Lecture I: Introductory

Areas of Linguistics.
Branches, Methods and Key Paradigms
in Linguistic Research
Course: Key Trajectories in the Contemporary Linguistic Research
Date: September 7, 2020

[email protected]
Microsoft Team: Основи лінгвістичних досліджень
MOODLE University Platform
Grading
  Participation @ the Lectures & Seminars  
  Seminars (answers) – 40 points (8 seminars) 
  Semester project + presentation – 20 points 
  Final test – 40 points 
Thematic Outline of the Lectures
1. Introductory Lecture. Approaches, Methods and Key Concepts in
Linguistic Research.
2. Pragmatics: Language Use in Context.
3. Sociolinguistics: Language in Social environments. Linguistics and
Social media.
4. Critical Discourse Analysis.
5. Ethnolinguistics. Language and Cultural studies.
6. Language and Cognition: the Lines of Approach in Cognitive
Linguistics.
7. Corpus linguistics.
8. Profiling the Areas and Relevance of Contemporary Linguistics.
 Linguistics

■ Scientific study of language as a universal part of human behavior and thinking

■ Linguistics is the study of the human ability to produce and interpret language in
speaking, writing and signing (for the deaf).
■ All languages and all varieties of every language constitute potential data for
linguistic research, as do the relationships between them and the relations and
structures of their components.
■ The scientific way of thinking about language involves making systematic,
empirical observations.
Empirical means that we observe data to find the evidence for our theories.
Linguistic typology and language universals
■ Practitioners of linguistic typology – or linguistic typologists – tend to work with a
large number of languages in their research, typically asking ‘what is possible, as
opposed to impossible, in human language?’ or, more modestly, ‘what is more
probable, as opposed to less probable, in human language?’
■ (1) Cross-linguistic identification; (2) language sampling
■ Linguistic typology involves four stages of investigation:
(1) the identification of a phenomenon to be studied;
(2) the classification of the phenomenon;
(3) the formulation of a generalization or generalizations over the classification;
(4) the explanation of the generalization(s).
■ to uncover the unity of human language --- language universals!
 Language in our universe:
Linguistic endangerment
■ a language must have more than 100,000 speakers to be
‘Safe’, that is, to be likely to be spoken for at least the next
100 years.
■ On the basis of the figures then available from Ethnologue
(Lewis et al. 2014 is the current edition), Krauss shows this to
mean 600 Safe languages from a global list of more than
6,000 languages which in turn implies an extinction rate of
90 per cent in the current century.
■ Language has physical forms to be studied. You can hear speech, see writing and
signing, and feel Braille.
■ The forms can be decomposed into structured components: sentences, phrases,
words, letters, sounds. These language constituents are expressed and combined in
conventional ways that are largely (if not completely) rule-governed.
■ Branches of linguistics:
phonetics, i.e. the study of sounds
phonology, i.e. the study of speech sounds in their cognitive aspects
morphology, i.e. the study of the formation of words (morpheme is the smallest unit of
grammatical analysis with semantic specification)
syntax, i.e. the study of the formation of sentences
semantics, i.e. the study of meaning
pragmatics, i.e. the study of language use in the utterances
Discourse
■ "Discourse is the way in which
language is used socially to
convey broad historical meanings.
It is language identified by the
social conditions of its use, by
who is using it and under what
conditions. Language can never
be 'neutral' because it bridges our
personal and social worlds."
(Frances Henry and Carol Tator, Discourses
of Domination. University of Toronto Press,
2002)
■ Critical Discourse Analysis:
language – text – discourse
 Twitter Discourse
of the US President
Donald Trump
 Language planning
Making deliberate decisions about the form of a language.
■ Very commonly, a language ‘just grows’: it develops and changes in
response to countless small decisions made more or less unconsciously
by its speakers.
■ But it is perfectly possible, and in some circumstances necessary, for
the future of a language to be determined in important respects by
deliberate, self-conscious decisions, often made on an official basis.
■ Sometimes it is also called linguistic engineering.
■ A short glossary of the changes we’ve made to the
Guardian’s style guide, for use by our journalists
and editors when writing about the environment.
1.) “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” to be
used instead of “climate change”
Climate change is no longer considered to accurately
reflect the seriousness of the overall situation; use
climate emergency or climate crisis instead to
describe the broader impact of climate change.
However, use climate breakdown or climate change
or global heating when describing it specifically in a
scientific or geophysical sense eg “Scientists say
climate breakdown has led to an increase in the
intensity of hurricanes”.
2.) Use “global heating” not “global warming”
‘Global heating’ is more scientifically accurate.
Greenhouse gases form an atmospheric blanket that
stops the sun’s heat escaping back to space.
Linguistic methodology
■ It is aimed at identifying the nature of language in its interrelation with the
consciousness of its speakers (language users), society, culture, reality,
communication, and world perception processes, as well as at forming the
instruments, premises and ways of describing and analyzing the language and its
products.
■ Each paradigm in linguistics developed its approaches to and methodologies in
treating the language, taking into account as well the episteme, i.e. the body of ideas
that determine the knowledge that is intellectually certain at any particular time.
(1) Genetic (comparative-historical) paradigm: 19th c.
(2) Structural: first half of the 20th c.
(3) Pragmatic (communicative-functional): second half of the 20th c.
(4) Cognitive and Discourse: early 21st c.
■ Сontemporary episteme: anthropocentrism
 Key Lingustic Research Methods:
The method depends on your research
■ using corpora, questions which should be clearly
formulated, worthwhile, and researchable
■ questionnaire design, ‘because it is through them that you will be
connecting what it is that you wish to
■ computer-assisted content research with how you are going to go about
analysis, researching it’.
■ interview methods, The role of research questions is important
in identifying appropriate data and
■ observation, accordingly data collection, elicitation
(generation), or selection (e.g. when looking
■ statistic analysis, at a body of literary or newspaper texts).
■ fieldwork in linguistics
Overarching research question:
■ What are some differences in the way [a given political
event] is reported in newspaper X and newspaper Y?
■ Subordinate research question 1: How are the ‘social
actors’ in each newspaper report nominalized?
■ Subordinate research question 2: Which report uses the
greatest proportion of agentless passive verb
constructions?
Research question Data needed Data collection Data analysis

1…

2…

3…
■ Deliberately misleading articles, websites and
social media posts can come about for lots of
different reasons: they might be trying to influence
elections or policies; they might represent a form
of cyberwarfare between states; they might be
aimed at raising someone’s profile and influence,
or discrediting their opponents. Or they might
simply be about making money, relying on the
attention-grabbing nature of outrageous lies to
generate ad revenue. One thing they may have in
common, however, is the language they use.
■ For the past few years, researchers have been
trying to work out what the linguistic
characteristics of fake news are. Computers that
are fed material already classified as misleading
are able to identify patterns in the language used.
They’re then able to apply that knowledge to new
material, and flag it as potentially dubious.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/02/language-fake-news-
linguistic-research
■ One such project, led at Simon Fraser University in Canada, recently found that “on average, fake news
articles use more … words related to sex, death and anxiety”. “Overly emotional” language is often
deployed. In contrast, “Genuine news … contains a larger proportion of words related to work
(business) and money (economy).”
■ Another group of researchers analysed the relationship of various grammatical categories to fake news.
They concluded that words which can be used to exaggerate are all found more often in deliberately
misleading sources. These included superlatives, like “most” and “worst”, and so-called subjectives, like
“brilliant” and “terrible”. They noted that propaganda tends to use abstract generalities like “truth” and
“freedom”, and intriguingly showed that use of the second-person pronoun “you” was closely linked to
fake news.
■ At the University of Birmingham, a study on newspaper writing by Jayson Blair, who resigned from the
New York Times in disgrace in 2003. Even though he was trying to pass his work off as factual, there
were subtle tells that only become evident when the data is crunched. For example, there were more
emphatics like “really” and “most” in Blair’s retracted articles. He used shorter words and his language
was less “informationally dense”. The present tense cropped up more often and he relied on the third
person pronouns “he” and “she” rather than full names – something that’s typical of fiction.
 Linguistics Goes Multidisciplinary (I)
■ Field linguistics applies the methods of data elicitation and data collection in order
to document, describe and analyze languages and language practices in their natural
habitat – within the community of native speakers under investigation.
■ The primary mission of anthropological linguistics is to tie forms of language to
the social structures and customs of a people. Linguistic anthropologists study
linguistic landscapes, which becomes more than an assemblage of verbal signage
displayed in public or community spheres within urban contexts, but also a
conceptual frame for the local lives.
■ “a barometer of the relationship between language and society”
■ Anthropological linguists study the relation between worldviews, grammatical
categories and semantic fields, the influence of speech on socialization and personal
relationships, and the interaction of linguistic and social communities.
Linguistic landscape of Lviv: Past &
Present
 Linguistics Goes Multidisciplinary (II)
■ A principal difference is that
What do you call soft drinks in the US?
sociolinguistics focuses on the varieties of
language used among different groups
within a particular language community.
■ Sociolinguists also investigate language
change through time by plotting the
spreading adoption of new forms and the
decay of old ones, which is often
accelerated during periods of social stress
and change.
■ Concepts of politeness and offensiveness
differ among different social groups, and Dialect vs regional variety

such social conventions and their

correlation with social relations are also Dialect vs regional variety
topics relevant to sociolinguistics. I have got ↔ I have gotten
Linguistics Goes Multidisciplinary (III)
■ On a broad understanding of cognitive linguistics, any approach which
sees language as primarily a mental phenomenon, located in the minds
of its speakers, can be described as cognitive. It deals with categorization
and conceptualization of the world through the language means.
Case A: → We’re at a crossroads.
→ We may have to go our separate ways.
→ The relationship isn’t going anywhere.
→ We’re spinning our wheels.
→ Our relationship is off the track.
Case B: Americans and Japanese agree on LIFE IS A SPORT, but Americans
have baseball jargon, while the Japanese – sumo words.
Linguistics Goes Multidisciplinary (IV)

Language processing: The mental activities involved in

producing and comprehending language.
Whenever we produce an utterance, or whenever we hear and
understand one, there is a great deal of elaborate activity
going on in our brains.
Psycholinguists are interested in the mental lexicon, the
words and lexical resources stored in an individual brain.
 Linguistic relativity hypothesis

■ popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

■ The hypothesis goes that the structure of our language to some extent
determines the way we perceive the world.
■ It holds that the language natively spoken by people influences the way they
view the world and interact with it.

e.g. The Hopi language has one word to describe three different things. The same word
implies an insect, an aviator, and an airplane. Hence, if a Hopi speaker witnesses an insect
flying near an aviator, while looking at an airplane, she would claim to have seen the same
thing (word) thrice, whereas an English speaker would describe it as seeing three different
things.
Friedrich Schleiermacher acknowledged:

All humans are under the sway of the language

they speak, so that it is impossible to think with
complete clarity anything that lies beyond its
boundaries.
 Linguistics Goes Multidisciplinary (V)

■ Narrative Studies: Everything’s a narrative, narratives are everywhere, and if you

(as an enterprise, a politician, a university department, a public service, a tourist
resort – yes, even a restaurant meal) don’t ‘have a narrative’, you are sunk.
■ Some narratives encapsulate key information in a memorable format, but most
centrally narratives have a performative function: what is told and the way that it is
told simultaneously reports on the identity and values of the teller, or the subject-
matter, or the addressee (or some combination of these).
■ It is always crucial to look what narrative a text elaborates.
Guerrilla war
■ A terminological meaning
‘war, during which the weaker side uses the tactics of
avoiding general battles and combats unexpected enemy attacks
with the help of small military units or partisans’.
■ The combination guerrilla war is associated by users of common language primarily with semantic
elements such as ‘a scope of insidious, hidden and difficult to predict, tiring opponent actions’.
■ In the modern texts, the term guerrilla war can undergo a metaphorisation process – it is a
determinologisation of multiword expression of military terms.
■ In the figurative sense of the verbal connection guerrilla war there are characterised semantic elements as
‘set of insidious actions, hidden, difficult to predict, directed against to someone or to something, to
achieve something, teasing the opposite side, her fatigue, limiting its influence’.
■ Tax guerrilla war, office guerrilla war.
■ The texts which reported metaphored military term guerrilla war featured the following metaphors:
POLITICS is a WAR, ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE is a WAR, DIFFERENT, SPECIAL ACTIVITIES
and FORMS OF COMPETITION is a WAR.
Thank you for your attention!