4. What are the relations between the “academic” and “vocational” aspects? Can they exist without each other?
5. Comment on the terms “the English language”, “sublanguages”, “varieties”.
6. What are the ways of approaching the study of the varieties of English? What do the varieties have in common?
7. What are the components of a complete description of any variety of Contenporary English? Give some comments on each of them.
8. Will you name the most important varieties of English? Give their specific features.
9. What methods are used in study of Contemporary English? What is their essence?
10. What can you tell about relationship between the academic content of Contemporary English and applied or vocational programmes for the study and teaching of English as a foreign language?
11. What does Strevens say about a doctrine in teaching English? What attitude towards language teachers prevailed in the UK and the USA in the nineteen sixties? What is meant by “a marriage of the two components”?
12. What are the main ways of raising English language teaching standards in Britain and abroad?
13. What does the author mean by “a triple bond between the disciplines”? Give your comments on the interrelation between disciplines.
II. Read, mark and discuss in pairs the following Strevens’ statements about the aims pursued by foreign learners of English:
- As the medium of the literature and culture of English speaking countries;
- For access to scholarly and technological publications;
- To qualify as English teachers, translators and interpreters;
- To improve their chances of employment or promotion in such areas as the tourist trade, international commerce or programmes for economic or military aid.
What statements of your own can you add to the list? Give your comments.
Chapter 5. Language and Representation
We see, hear and otherwise experience so largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. ( Edward Sapir).
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our (Benjamin Lee Whorf).
Language enables us to talk with each other. At the same time it enables us to talk about something. It provides us with not just a mode of interaction, but also with a capacity for representation. Now we turn to the IDEATIONAL possibilities of language. It is these which provide us with the means for apprehending and comprehending, to ourselves and with others, the world in which we live.
We are immediately faced, however, with a fundamental question: do all human languages represent the world in the same way; or do different languages (by virtue of their different vocabularies) provide different ways of experiencing and understanding the world, in much the same way as different kinds of speaking practice make possible different modes of relation?
1. Two Conflicting Positions the “Universalist” versus the “Relativist”
Fundamentally, we can understand the way in which language represent the world to us in terms of two opposing positions. According to one view, human beings generally (whatever their culture or language) are endowed with a common stock of basic concepts-"conceptual primes" as they are sometimes known-out of which more elaborated conceptual systems and patterns of thought can be constructed. Language, according to this view, is merely a vehicle for expressing the conceptual system which exists independently of it. And, because all conceptual system share a common basis, all language turn out to be fundamentally similar. They will all, for instance, find some way of expressing such, conceptual primes as relative height (e.g. "up" vs. "down"), relative distance (e.g. "near" vs. "far"), relative time (e.g. "now' vs. "then"). According to this position, thought determines language; and consequently separate languages represent the world in closely equivalent ways. We might characterize this view as the "universalist" position.
The alternative position maintains that thought is difficult to separate from language; each is woven inextricably into the other. Concepts can only take shape if we have the words and structures in which to express them. Thinking depends crucially upon language. Because the vocabularies and structures of separate language can vary so widely, it makes no sense to posit conceptual primes of a universal nature. Indeed, it is not at all likely that different languages represent the world in equivalent ways. On the contrary, habitual users of one language will experience and understand the world in ways peculiar to that language and different from habitual users of another language. The latter viewpoint might be termed the "relativist" position.
2. Vocabulary and Grammatical Differences between languages.
In support of the relativist position it is clear that the continuum of experience is differently dissected, by the vocabularies of different languages.
Some of the most striking differences, between the vocabulary of separate language show up in the arrangement of colour terms. Whereas English operates with eleven basic colour terms ("black, "white" "red", "green", "yellow", "blue", "brown", "purple", "pink", /"orange" and "grey"), some languages operate with more, some with less. Russian for example, deploys twelve, the former making a distinction, between two types of blue. The way in which the colourspectrim is segmented can thus vary quite dramatically from language to language.
However, the really fundamental differences between languages operates at more than the level of vocabulary; they operate within the structural patterns of the language itself. Thus, differences between languages may be found in the way they are structurally patterned to handle such basic notions as time, cause and effect, agency, spatial relations, and so on. The linguist with whom the relativist claim is most associated — Benjamin Lee Whorf proposes "a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic background are similar, or can in some way be calibrated... Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different, views of the world."
3. Difficulties in the Relativist position
Over forty years have elapsed since Whorf wrote these words. Yet, with occasional shifts in the terms of debate, controversy around these issues has remained strong ever since. Evaluating the respective merits of the relativist and universalist position would really require a book. There are it mast be admitted, certain basic difficulties in the relativist position. In its extreme form it assumes distinctions in experience and understanding on the basis of linguistic distinctions. So it assumes, for example, that Russians experience the colour spectrum, particularly in the domain of “blueness", rather differently than English speakers do, because the linguistic terms are different in this respect language is not an absolute straitjacket - it does not totally constrain our ways of seeing and experiencing. I would still want to claim, as Whorf states, that language plays an active and crucial role in sharing (though not completely determining) the processes of representation, by "pointing us toward different types of observation" and "predisposing certain choices of interpretation".
4. The “Interested" Character of Linguistic Representation
What the relativist position emphasizes, then, despite certain difficulties associated with it, is that the world is not given to us directly and straightforwardly in experience. In apprehending, comprehending and representing the, world we inevitably draw upon linguistic formulations. One might say that because of this we always see it slightly askew. But it is not so much a question of "bias" that is at stake here. What it amounts to in fact is that there is no absolutely neutral and disinterested way of apprehending and representing the world. Language always helps to select, arrange, organize, and evaluate experience, even when we are least conscious of it doing so.
In this sense representation is always interested: the words chosen are selected from a determinate set for the situation at hard and have been previously shaped by the community, or by portions of the community, to which the speaker belongs.
5. Vocabulary and the depiction of gender
We can see something of the interested nature of representation by looking at the distribution of English vocabulary items around the notions of "woman" and "man", "female" and "male". In a study, based primarily on American English, it was found, for example, that there were more words for men than there were for women. Despite this kind of imbalance, however, there were many more words for a woman in her sexual aspect than there were for a sexually active man. Thus, for women there are in excess of 200 expressions such as "pint", "Judy", "tart", "skirt", "piece", "bitch", " tight-bitch", "slag", "scrubber", "piece-of-ass", "cunt", "bird", "broad", "lay", "pick-up", "prick-teaser" and so on. Many of the terms sound pejorative. An equivalent list for men is much more difficult to compile but would include less than fifty items such as "stud", "dirty-old-man", "randy-old-goat", "philanderer", "Casanova", "trick", "lecher", and so on. Not only are there fewer of them in total but proportionally less of them are explicitly pejorative. Some, indeed, have the option of actually being honorific.
Why should "woman-as-sexual-being" require such a proliferation of lexical items? Such terms can hardly be said to be representing reality in disinterested ways. The items themselves, of course, give same kind of clue to their origins. They mostly have resonances of certain all-male subcultures: the adolescent male peer croup, the locker room and the building site subculture. As such they are mare likely to be used by men of women than women of men. Also, there is an overriding tendency in items of this type towards metonymic representation, where a part is made to stand for the whole: it can be an anatomic element ("ass", "cunt"); or an element of dress (""skirt"); it can be an element of the act itself ("lay", "screw"); or a preliminary to it ("pick-up"). The cumulative effect of these metonyms is to objectify and depersonalize in a reductive fashion.
Obviously, not all men, necessarily use such items. And those that do so will probably use them only in certain restricted context. And even than, the items will not always and inevitably be used in a reductive and objectifying fashion. But the presence in the language of such a skewed distribution of lexical items generates and confirms a pressure in favour of modes of representation that ultimately help to produce women as a commodity for consumption (cf. "tart").
A similar pattern of representation seems to be in play around paired items in the language, where by derivation the pairs were once roughly equivalent in meaning except for a difference in gender. Such pairs include the following:
Bachelor Spinster
Courtier Courtesan
King Queen
Lord Lady
Master Mistress
Sir Madam
Thus, one meaning for "king" and "queen" is monarch or sovereign, male and female respectively. But, whereas the farmer has retained, exclusively its honorific orientation towards "pre-eminent" the latter item is now available for use in designating "a male homosexual who dresses and acts effeminately", in which sense it is quite likely to be used derogatorily. Similarly, "master" and "mistress" could once be used equivalently to refer to the male and female heads of a household. More, recently, however, mistress came to be used almost exclusively to designate "kept woman" or "illicit lover". In like manner "courtesan" now refers exclusively to "high class prostitute"; and "madam" is just as likely to refer to "woman brothel keeper", unless it is being used of a child ("she's a right little madam").
It is quite normal, of course, for words to change their meaning. Nor is it at all unusual for some words in some situation to be used for pejorative purposes. It is striking, however, that words associated with women should be consistently downgraded in this way. Such a tendency lends support to the claim that English, at least, is systematically skewed to represent women in a subordinate’s position.
Aids to study the text:
1. What do we mean by “the ideational possibilities of language”?
2. In what terms can we understand the way in which language represents the world to us?
3. What’s the essence of the “Universalist” position to judge the connection of the world and language?
4. What point of view does the “Relativist” position express on the issue in question?
5. Illustrate the difficulties in the Relativist position.
6. How does the Relativist position describe the “interested” character of linguistic representation?
7. What vocabulary and grammatical differences between languages can be fairly pointed out?
Chapter 6. Pragmatics and its relationship with other sciences
When we speak or write we want to be understood and respected. We want to convey our meaning and we want to do it in a way that will command admiration, To accomplish these ends we must know the meanings of words, their connotations, implications, and we must know how to combine words effectively into sentences.
What does one want to know about a word? First of all, what it means; also how it is spelled, how it is pronounced, and what its origin is. But a dictionary can help us to understand the meaning of a word. But the only way to understand a word fully is to see it in use in as many contexts as possible. This means that anyone who wants to improve his vocabulary must read a great deal and must make sure that he understands what he reads. But there is no short cut to this kind of knowledge.
The function of grammars and dictionaries is to tell the truth about language. Not what somebody thinks ought to be the truth or wants to sell somebody else as being the "best" language, but what native speakers actually do when they talk and write.
Good usage is matter of combining-the rules of grammar and acceptable meanings of words with an appreciation of our relationship with the addressee None of us can afford to be complacent about our command of English. It is in ordinary talk to ordinary people on ordinary matters that we are most at home, linguistically and otherwise.
Problems arise as soon as the context as somewhat out of the ordinary. We suddenly need to address a cousin about the death of her husband. This is when we may -or should- pause and wonder about idiom, good usage, and the most appropriate way of putting things. There is the risk of sounding too colloquial, too flippant. There is the converse risk of seeming ponderous, distant, pompous, unnatural. Here we should deal with pragmatics.
Pragmatics is defined by modern dictionaries as the study of the use of language in communication, particularly the relationships between sentences and the contexts and situations in which they are used. Pragmatics includes the study of:
a) how the interpretation and use of utterances depends on knowledge of the
real world;
b) how speakers use and understand speech acts;
c) how the structure of sentences is influenced by the relationship between
the speaker and the hearer.
Pragmatics is sometimes contrasted with semantics which deals with meaning without reference to the users and communicative functions of sentences.
Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others. In theory, we can say anything we like. In practice, we follow a large number of social rules (most of them unconsciously) that constrain the way we speak. There is no law that says we must not tell jokes during a funeral, but it is generally 'not done'. Less obviously, there are norms of formality and politeness that we have intuitively assimilated, and that we follow when talking to people who are older, of the opposite sex, and so on. Writing and signing behaviour are constrained in similar ways.