Lexis Four

A bit more hands on, this one. If a largely theoretical exercise can be ‘hands on’. You know what I mean.

Either way, it doesn’t exactly lend itself to slightly sarcastic extemporizing in the usual way, so this’ll be short. Just a couple of quick points.

Sociolinguistics One

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

An old saw, but a pleasingly robust one. The requirement for a navy, for example, helps explain why Switzerland has no single language of its own and has to make do with borrowings from more seafaring nations.

Lexis Three

1.    ¡Hasta el infinito, y más allá! 

In Japan the traffic lights are ‘blue’ despite there being a separate word for ‘green’, and the sun is red not yellow. It’s right there on the flag.

So those “perceivable differences.” The question is, ‘perceived by who(m)?’ I’m sure we’ve all had discussions of various levels of heatedness with friends, sales clerks, and shopping buddies over whether a particular item of clothing is black or just very very dark blue. How much are those perceptions cultural (the red sun in Japan), linguistic (yellow most everywhere else), or individual (Newton, of course, spoke of ‘white’ light)? How do they feed up and down? If a word holds a meaning simply because a critical mass of people thinks that it does, then whose ‘perception’ really matters?

Lexis Two

1.    Where Wings Take Dream

Have you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat? I’ll dig it out and put some thoughts up soon.

* * * * *

              “Search your memory for a few such mistakes… How do you explain these occurrences?”

Alcohol.

Cross Post

Not cross though. Just disappointed. The only person you've let down is yourself.

A Leisurely Stroke

Linky Linky

"Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions."

Further commentary here.

Lexis One

1.    Mairzy Doats

There are essentially three alphabets in Japanese – except they’re not really alphabets, but anyway: hiragana, which is your basic phonic syllabary and of which there are about fifty; katakana, which is the same but used broadly as italics are used in English and of which there are also about fifty; and kanji, which are the famous ideograms (not really ideograms) people get tattooed on their shoulders in the mistaken belief that they say ‘brave warrior’ when they actually say ‘discombobulated chicken’. School students are expected to remember about 2000 ‘daily use kanji’ but estimates of their total number usually hover around 6000.

There are no word breaks in standard written Japanese. As someone whose ability with the language hovers between ‘functional’ and ‘conversational’ depending upon alcohol consumption, this can cause me problems. Although frankly everything about the language causes problems but that’s for another time, perhaps.

Doing Applied Linguistics

Groom, N and Littlemore, J (2011). Routledge: London

A.K.A. Sampling Bias A-Go-Go

Some of the most common advice on structuring a speech is as follows: tell them what you are going to say, then say it, then tell them what you said. The authors of this book have taken that advice very much to heart, so much so that I’m half tempted to use the Introduction and Conclusion sections of each chapter as a basic grammar exercise for some of my students, comparing the future and past tenses in English in otherwise unchanged passages.

It is an introductory text though, so there’s value in covering the basics thoroughly. The opening chapters (1-4), specifically addressing the field of Applied Linguistics – what it is and does – are something I think I’ll returning to repeatedly as I get up to speed with the terminology. I have a bit of prior experience with social science (and indeed physical science) research methodologies though, so the chapters addressing these were less personally helpful. Not aimed at the likes of me perhaps. Fair enough.

However, “[i]t is also an important part of the applied linguist’s remit to go about creating problems – or more precisely, to go about identifying problems which have hitherto gone unnoticed” (p12). So let’s take the authors at their word and pick some holes in this baby, shall we?

Hand biting to commence in 3, 2, 1…

  

Expectations

Look on these as a version of my lecture notes. I’ll probably drop in other bits and bobs about extra reading and the like as and when, but for the main part I’ll be aiming to put up thoughts on each unit and associated reading as I get round to them. I imagine those notes will tend towards the digressive and idiosyncratic. Please believe me when I say that they’ll be more organized on the screen than they were in my head. My general approach is to throw it all at a wall and see what sticks. It’s an approach that (usually) works well for me, but your mileage may vary.

I’m still waiting on a couple of textbooks, but I’m going to get cracking with what I’ve got and try to fill in the gaps later. Fortunately I read The Language Instinct a couple of years back, so hopefully that’ll account for a bit of the slack. We’ll see.

Suggestions for the blogroll, extra reading and viewing, or whatever all gratefully received.