Language in the world: properties and powers
Linguistic autonomy
Relevance to applied linguistics
Why should these ideas be of interest to applied linguists? As we have noted, the accounts of language developed in the Chomskyan tradition have not proved particularly helpful for their work. It seems that there is currently a rapidly expanding area of common ground between those who are contributing to descriptions of language based on empirical evidence and those whose practical work involves language, as teachers (of first or additional languages, literacy and literature), translators, therapists and so on. There has been much discussion recently about whether applied linguistics should adopt theory from linguistics, or develop theories of its own (Brumfit 1997; Coupland 1997; Davies 1999; Rampton 1997). The theories are, it seems to us, of equal interest to both theoretical and practical linguists. Corpus linguistics, in particular, has an important contribution to make to both language description and language pedagogy, while researchers such as Wray demonstrate persuasively what teachers of additional languages may have to learn from the findings on recent research about the origins of language in the species. Finally, the research techniques used in the fields described here, particularly computer modelling, seem likely to have potential applicability in many areas of social research. Although we are cautious about the adoption of such methods without careful consideration of the theories on which they rest, we see applied linguistics as a research field in which these approaches are very likely to prove useful in the future.
We consider some debates about language in its written form. Again, we pay some attention to the ways in which they are expressed by those who discuss them, but we are mainly concerned to clarify the nature of the properties and powers of people and of language.
