Objective Description

3 Key excerpts on "Objective Description"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Reference Grammars and Modern Linguistic Theory

  • Gottfried Graustein, Gerhard Leitner, Gottfried Graustein, Gerhard Leitner(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  This is discussed partly on the basis of a critical evaluation of the Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire. In §4, the organization of the general comparative and the language-specific grammar according to the synthetic and analytic viewpoints is explained. 2. Demands on a language description In 82, I will formulate and argue for a set of postulates and theses which circumscribe the contents and form of a language description. 2.1. Aim Definition: Λ language description is an encyclopedic description of a language the contents and form of which are defined with respect to linguistics as a science.' The linguistic description here envisaged scientifically describes one natural language, the object language, in terms of another natural language, the background language (also called metalanguage). 1 It is one kind of language description. Other kinds are, e.g., a pedagogic description or a general purpose description for an encyclopedia. Disregarding these for the rest of the 2 Science is, of course, to be taken in the sense of 'Wissenschaft', not in the sense of 'Naturwissenschaft'. 1 I call it background language rather than metalanguage because it is the language in terms of which we understand the object language. It is also used in the dictionary (cf. §2.2 ad 2), where it would not normally be said to have the status of a metalanguage in the scientific sense. 135 discussion, I will follow the above definition and henceforth call the linguistic description of a language simply a language description. It must be usable by any linguist for whatever his specific interests may be. This implies, among other things, a. that no knowledge of the language or any aspect of it (e.g. its writing system) is presupposed; b. that the general state of the art in linguistics is presuppoeed, so that a layman is not expected to be able to use the description; c.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary

  • Phil Benson(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  The point here is not simply that linguists and lexicographers have on occasion used the dictionary as a metaphor for the objectivity of language. It is rather that there seems to be no other way of conceiving of that objectivity other than in terms of its description in some externalised metalinguistic form. It is in the sense that the practice of describing languages is both logically and historically prior to the conceptualisation of languages as objects that can be described, that dictionaries can be understood as representations of languages. The notion of a dictionary as a representation, rather than a description, of a language implies metalinguistic processes of objectification, in which the language is constructed as an object within the field of social knowledge. While the notion of metalinguistic representation does not necessarily deny the objective existence of languages, it does imply the impossibility of separating our knowledge of a language from the metalinguistic form in which that knowledge is represented.

  The assumption that languages are capable of Objective Description has been undermined in the late twentieth century, not only by critics of Saussurean linguistics such as Harris, but also by approaches that more generally call into question the idea that words have determinate meanings independently of their contexts of use. More than 50 years ago, Hjelmslev argued:

  The so-called lexical meanings in certain signs are nothing but artificially isolated contextual meanings, or artificial paraphrases of them. In absolute isolation no sign has any meaning; any sign meaning arises in a context, by which we mean a situational context or explicit context, it matters not which, since in an unlimited or productive text (a living language) we can always transform a situational into an explicit context.

  (Hjelmslev, 1943/1961: 45)

  This formulation of the problem of lexical meaning, which has largely informed the development of linguistic pragmatics, undermines the notion that the senses of words are determinate within the linguistic system (Mey, 1993: 139). Although intuition suggests that many words do indeed have determinate meanings independently of their contexts of use, attention has shifted towards the ways in which these meanings are socially constructed and appear and disappear in response to social and ideological change.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Describing and Explaining Grammar and Vocabulary in ELT

  Key Theories and Effective Practices

  • Dilin Liu(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  However, it is very important to point out that no single linguistic theory alone is adequate for developing effective and useful pedagogical language description, no matter how contemporary and sound the theory is. The reason that we should not try to base our grammar and vocabulary descriptions on one single theory is threefold. First, the purpose of pedagogical language description, as noted earlier, is to help language learners better grasp grammar and vocabulary usages, so, in designing and giving grammar and vocabulary descriptions, there are many factors we need to take into consideration (such as learner age and learning purpose), and some important principles we should follow (such as clarity and simplicity— issues that will be discussed in detail below in Section 1.4). Second, every linguistic theory may have its own particular weakness, especially from a language learning/teaching perspective. A theory can be sound and comprehensive but it may be too complex and/or too abstract in some of its concepts or procedures of analysis. Third, there is no consensus among researchers that any particularly linguistic theory is more advantageous than others when applied in grammar teaching (Hudson, 2001).

  1.3  The importance of language description

  The importance of language description in language learning and teaching is twofold. First, besides factors such as learner needs and the degree of usefulness of language items, language description greatly influences what language structures and usages are taught and how they are taught. This is because language lessons and teaching materials such as textbooks are often based on the language descriptions provided by linguists with a particular theoretical background. For instance, a textbook which used linguistic descriptions based on structural linguistic theories and was published before corpora were widely used would often focus mostly on grammatical units and rules and present them largely in isolation (i.e., without adequate contextual information illustrating them as choices for effective communication) by using many made-up sentences, rather than authentic ones taken or adapted from corpus data. On the other hand, a textbook based on systemic functional linguistic descriptions and published after corpus linguistics became popular tends to (1) focus on language (lexicogrammatical) units as part of a system or systemic resources that people use for communicative functions and (2) present them in meaningful contexts, employing corpus-based materials, e.g., Celce-Murcia & Sokolik’s (2007–2009) Grammar connection 1–5 series

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book