Page 21 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 2: Linguistics: Branches and Tools

focus in many university programs in linguistics. Language description is a work-intensive Notes
endeavour, usually requiring years of field work in the language concerned, so as to equip the
linguist to write a sufficiently accurate reference grammar. Further, the task of documentation
requires the linguist to collect a substantial corpus in the language in question, consisting of texts
and recordings, both sound and video, which can be stored in an accessible format within open
repositories, and used for further research.
Applied Linguistics
Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both
within particular languages and among all languages. Applied linguistics takes the results of
those findings and “applies” them to other areas. Linguistic research is commonly applied to areas
such as language education, lexicography, and translation. “Applied linguistics” has been argued
to be something of a misnomer[who?] since applied linguists focus on making sense of and
engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply “applying” existing technical
knowledge from linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple
sources, such as sociology (e.g., conversation analysis) and anthropology.
Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis and
speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers.
Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation,
and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics that have come to the forefront.
Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and
semantic theories on computers constraints.
Linguistic analysis is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify
the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to
prove their claim. This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration
department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted either in the asylum seeker’s
native language through an interpreter or in an international lingua franca like English. Australia
uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method
depending on the languages involved. Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language
analysis, which can be done either by private contractors or within a department of the government.
In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination
about the speaker’s nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical
role in the government’s decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.
Translation
The sub-field of translation includes the translation of written and spoken texts across mediums,
from digital to print and spoken. To translate literally means to transmute the meaning from one
language into another. Translators are often employed by organisations, such as travel agencies as
well as governmental embassies to facilitate communication between two speakers who do not
know each other’s language. Translators are also employed to work within computational linguistics
setups like Google Translate for example, which is an automated, programmed facility to translate
words and phrases between any two or more given languages. Translation is also conducted by
publishing houses, who convert works of writing from one language to another in order to reach
varied audiences.
Description and Prescription
Linguistics is descriptive; linguists describe and explain features of language without making
subjective judgments on whether a particular feature is “right” or “wrong”. This is analogous to
practice in other sciences: A zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective
judgments on whether a particular animal is better or worse than another.
Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others,
often favouring a particular dialect or “acrolect”. This may have the aim of establishing a linguistic
standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be

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