We are now studying chapter 7 of this heavy tome and have got the hang of what the author is doing. It is primarily opening up a new framework for research into language acquisition, one different from Chomsky’s Transformational Generative model that has dominated Linguistics for the last half century. Transformational Generative Grammar offers a mathematical schema for describing the syntax of language based on the idea that all languages can be described in the same way because they are the product of the innate system which all human beings share.

The new paradigm argues that the structure of language is determined by the social demands made on it and is learned by children from interacting with older members of the tribe. It is based on two capacities of the human being: one, looking for patterns and, two, communicating with another human being by pointing at something in the world. No other ape does this – Tomasello is Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and he should know! Continue reading →

Dictionary of British Sign Language / English, produced for the British Deaf Association by Deaf Studies Research Unit, University of Durham, 1992

This is a huge brick of a book, necessarily so since it gives entries for the 1739 signs in British Sign Language (BSL). Each sign requires photos and a detailed descriptive entry. The bulk of the book is taken up with the signs of BSL.

About 160 pages of closely printed text at the beginning give a very clear outline of BSL as a language system. It is clear that at the time of making the dictionary (1992) there was still much linguistic analysis of BSL to be done (e.g. on categorising verbs). The book does not appear to have been updated, but there may well have been further work on a satisfactory description of sign language in the last twenty odd years. Continue reading →

Last week we had an interesting time working our way through the chapter on deixis.* I have a very happy memory of discovering deixis when I was doing my MA in Applied Linguistics at the University Essex in 1975-1976.

I’d come from teaching literature to very able fourth year B.Ed. students and we were tackling Dickens’ big books including Little Dorrit. It always makes an interesting class to go back to a novel’s opening paragraphs when one has finished reading the book to see how the themes of the book are adumbrated in the opening section. For two years I had attempted this with my students and we had realised eventually that there was something very odd about the opening of Little Dorrit. For two years we had had to declare ourselves defeated in our attempts to describe what this was.

I had chosen Stylistics as one of my options in my course at Essex and been delighted by the discovery that, at long last, there was a link between Literature and Language studies. The old failure to analyse the peculiarity of the opening of Little Dorrit seemed a perfect opportunity to try out my newly learned knowledge of Linguistics.

One happy afternoon I settled down to read it again and realised that the oddity of the text consisted in its failure to be precise about where and when the entities in the passage were operating. I took my problem to David Kilby, one of my lecturers, and he immediately recognised that what I had no word for was deixis and referred me to John Lyons Theoretical Linguistics. This has only a page and a half on the subject, but it was enough for me to do a word by word analysis of the passage. The precision of this stylistic analysis enabled me to account for the oddness of this opening of the novel and to relate it to the Christian message of the book as a whole.

I wrote it up for my course in Stylistics and shortly after Ron Carter published it in one of the early books of practical Stylistics  in this country.**

*Introducing Pragmatics in Use: Anne O’Keefe, Brian Clancy, Svenja Adolphs, Routledge 2011

**Language and Literature: ed. Ronald Carter, Allen and Unwin, 1982

In my blog of 30^th November, I shared my first thoughts about the book my friends and I were studying (Jean Stilwell Peccei: Pragmatics). I commented that, unlike syntax and phonology and even certain approaches to discourse analysis, semantics still seems to be a hotchpotch of disconnected attempts to impose a meaningful framework on language and its relation to the real world.

Having worked and argued our way through the book, it is clear that this first impression was well-founded. Historically, language study has always been part of philosophy and philosophers have made several critical contributions to the new discipline of pragmatics.

Peccei draws on the work of the philosophers Grice, Austin and Searle in chapters 4-7 of her  workbook on Pragmatics. In addition, the first chapters of the book come from another traditional area of Philosophy, that of Logic. I shall return to the example in the earlier blog: Continue reading →

Neither my webmaster nor I can find the blogs I claim to have written about the work my friends and I have been doing on the language of the law (Forensic Linguistics) and the language of medicine, so I shall leave them for the moment and consider our current preoccupation, which is pragmatics.

We made a wise decision to work through a workbook on the subject.* Many of insights we are familiar with (e.g. speech act theory) but we have no systematic knowledge of the area.

The first distinction we had to make was that between semantics and pragmatics. Briefly, semantics deals with the meanings encoded in the language system itself; pragmatics describes the use of language in making meanings in the world. Continue reading →