Language in applied linguistics: a historical perspective

In contradistinction to the view of language as a state made of elements of thought or behaviour, or of units of structure or communication, is the view of language as an activity. It is concerned with the way language operates or is operated by man. From this point of view, language may be considered as (1) an activity of the mind, or (2) an activity of the brain.

1. As an activity of the mind, language may be regarded either (a) as mental movement, or (b) as stimulus-response. The study of language as mental movement is called psychomechanics [5]. Its basic postulate is that the mental operations involved in the use of language necessarily take a certain amount of time, infinitesimal though this may be. The task of psychomechanics is to identify these mental operations and to refer them to mental time in an effort to demonstrate the mental process involved in acts of language. The study starts by delimiting the degrees of abstraction through which our minds seize and represent the world of experience. Such an approach is fundamentally different from the traditional analysis of language as a group of static, logical categories.

Psychomechanics attempts to explain how language, the institutional system, becomes usage in the individual acts of speaking and writing. Usage is considered essentially as a process of mental expression by means of acts of abstraction capable of producing such different types of linguistic categories as the parts of speech, inflectional forms, and vocabulary.

In view of stimulus-response idea, psychologists, and certain linguists as well, have long considered language as a verbal response to external stimulus. This trend is called behavioristic theory. Language is regarded as an immediate animal-like reaction to what is perceived [13]. It is as if language were a long series of conditioned reflexes. A number of linguists have regarded language in this way and have composed applied methods for language teaching from this point of view. Such methods present and drill unanalysed units of language as complete utterances, always given in association with the appropriate situation.

The contextual stimulus-response view differs from this in that it teaches the language as a constant variation in the stimulus to fit a corresponding variation in the language response, thus leading the learner to abstract the patterns of language by seeing the relation between each element of the situation and the corresponding element of the response.

This view of language evolved from the contextual theory of C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards [9]. According to this theory, the stimulus of experience comes to us in repeated contexts. These may be physical events which reach our minds through our senses; or they may be events in the mind itself - memories, associations of ideas. Whatever they be, these contexts are continually associated with certain elements (e.g. words) in the language which then become symbols of elements in the context. These symbols, from the speaker's standpoint, are always subordinate to what they stand for; from the hearer's standpoint, they are equal. The hearer first perceives the sound as sound. He then recognizes sounds as distinctive units; he does so because similar sound sensations in the past were always associated with signs. He then recognizes simple referents (e.g. names of things), and finally complex ones. The complexity of the referent, however, is not necessarily reflected in the complexity of the symbol; a single word can stand for a complex idea. But it is not the single word which determines the reference; it is its interconnection with the other words in the sentence.

Language may be considered as only partly a matter of stimulus-response. It is partly concrete activity; partly abstract activity. The concrete perceives and reacts to situations in an animal-like way, through verbal responses to immediately perceived cues and associations, in an automatic type of speech behaviour. The abstract conceptualizes and categorizes. Everyday speech is a combination of both.

Language as an activity of the brain.

If some linguists regard language as an operation of the mind, others prefer to consider it as an operation of the brain. They study this operation of the human brain as a physical activity. In order to understand the nature of this activity, two approaches have been developed:

1) The first consists in an analysis of speech reactions during local interferences with the brain (the approach through neurology);

2) The second is the construction of models and devices which function as analogues of the human brain (the approach through technology).

Since all stimuli leave a trace on the brain and a language sign is an association between two stimuli, the acoustic image and the concept, this sign may theoretically be found in the brain. The localization of speech areas in the brain goes back to 1861, when Broca pointed out the relationship between language and the cortex of man's brain. In recent years, neuro-surgeons have been able to locate the different areas in the cortex which control hearing and speech, memory and thought, and to formulate theories as to their function and interrelation. W. G Penfield [10], working in this field for more than a quarter of a century, made verbal tests on hundreds of patients during brain operations. This enabled him to construct a theory based on speech areas and to assume that the organization and co-ordination of the speech mechanisms are carried out by nerve-cell connections, all within the same half of the brain, the dominant one.

Most of those who study the linguistic activity of the human brain no longer believe that it is a matter of mental images. It is rather a matter of nerve impulses traveling along networks. These seem to correspond to the statistical properties of language. Recent neurological theories have led to speculation by theorists of language in a number of different directions. A science of "speculative neurology" has even arisen. Nerve-cells, which are all-or-nothing firing devices, operate in a two-unit system, building networks in which every linguistic form has its position. Some linguists believe that the nerve-cells are arranged in loops, around which signals circulate and may be remembered by firing one another in succession around the loop and back to the first cell, where the cycle is started anew on its next round.

Similarities have also been found between certain brain disorders and certain fundamentals of language. R. Jakobson [7] has compared the basic types of loss of memory with the basic characteristics of language. One type affects the ability to put words together in the right way; the other type affects the ability to substitute one unit for another.

There is still no definite answer to the question whether the dividing of speech into units like phonemes and words is done in the mind of the speaker, or only in the mind of the linguist. Applied linguists set up experiments which aimed to obtain from speakers and listeners certain responses which correspond to the theories and observations of the linguists. But this sort of experiment is more difficult than it seems, for each speaker and listener brings to the language his own special responses which are due to his peculiar nervous system and his own unique combination of memories and experiences in the use of the language; it would often seem that he interprets what he hears according to his own liking.

The second approach to the linguistic operations of the human brain presupposes the construction of models of it, theoretical models and working models.

Theoretical models have been built for the purpose of studying of the activity of the brain. One of these is the chromatoscope, a sort of mechanical generator of linguistic hypotheses, in which both words and concepts are regarded as “molecules of experience”, particles of “meaning” being the atoms out of which these molecules are built. The atoms of meaning are considered as active “packets of information” capable of activating other atoms. Theoretical models such as these only suggest possible approaches to the study of the linguistic activities of the human brain [8].

As for the working models, it is the so-called “electronic brain” that is expected to lead to an understanding of how language operates in the brain of man. These devices, although greater in working capacity and efficiency than the human brain, are extremely limited in the variety of their activities. Their greatest achievement has been in the field of mathematical computation and cybernetics [14].

Some mathematicians, however, have denied any close analogy between such digital computers and the construction or activity of the human brain. They point out the historical and contingent character of both mathematics and the natural languages. Moreover, it is reasonable to expect that any adequate theory of brain functioning should have statistical characteristics which display plurality, probabilism, variability, redundancy, and tolerance of small errors. No machine having a unitary mechanism, a fixity of properties, an economy of connections, a certainty of output and an intolerance of small errors can successfully simulate the brain. If and when such an analogue with the proper characteristics is developed, its contributions to linguistic psychology could be profitably correlated with the findings of the neuro-surgeons. If in turn these could be correlated with the analytical and inferential work of linguists, our knowledge of the two extremes of the act of human communication - two minds communicating through language - may yet reach the exactness of our knowledge of the sound-waves which occur between them.

Language as change.