The Relevance of Linguistics

H.G. Widdowson

What is linguistics for? What good is it to anybody? What practical uses can it be put to? One response to such question is, of course, to deny the presupposition that it needs any practical justification at all. Like other disciplines, linguistics is an intellectual enquiry, a quest for explanation, and that is sufficient justification in itself. Understanding does not have to be accountable to practical utility, particularly when it concerns the nature of language, which is so essential and distinctive a feature of the human species.

Whether or nor linguistics should be accountable, it has been turned to practical account. Indeed, one important impetus for the development of linguistics in the first part of this century was the dedicated work done in translating the Bible into languages hitherto unwritten and undescribed. This practical task implied a prior exercise in descriptive linguistics, since it involved the analysis of the languages (through elicitation and observation) into which the scriptures were to be rendered. The practical tasks of description and translation inevitably raised issues of wider theoretical import.

They raise other issues as well about the relationship between theory and practice and the role of the linguist, issues which are of current relevance in other areas of enquiry, and which bear upon the relationship between descriptive and applied linguistics.

The process of translation involves the interpretation of a text encoded in one language and the rendering of it into another text which is, as far as possible, equivalent in meaning. In so far as it raised questions about the differences between language codes it can be seen as an exercise in contrastive analysis. In so far as it raises questions about the meaning of particular texts, it can be seen as an exercise in discourse analysis. Both of these areas of enquiry have laid claim to practical relevance and so to the business of applied linguistics.

With regard to contrastive analysis, one obvious area of application is language teaching. After all, second language learning, like translation, has to do with working out relationships between one language and another. One possibility is that learners conform to a pre-programmed cognitive agenda and so acquire features of language in a particular order of acquisition. In this way they proceed through different interim stages of interlanguage which is unique to the acquisition process itself. Enquiry into this possibility in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has been extensive.

Discourse analysis is potentially relevant to the problems of language pedagogy in two ways. Firstly, it can provide a means of describing the eventual goal of learning, the ability to communicate, and so to cope with the conventions of use associated with certain discourses, written or spoken. Secondly, it can provide the means of describing the contexts which are set up in classrooms to induce the process of learning. In this case it can provide a basis for classroom research.

But the relevance of discourse analysis is not confined to language teaching. It can be used to investigate how language is used to sustain social institutions and manipulate opinion; how it is used in the expression of ideology and the exercise of power. Such investigations in critical discourse analysis seek to raise awareness of the social significance of linguistic features in the interpretation of literary texts, the particular concern of stylistics.

In these and other cases, descriptive linguistics becomes applied linguistics, in that it can be relevant to an understanding of practical concerns associated with language use and learning. These concerns may take the form of quite specific problems: how to design a literacy programme, for example, or how to interpret linguistic evidence in a court of law (the concern of the growing field of forensic linguistics). But other concerns for relevance are more general and more broadly educational.

Control of language is, to a considerable degree, control of power. Language is too important a human resource for its understanding to be kept confined to linguistics. Language it so implicated in human life that we need to be as fully aware of it as possible, for otherwise we remain in ignorance of what constitutes our essential humanity.