Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive
study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the
way language is used, and the effects of
language use on society.
Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in
that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the
language, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect on the society.
Sociolinguistics overlaps to a
considerable degree with pragmatics. It is
historically closely related to linguistic
anthropology and the distinction between the two fields has
even been questioned recently.
It also studies how language varieties differ
between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc. and how creation and
adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social or socioeconomic classes.
As the usage of a language varies from
place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and these sociolects are what sociolinguistics
studies.
The social aspects of language were in
the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s,
and also by Gauchat in Switzerland US and Basil Bernstein in the UK
Applications of sociolinguistics
For example, a sociolinguist might
determine through study of social attitudes that a particular vernacular would not be considered
appropriate language use in a business or professional setting. Sociolinguists
might also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of this sociolect
much as dialectologists would
study the same for a regional dialect.
The study of language variation is
concerned with social constraints determining
language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use
of different varieties of language in different social situations.
William Labov is often regarded as the
founder of the study of sociolinguistics. He is especially noted for
introducing the quantitative study of language variation and
change, making the sociology of language into a scientific discipline.
This vast field of inquiry requires and
combines insights from a number of disciplines, including linguistics,
sociology, psychology and anthropology.
Sociolinguistics examines the interplay
of language and society, with language as the starting point. Variation is the
key concept, applied to language itself and to its use. The basic premise of
sociolinguistics is that language is variable and changing. As a result,
language is not homogeneous — not for the individual user and not within or
among groups of speakers who use the same language.
By studying written records,
sociolinguists also examine how language and society have interacted in the
past. For example, they have tabulated the frequency of the singular
pronoun thou and its replacement you in dated hand-written
or printed documents and correlated changes in frequency with changes in class
structure in 16th and 17th century England
This is historical sociolinguistics: the
study of relationship between changes in society and changes in language over a
period of time.
Stylistics
Stylistics can be by and large
described as the study of style of language usage in different contexts, either
linguistic, or situational. Yet, it seems that due to the complex history and
variety of investigated issues of this study it is difficult to state precisely
what stylistics is, and to mark clear boundaries between it and other branches
of linguistics which deal with text analysis.
What has been the primary interest of
stylistics for years is the analysis of the type, fluctuation, or the reason
for choosing a given style as in any language a single thought can be expressed
in a number of ways depending on connotations, or desired result that the
message is to produce. Therefore, stylistics is concerned with the examination
of grammar, lexis, semantics, as well as phonological properties
and discursive devices.
It might seem that the same issues are
investigated by sociolinguistics, and indeed that is the case,
however sociolinguistics analyses the above mentioned issues seen as dependant
on the social class, gender, age, etc, while stylistics is more interested in
the significance of function that the style fulfills.
Moreover, stylistics examines oral and
written texts in order to determine crucial characteristic linguistic
properties, structures and patterns influencing perception of the texts. Thus,
it can be said that this branch of linguistics is related to discourse analysis, in particular critical
discourse analysis, and pragmatics. Owing to the fact that at the
beginning of the development of this study the major part of the stylistic
investigation was concerned with the analysis of literary texts it is sometimes
called literary linguistics, or literary stylistics.
Nowadays, however, linguists study
various kinds of texts, such as manuals, recipes, as well as novels and
advertisements. It is vital to add here that none of the text types is
discriminated and thought to be more important than others. In addition to
that, in the recent years so called ‘media-discourses’ such as films, news
reports, song lyrics and political speeches have all been within the scope of
interest of stylistics.
Each text scrutinized by stylistics can
be viewed from different angles and as fulfilling at least a few functions.
Thus, it is said that texts have interpersonal function, ideational function
and textual function. When describing a function several issues are taken into
consideration. Therefore, interpersonal function is all about the
relationship that the text is establishing with its recipients, the use of
either personal or impersonal pronouns is analyzed, as well as the use of
speech acts, together with the tone and mood of the statement.
When describing the ideational
function linguists are concerned with the means of representing the reality by
the text, the way the participants are represented, as well as the arrangement
of information in clauses and sentences. The textual function is the
reference of sentences forwards and backwards which makes the text cohesive and
coherent, but also other discursive devices such as ellipsis, repetition,
anaphora are studied. In addition to that the effectiveness of chosen stylistic
properties of the texts are analyzed in order to determine their suitability to
the perceived function, or contribution to overall interpretation.
Linguists dealing with a sub-branch of
stylistics called pedagogical stylistics support the view that this field of
study helps learners to develop better foreign language competence. What is
more, it is thought that being acquainted with stylistics makes student more
aware of certain features of language and to implement the knowledge in their
language production on all levels: phonological, grammatical, lexical and
discursive. Also empirical findings support the view that stylistics helps
students improve their reading and writing skills.
Neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics is the study of
the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension,
production, and acquisition of language.
Much work in neurolinguistics is informed
by models in psycholinguistics and
theoretical
linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can
implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are
necessary in producing and comprehending language
Neurolinguistics is historically rooted in
the development in the 19th century of aphasiology, the study of linguistic deficits (aphasias) occurring as the result of brain damage. Aphasiology attempts to
correlate structure to function by analyzing the effect of brain injuries on
language processing. One of the first people to draw a connection between
a particular brain area and language processing was Paul Broca, a French surgeon who conducted autopsies on
numerous individuals who had speaking deficiencies, and found that most of them
had brain damage (or lesions) on the left frontal lobe, in an area now known as Broca's area.
Phrenologists had made the claim in the
early 19th century that different brain regions carried out different functions
and that language was mostly controlled by the frontal regions of the brain,
but Broca's research was possibly the first to offer empirical evidence for
such a relationship, and has been described as
"epoch-making" and "pivotal" to the fields of
neurolinguistics and cognitive science. Later, Carl Wernicke, after whom Wernicke's area is named, proposed that
different areas of the brain were specialized for different linguistic tasks,
with Broca's area handling the motor production of speech, and Wernicke's
area handling auditory speech comprehension.
The work of Broca and Wernicke
established the field of aphasiology and the idea that language can be studied
through examining physical characteristics of the brain.
Early
work in aphasiology also benefited from the early twentieth-century work
of Korbinian Brodmann,
who "mapped" the surface of the brain, dividing it up into numbered
areas based on each area's cytoarchitecture (cell structure) and
function; these areas, known as Brodmann areas, are still widely used in
neuroscience today.
The coining of the term
"neurolinguistics" has been attributed to Harry Whitaker, who founded
the Journal of Neurolinguistics in 1985
Interaction with other fields
Neurolinguistics is closely related to
the field of psycholinguistics,
which seeks to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms of language by employing the
traditional techniques of experimental
psychology; today, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic theories
often inform one another, and there is much collaboration between the two
fields.
Bibliography
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