Three branches of linguistic, and e influence on TESOL.

Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping, meanings.

Formally, a generative grammar is defined as one that is fully explicit. It is a finite set of rules that can be applied to generate all those and only those sentences (often, but not necessarily, infinite in number) that are grammatical in a given language. This is the definition that is offered by Noam Chomsky, who invented the term [1] , and by most dictionaries of linguistics. It is important to note that generate is being used as a technical term with a particular sense. To say that a grammar generates a sentence means that the grammar "assigns a structural description" to the sentence.

The term generative grammar is also used to label the approach to linguistics taken by Chomsky and his followers. Chomsky's approach is characterised by the use of transformational grammar � a theory that has changed greatly since it was first promulgated by Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures � and by the assertion of a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the same). The term "generative linguistics" is often applied to the earliest version of Chomsky's transformational grammar, which was associated with a distinction between the "deep structure" and "surface structure" of sentences.

 

In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the school of linguistics that understands language creation, learning, and usage as best explained by reference to human cognition in general. It is characterized by adherence to three central positions. First, it denies that there is an autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind; second, it understands grammar in terms of conceptualization; and third, it claims that knowledge of language arises out of language use.

Cognitive linguists deny that the mind has any module for language-acquisition that is unique and autonomous. This stands in contrast to the work done in the field of generative grammar. Although cognitive linguists do not necessarily deny that part of the human linguistic ability is innate, they deny that it is separate from the rest of cognition. Thus, they argue that knowledge of linguistic phenomena -- i.e., phonemes, morphemes, and syntax -- is essentially conceptual in nature. Moreover, they argue that the storage and retrieval of linguistic data is not significantly different from the storage and retrieval of other knowledge, and use of language in understanding employs similar cognitive abilities as used in other non-linguistic tasks.

Departing from the tradition of truth-conditional semantics, cognitive linguists view meaning in terms of conceptualization. Instead of viewing meaning in terms of models of the world, they view it in terms of mental spaces.

Finally, cognitive linguistics argues that language is both embodied and situated in a specific environment. This can be considered a moderate offshoot of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in that language and cognition mutually influence one another, and are both embedded in the experiences and environments of its users.

Areas of study

Cognitive linguistics is divided into three main areas of study:

• Cognitive semantics, dealing mainly with lexical semantics

• Cognitive approaches to grammar, dealing mainly with syntax, morphology and other traditionally more grammar-oriented areas.

• Cognitive phonology.

Aspects of cognition that are of interest to cognitive linguists include:

• Construction grammar and cognitive grammar.

• Conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending.

• Image schemas and force dynamics.

• Conceptual organization: Categorization, Metonymy, Frame semantics, and Iconicity.

• Construal and Subjectivity.

• Gesture and sign language.

• Linguistic relativism.

• Cognitive neuroscience.

Related work that interfaces with many of the above themes:

• Computational models of metaphor and language acquisition.

• Psycholinguistics research.

• Conceptual semantics, pursued by generative linguist Ray Jackendoff is related because of its active psychological realism and the incorporation of prototype structure and images.

Cognitive linguistics, more than generative linguistics, seeks to mesh together these findings into a coherent whole. A further complication arises because the terminology of cognitive linguistics is not entirely stable, both because it is a relatively new field and because it interfaces with a number of other disciplines.

Insights and developments from cognitive linguistics are becoming accepted ways of analysing literary texts, too. Cognitive Poetics, as it has become known, has become an important part of modern stylistics. The best summary of the discipline as it is currently stands is Peter Stockwell's Cognitive Poetics.

 Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is spoken (or how it was spoken in the past) by a group of people in a speech community. All scholarly research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic world as it is, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be. Modern descriptive linguistics is based on a structural approach to language, as exemplified in the work of Bloomfield and others.

Linguistic description is often contrasted with linguistic prescription, which is found especially in education and in publishing. Prescription seeks to define standard language forms and give advice on effective language use, and can be thought of as the attempt to present the fruits of descriptive research in a learnable form, though it also draws on more subjective aspects of language aesthetics. Prescription and description are essentially complementary, but have different priorities and sometimes are seen to be in conflict.

Accurate description of real speech is a difficult problem, and linguists have often been reduced to approximations. Almost all linguistic theory has its origin in practical problems of descriptive linguistics. Phonology (and its theoretical developments, such as the phoneme) deals with the function and interpretation of sound in language. Syntax has developed to describe the rules concerning how words relate to each other in order to form sentences. Lexicology collects "words" and their derivations and transformations: it has not given rise to much generalized theory.

An extreme "mentalist" viewpoint denies that the linguistic description of a language can be done by anyone but a competent speaker. Such a speaker has internalized something called "linguistic competence", which gives them the ability to extrapolate correctly from their experience new but correct expressions, and to reject unacceptable expressions.

There are tens of thousands of linguistic descriptions of thousands of languages that were prepared by people without adequate linguistic training. Prior to 1900, there was little academic descriptions of language.

A linguistic description is considered descriptively adequate if it achieves one or more of the following goals of descriptive linguistics:

1.    A description of the phonology of the language in question.

2.    A description of the morphology of words belonging to that language.

3.    A description of the syntax of well-formed sentences of that language.

4.    A description of lexical derivations.

5.    A documentation of the vocabulary, including at least one thousand entries.