Latin then (as English now) was the lingua franca, training in Latin structure and in logic, discourse and translation was necessary. Hence the emphasis on grammar in the trivium (an analogue of which remains today in the Honors Moderations at Oxford University as the first part of the degree of Literae Humaniores or classics). Should we regard that type of interest as a form of applied linguistics? Would it perhaps be more accurate to see it as a precursor of linguistics?
If that is accepted, then we could extend the argument, first by suggesting that investigations (and teaching) are always prompted by socio-political and economic imperatives, which in the Middle Ages demanded the provision of an educated professional class of clerics and lawyers. That imperative, we might suggest, is what drives speculation (‘pure research’) rather than the other way round. Applied disciplines, it follows, develop in order to provide the necessary training in newly emerging technical and professional occupations.
This again suggests that the relation between theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics should place applied linguistics in the pole position. Applied linguistics can then be seen to be the driver, with linguistics following behind to respond to the practical questions applied linguistic raises, attempting to answer them and by doing so widening its range of coverage. Take second language acquisition, now firmly within theoretical linguistics but itself in origin a very practical study of error analysis in TEFL; or critical discourse analysis and other areas of stylistics or LSPs, now drawn into the wider study within sociolinguistics of language variation; or translation a seriously practical pursuit and now slowly becoming absorbed into comparative linguistics.
Of course, there are important and continuing distinctions between general or theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics. They may be summarized by:
• the immediate and the distant, with applied linguistics concerned with the former; and
• the need to expand to other disciplines because of the involvement of factors outside the scope of language. Applied linguistics is clearly multi-factorial in that in addition to linguistics, it draws on other disciplines, psychology, sociology, education, politics and so on. Ironically, as has become clear in the last period, linguistics also needs to do the same and cannot isolate itself from the daily uses of language.
