Part 2: Some key issues in applied linguistics
Integrationist and functionalist accounts of language
The most thoroughgoing rejection of the separation of linguistic form from social function is perhaps that articulated by Harris and his associates. Harris (2001) draws a distinction between 'autonomists' those who believe language is a set of verbal tools, and communication just the use to which those tools happen to be put- and 'non-autonomists', those who believe language is communication. He defines himself as an 'integrationist', and thus among those who take 'the most radical position' (p.131) on this issue. Integrationists see the extrapolation from individual cases to general rules as illegitimate, because language is a negotiated protocol between individuals which varies with each negotiation. (Other interpretations of integrationism also challenge mentalist versions of linguistics, though from slightly different positions. See, for example, Lieb 2002.)
Another approach which denies a distinction between language 'competence' (the abstract mental capacity, or potential, to deploy language) and 'performance' (the realization of this capacity in actual utterances) is defined as 'functional', associated particularly with Halliday, who proposes that 'language is as it is because of what it has to do' (Halliday 1978: 19), and that the way to understand language is to start from the principle that 'the linguistic system is a sociolinguistic system' (ibid.: 72). There is considerable integration, in Halliday's system, of the uses to which language is put and the patterns of its grammar and vocabulary. The functions of language include not only the communication of ideas (the 'ideational' function), and the organization of texts themselves (the 'textual' function) but also the participation in communicative acts, enabling human beings 'to take on roles and to express and understand feelings, attitude and judgements' (Bloor and Bloor 1995: 9). The descriptive system which has developed from this perspective on language as practice includes categories and labels such as 'Actor', 'Goal' and 'Process' which signal a concern with meaning, including interpersonal meaning. Rather than seeing the sentence as the largest unit of analysis, and sentences as composed of aggregations of smaller units, this perspective posits the text as 'the basic unit of the semantic process' (ibid.: 107). For Halli dayan functionalists, it is more useful to see text as encoded in sentences rather than composed of them, and the emphasis on understanding what language is is much more inter- than intra-individual. As Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999: 140) express it, 'the social is built into the grammatical tissue of language'.
In this approach there is a shift of emphasis from the invisible workings of the individual mind towards the empirically observable behavior of the language user. Many applied linguists would argue that this is more useful to them than the formalist approach to language description associated with Chomsky. As Carter (1993) puts it:
There is a primary focus on language in use rather than on language as an abstract system and the models of analysis developed within functional linguistics are therefore of particular use for the analyses of naturally occurring spoken and written texts, often those produced within educational contexts. (p.31)
A concern with empirical evidence of language-users' behavior underpins another development in language description, whereby researchers have developed large, electronically stored 'corpora': 'collection[s] of pieces of language, selected and ordered according to explicit linguistic criteria in order to be used as a sample of the language' (Sinclair 1996 in Aston and Burnard 1998). A key objection made by corpus linguists to traditional descriptions is the weight placed by the latter on the intuition of the native speaker of a language, a procedure which Sinclair (1991) likens to 'that of the physical sciences some 250 years ago' (p.l). Corpus linguistics uses the computer to store and to search very large quantities of language data which have been produced for actual communicative purposes by (usually) large numbers of speakers and/or writers. The corpus known as the Bank of English, for example, includes over 400 million words of running text drawn from newspapers, magazines, fiction and non-fiction books, brochures, leaflets, reports and letters, as well as transcripts of every day conversations, meetings, discussions and radio programs.
The software used to investigate a corpus allows the identification of recurring patterns; in particular, concordancing programs identify the contexts within which particular linguistic items, such as a specific word or group of words, occur. Collocations are patterns of co-occurrence of words- 'You shall know a word by the company it keeps', wrote Firth (1957: 11, cited in Stubbs 1996)- and corpus investigations have identified some facts about such patterns which had not been identified by earlier methods of analysis. Corpus linguists have found reason from their research to challenge the adequacy of traditional grammatical categories. They argue that corpus evidence points to a different kind of classification, of 'patterns' functioning differently from the paradigm/syntagm matrix described above. Again, communicative function is foregrounded:
As communicators we do not proceed by selecting syntactic structures and independently choosing lexical items to slot into them. Instead we have concepts to convey and communicative choices to make which require central lexical items, and these choices find themselves syntactic structures in which they can be said comfortably and grammatically. (Francis 1995 in Hunston and Francis 2000: 31)
