A Linguistic Explanation for the Foundations of Applied Linguistics
Is applied linguistics merely an extension of linguistics, as its name implies? To answer that question, we need philosophical delimitation criteria. We might avoid much contestation and contradiction if we defined the fields of linguistics and applied li
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A Linguistic Explanation for the Foundations of Applied Linguistics
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A Conception of Continuity: Some Linguistic Confessions
The historical origins of applied linguistics lie in the beguilingly simple assumption that applied linguistics is a mere extension of linguistics. The ways in which this assumption is formulated often imply that an uncomplicated continuity exists between a kind of ‘hard’, scientifically conceived linguistics at the one extreme to a ‘soft’, socially or educationally engaged disciplinary orientation that may be called applied linguistics at the other end of the spectrum. As we shall see below, the working out of this notion led to nothing less than a linguistic conception of applied linguistics. We return to that important historical issue in more detail subsequently. For now, however, let us consider a number of statements relating to the questions “What is linguistics?” and “What is applied linguistics?” that illustrate how the assumed continuity between them is often construed, and why the argument for an extension of linguistics, to embrace applied linguistics as well, is so tempting. We will do well to remember that when linguists and applied linguists try to answer these kinds of questions, of how their disciplines should be defined, they are doing it not as linguists studying phenomena in one or perhaps more linguistic subdisciplines. Rather, they are taking a step backwards, as it were, into the realm of philosophical or foundational linguistics. At this level of linguistic conceptualization the role of linguistic confessions becomes important. Whether they are made at the beginning or at the end of a stretch of learned theoretical discourse, linguistic confessions are always crucial, for they influence everything in between. Let us consider five linguistic confessions, and add those of a journalist for good measure. The first of these derives from an arch-structuralist, the Danish linguist Hjelmslev: (1) In its point of departure linguistic theory was established as immanent, with constancy, system and internal function as its sole aims, to the apparent cost of fluctuation and nuance, life and concrete physical and phenomenological reality. A temporary restriction
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 A. Weideman, Responsible Design in Applied Linguistics: Theory and Practice, Educational Linguistics 28, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41731-8_2
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2 A Linguistic Explanation for the Foundations of Applied Linguistics of the field of vision was the price that had to be paid to elicit from language itself its secret. But (instead) … of hindering transcendence, immanence has given it a new and better basis; immanence and transcendence are joined in a higher unity on the basis of immanence. Linguistic theory is led by inner necessity to recognize not merely the linguistic system, in its schema and in its usage … but also man and human society behind language … (Hjelmslev 1963: 127).
For Hjelmslev, then, there is a movement in linguistics with an almost inevitable end (“inner
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