Analytical Techniques
Analytical techniques in the field of languages and linguistics refer to the methods and tools used to analyze and interpret language data. These techniques can include statistical analysis, computational modeling, and qualitative analysis methods such as discourse analysis and content analysis. They are essential for gaining insights into language structure, usage, and meaning.
4 Key excerpts on "Analytical Techniques"
eBook - ePub- F.C. Stork, J.D.A. Widdowson(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...9. Some Practical Applications of Linguistics Language is such a fundamental and important part of human behaviour, particularly in an advanced literate society, that the nature and structure of language is worth studying in its own right and the science of linguistics, or General Linguistics as it is sometimes called, does just that. In the preceding chapters we have surveyed briefly some of the main trends and cross currents in linguistic thought and we have shown how the work of linguists, particularly in the twentieth century, has increased our understanding of what is involved in the use of language as a means of communication. So far, however, we have said nothing about the use made of this new knowledge in practical activities, but since language is basic to our personal and social lives it would be very surprising indeed if the better understanding of language did not have wider applications in many disciplines and fields of human experience. Recently there has been a greater recognition of the fact that linguistics does have such applications and the term Applied Linguistics has been used for some time to refer to a set of methods and procedures involving the application of linguistic theory to practical problems. Language teaching is the most obvious area where linguistics would seem to be relevant, and in some cases the term Applied Linguistics is used synonymously with the application of linguistics to language teaching. It is not difficult to see why this should be, for the language barrier has always been one of the most pressing problems in education and communication. This was true in the days when monks made the earliest interlinear glosses on manuscripts as an aid to learning and teaching Latin and it is even more true today in an age which has experienced an ‘explosion’ in the amount of information to be communicated...
eBook - ePubThe Languages of Literature
Some Linguistic Contributions to Criticism
- Roger Fowler(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Briefly, this means that, in the first case, although literature is language and therefore open to ordinary formal linguistic investigation (as I argued in Essays on Style and Language, 10–11) it has, like other formally distinctive texts, essentially distinctive contexts which the linguist no less than the critic must study. That is, the investigator must be curious about the extra-linguistic features which condition the distinctive style of a literary work. As for the applicability of different linguistic models, this is obviously variable. The old Bloomfieldian linguistics in its classic Immediate Constituent analysis phase, or Hallidayan scale-and-category grammar, both concentrating on relatively ‘small’ units, can have little to say about the linguistic structure of extended texts. Nor can we expect to learn much through linguistics about kinds of poetry where metaphor is dominant until we have proper tools for lexical analysis. It apparently needs repeating over and over again that there is no one linguistics providing a ready-made set of procedures or formulae perfectly apt for all kinds of texts. The appropriateness of the model is a concern for the individual analyst; just as important for this general discussion is that all those who engage in it realize that bland undefined accounts of ‘linguistics’ lead nowhere. There is no one linguistics except in community of certain basic and general ideals held since Saussure’s time. We cannot switch on a standardized linguistic analysis machine and stand by while it puts out a definitive breakdown of a text. Doubtless the lack of such a de vice has its advantages. My third prescription for a successful linguistic criticism is that it should proceed not merely from a theory of language but also from a respectful consideration of the demands and peculiarities of the many kinds of literary study. Now, the substance of this remark is addressed not only to linguists...
eBook - ePubLanguage in the News
Discourse and Ideology in the Press
- Roger Fowler(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 5 Analytic tools: critical linguistics In this chapter, we penetrate further into the details of linguistic structure. So far, I have maintained that the structure of a news text, under the pressure of the social circumstances of communication, embodies values and beliefs; that representation of experience, of events and concepts, is patterned by the structure of the medium, so inevitably that the very notion of ‘representation’ carries within it the qualification of representation from a specific ideological point of view, that values, or ideology, differ systematically in different forms of expression, as for example in the characteristically different choices of words and grammatical phrasings found in the Press. Like Halliday, I reject the extreme Whorfian position of ‘linguistic determinism’: it is implausible, and deeply pessimistic about the abilities of human beings, to believe that people’s world-views are fettered by their language. The fact is that everyone has access to numerous kinds of discourse within their own language, because of the multiple roles they perform, and the manifold roles and situations they encounter. This diversity of sociolinguistic experience allows the possibility of people enjoying different views of the world as they move from one mode of discourse to another. Habit and inertia, however, inhibit this comparative process. People are not terribly conscious of linguistic variety, or if they are, they are normative about it: they tend to believe that there is a ‘correct’ mode of discourse for a given type of situation, either their own, or that of some kind of prestige speaker. Thus speakers are prone not to learn from the plurality of different voices around them. As far as news media are concerned, most people read only one daily newspaper, and watch the news on only one television channel...
eBook - ePub- Geoff Thompson(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...At the same time, the way we normally talk about these experiences (and the way we hear other people talk about them) influences the way we see them: for example, we generally accept without conscious query the fact that advertisers talk about their products as solutions to our problems (as opposed to talking about our willingness to pay for the products as the solution to the advertisers’ problems, which is at least equally valid a view). By formulating our approach to linguistic description in the kind of terms used above – choices amongst relevant options in context – we are deliberately opening up the path towards grammatically based text analysis (where ‘ text ’ means any instance of language in use): at each stage, we can ask why the writer or speaker is expressing this particular meaning in this particular way at this particular point. I mentioned earlier that generative approaches take linguistics towards biology; functional grammar takes it towards sociology: the systematic study of relevant features in the culture and society that form the context in which language is used, and which are at the same time constructed by the way in which language is used. Both approaches, through form and meaning, ask essentially the same question about language: how can we explain why language has the main features that it does? But whereas the form-based approach finds the answer in the way our brains are structured, the meaning-based approach finds it in the way our social context is structured...
