Language and language practices
The relation between linguistics and applied linguistics is explored in relation to areas of shared interest. To highlight the distinction, I first consider the very different approaches made by linguists and applied linguists to the way people use language, what is often referred to as the study of language in situation. I then explore in some detail two further areas, language and gender and clinical linguistics. An activity such as clinical linguistics or language and gender may be practiced by both linguists doing their application and by applied linguists, and it is therefore important to consider the distinct triggers for their research questions (which, in the case of the applied linguist, are more likely to be institutional ‘problems’) as well as their investigative procedures, the skills and knowledge they each draw on.
It is a commonplace that there are different ways of looking at the same ‘thing’. I am not here referring to the issue of epistemic relativism (the idea that all referents are socially constructed, that there is no thing-in-itself). What I have in mind is that there can be different views of the same phenomenon; it is not that the phenomenon is thought not to exist or to be socially constructed in different ways but that it can be explained variously, depending on the vantage point you take up. For example, suicide, the famous Durkheim phenomenon, has been of interest to both psychologists and sociologists (as well as of course to those working in other disciplines, penologists, medical researchers, theologians and so on): to the psychologist, suicide is of interest because it is, as Durkheim himself said, the most individual of all actions. And it is of interest to the sociologist because suicide is a social act, an act that denies all value to the society where it occurs. The fact that rates of suicide and trends in suicide are, as Durkheim showed, different across societies but stable within any one society emphasizes its societal significance.
We might say, therefore, that what distinguishes psychology and sociology (at least in part) is not that they are interested in different phenomena but that they have different ways of addressing and explaining the same phenomena. Much the same is true of history and political science or of physics and branches of engineering. And the different ways of addressing and explaining, what we have also called differing vantage points, have two faces, that is that both the looking towards the topic differs and the looking away differ. This is particularly the case when one of the viewers is practice oriented, as in engineering. Far more than in the psychology–sociology opposition, here the whole purpose of the activity, of looking towards the phenomenon, is dedicated to looking away, back to the engineering ‘problem’ that the engineer needs to solve.
We find the same variation in attending to language. The literary critic and the grammarian may both look at the same historical text, the one seeing an early example of a poetic genre, the other the key to an unsolved problem in the grammar he or she is writing of that language. In the distinction we have drawn between linguistics and applied linguistics there is the same difference of viewpoint.
The linguist will experience a discussion among elders in an Australian aboriginal community, where only very few still speak the first language (L1), and will think of vocabulary lists and informants to help to write a grammar. The applied linguist, listening to the same discussion, will consider policy issues (should/can the language be maintained?) and whether to advocate a bilingual program in the schools (English plus the local language) or an English-only program. And if English whether to recommend some use of aboriginal English (Baugh 2002), the equivalent in Australia of North American ebonics (Green 2002).
