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APPLIED LINGUISTICS AS A MEDIATOR

METHODS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

What you have got in your schedule is a strange and sophisticated issue “The ABC of
Computer Science”. Ironically, it is a great blunder of a clerk, who is absolutely ignorant
in the sphere of linguistics. The course of mine runs as “ Machine Translation as a
Brunch of Applied Linguistics”.
First of all we will try to clear up the correlation between translation studies (your
major) and linguistics (your major again), which is fortunately or unfortunately “ is
applied to”. What is in common? Right at the beginning I will declare some basic
assumptions that could be made about both translation and linguistics:
1. Translation is either the rendering of something into another language or the
transformation of smth. into smth. Double focus is required.
2. Linguistics deals with the structure (F. de Saucer’s conception which is rather
challenging) of a language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax,
semantics, pragmatics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics and …the list could be
enlarged up to infinity. The aspect “infinity” characterizes the nature of linguistic study.
It’s totally flexible and integrative, like a virus in social strata, it is very much integrative
as well. Still, being integrative – doesn’t mean being global. That’s why, there are many
linguists of so called narrow major.
3. Linguistics and translation deal with language. If language deals with information,
then linguistics and translation study the way information is transformed. In
linguistic terms – both linguistics and translation cover meaning.
Besides, we are living in the era of virtual reality (a new term has been already
fixed be Webster’s Dictionary). This presupposes that the meaning itself can operate
independently, leaving the limits of a word. Modern machines usually understand
meaning as a cluster of information arranged in a byte (digit). Byte is the combination
of bits used to represent a particular letter, number, or special character. It is the
smallest unit of information. Byte consists of adjacent bits, usually eight, processed by
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a computer as one unit. A simple floppy disk contains 1,44 Mega bytes of data (5 thick
books) and data CD can even substitute a small library.
In its tern most of the people conceive of meaning in terms of information —
ideas about the external or about our internal thoughts and beliefs, for example: if I say
during the credit “Go and read a bit more” – it means “Ouch! God! I’ve failed”.
Russian psychists were the first to create a term “проблемный ребенок” – it means that
the kid is mentally ill. Such referential meaning no doubt for a large portion of
communication, but it's not the whole story. Computer can do the same, using the iconic
signs and stable expressions.
Expressiveness in a word reflects the emotional state of a speaker. Ouch! has
no referential status but express connotative meaning refers to the intended impact of
an utterance on its hearer. Can you pass the salt? is only incidentally a question about
your physical ability; rather, it attempts you to perform the action indicated. Now,
transform it as N. Chomsky did. This is a perfect communication “between human and
computer” with a particular stress on dialogic discourse.
Computer (lat. computio) is not able to understand this expressiveness, but still it
is a calculator no longer and you should understand as quick as possible. It can render
phatic meaning, as in expressions such a How are you? (establishes and maintains
social contact between communicators). Software of a computer can follow the phatic
behavior of a human being like it is with the system of translation Magic Goody. It can
identify the user saying “Hello Yelena! Lets work together”(but the name should be
inserted beforehand with the help of a key-board). Metalinguistic meaning is
illuminated by no course of our university. Being too close to logics (the science that
investigates the principles governing correct or reliable inference/deriving).
Metalinguistic meaning addresses matters concerning the language itself. Definitions
puzzles are Metalinguistic by their nature. (for example, what English word has three
double letters in a row? An apple has. Apple Macintosh is a trademark of PC designed
totally for squeamish American users).
Metalinguistic meaning challenges your philological feeling. In four years you
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will indicate in your CV: “trilingual: fluent English, perfect German, and smooth
metalanguage”. Then you will explain to the recruiter that metalanguage is any
language or symbolic system used to discuss, describe, or analyze another language or
symbolic system. This is the languge one communicate with the computer. Finally,
poetic or stylistic meaning reflects nuances of interpretation brought about by the
manner in which information is expressed: For instance, Ch. Dickens might have
opened A Tale of Two Cities with:
[l] In some ways, the times were good and in some ways, the times were bad.
rather then:
[2] It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .
The addition of what literature teachers call paradox makes the sense of apparent
continuousness with an underlying resolution. It is part of the poetic meaning, that is
absent in the first case. My beloved A.Zhid starts his novel Perfume with the conceptual
words: “Paris smelt badly”. Computer will translate it exactly, word for word: no
aposiopesis at the end, no feeling, just mere dot (dead end ☺).
Many types of communication are composites of these six types of meaning. The
bumper sticker says If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Referentially,
propositions (guns are outlawed and outlaws have guns) joined by an if-then.
Connotative meaning is that guns should not be outlawed. Its poetic meaning rests in of
the key elements — guns/outlawed: '.outlaws/guns — a mirror image device
(Gakobson). Computer is helpless.
Meaning can be divided into two categories, what is expressed and what is ment
to be expressed. They are broad categories that includes the total meaning that can be
gain only in situation. If you meet a person with a gravy stain on his tie, you might infer
that he is sloppy. If you meet someone with a black eye, you might conjecture that she
had a fight or has had an accident with a door. In both cases, you have received some
information, but in neither case has the information been meant. The information
through natural causes rather than through the intentions of the communicators can be
easily transformed.
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Applied linguistics is studied by miscellaneous researchers. Descriptive grammarians

are interested primarily in people’s linguistic knowledge and behavior, in what they say
and how they say it. They don't judge is it correct or incorrect logically (Is Kiyiv a
capital of Poland or not). Generally, they believe that if a community of native speakers
of a language consistently speaks in such and such a way, then so be it. That, for the
descriptive grammarian, is correct, regardless of how prescriptive grammarians view the
behavior. Descriptive grammarians attempt to put aside their own linguistic prejudices
(yes, we all have them) and accept and describe what they observe. Find three
expressions both in English and Ukrainian (e.g., ain't, яка зараз година, нормально,
that speakers regularly use but which prescriptive grammarians claim that they shouldn't
use. You may have to look in a prescriptive grammar or handbook of style for this, for
academic grammars of Longman p.h. or Bilodid’s manuals).
To make the differences between these two approaches more concrete, let's consider an
example. We will look at the phenomenon of preposition stranding (прийменник,
який заблукав)—removing the noun phrase that a preposition governs, as in ex. : Bill
is impossible to live with. A typical trouble for the mashine translation. The preposition
with occurs before a noun phrase, e.g., with Bill. In [8], Bill, the object of with, has been
"moved" to the beginning of the sentence (actually into the subject position of the main
clause). Prescriptive grammarians have objected to stranded prepositions, especially at
the ends of sentences, for two centuries. Their reasons have been many and varied. For
instance, the very influential eighteenth-century grammarian, Lindley Murray, regarded
them as "inelegant." Currently, editors of various kinds of documents try to eliminate
prepositions that end sentences, often for vague reasons.
The descriptivists understand perfectly well that to do anything less is intellectually and
ethically unjustifiable, as well as practically imprudent. Professionals in translation studies
may follow descriptive attitude towards this or that linguistic fact (a cat: sing.,
tom/pussy cat, black/white/strange, young/old/almost dead and so on) contrasting them
with Ukrainian variants (кіт, одн., кітка/коцур, чорний/білий/ніякий і т.д.).
The representatives of theoretical approach in applied linguistics believe neither
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in dialectics nor in any linguistic progress. The linguistic designers of PROMT family, for
instance – professional bilingual software usually follow this method in grammar,
showing the vast paradigm of the lexeme. According to their assumption language
varieties are rule-governed. Some collocations are meaningful, grammatically arranged, or
acceptable; other are meaningless, ungrammatical, and unacceptable. They are our modern
translation studies scholars and linguists (prof. R.P. Zorivchak, prof. I.Bilodid, prof.
O.Ponomariv, and others) to discuss the functional aspects of lexical and grammatical
usage (compare пенсіонери – старші люди, хот-дог – канапка з поганенькою
сосискою, шклянка – пластянка ). On the contrary, American scholars in theoretical
linguistics as a rule are pregnant with social ideas, socionics, gender studies, and
culturalism (it is absolutely natural for USA ). One may only guess what variant is proper
poor people or lower class, he or she, young woman or lolita. The status of an expression
is judged against the rules that constitute linguistic tradition, and serves as a ground for
miscellaneous phantasmagoric theories. Nevertheless this approach for applied is far from
being outdated.
Modern analytic approach in applied linguistics claims that language theorists
don't work in a vacuum. Rather, they base their hypotheses on the careful examination
of language done by either themselves or other linguists. Linguistic analysis draws upon
the theories and the analytic tools noted above to provide a description of the facts and
rules of entire languages or of portions of a language. For example, Franz Boas and Ella
Deloria's Dakota Grammar (1939) uses the American structuralistic model of language
to describe the phonetics, morphology, and syntax of Indian language. In linguistic
description, the term grammar can refer either narrowly to the rules of sentence
formation (syntax) or more broadly to the overall analysis of a language. In Machine
translation grammatical coherence was very hard to be reached during the last century.
Nowadays, linguistic algorithms are aimed at communicative effect and stylistics of a
text. Linguistic analysis extends into many fields of applied linguistics (optical and
voice recognition, textual statistics, bilingual prosodic interpretation, and artificial
intelligence). The study of regional variation (dialectology) and of social variation
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(sociolinguistics) has contributed much to our awareness of the diversity of English.

Applied research has broadened our understanding of first and second language
acquisition, of the role of language in psychology, computer science, and law. The
institute of Ukrainian Studies and COBUILT research center in GB worked out
numerous databases with searchable engines in order to provide the specialist with the
brand nex lexicon.
In computer education, analytic linguistics has contributed to areas such as syntax,
lexicography, usage, reading, writing, and literature. These accomplishments concern
mostly the present state of the language, a perspective called synchronic linguistics.
Analysis also extends to the historical study of languages, a perspective called
diachronic (or historical) linguistics.
APPLIED LINGUSTICS AS IT IS
The term “applied linguistics” is a polysemantic one. In the Russian and Western
linguistics it has completely different interpretations. In the western tradition it
represents first of all teaching foreign languages, including a technique, skills and
strategies, description of grammar for the educational purposes, teaching of language as
a native and foreign and so forth. In the former USSR the term applied linguistics began
to be used widely in 50th. It was connected with development of computer technologies
and with appearing of systems of automatic processing. For this reason in the Russian-
speaking literature together with the term applied linguistics one may come acrooss
“computer linguistics”,
“computational linguistics”, “automatic linguistics” or “engineering linguistics”. They
are frequently used terms; meanwhile identification of these disciplines was rather
problematic, because each of them has the subject and methods within the framework
of applied linguistics as a hyperonim. Prof.V.Zvegintsev contributed much to this topic.
In his scientific heritage he discusses a correlation between theoretical and applied
linguistics, let me cite: “all kinds of automatic processing of the speech information
more often are understood as applied linguistics, but nevertheless it would be wrong to
enclose applied linguistics within the limits of the given problems”. There is another,
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pragmatic understanding of this term. So, under the name “School of Applied
Linguistics” (institute in Dublin, and a part of a Dublin university) one should
understand “Institute of Foreign Languages”. In our university, but our chair of the
same direction, there is “A Chair of Applied Linguistics” piloted by the assosiate
professor Z.Kasprishin. The goal of a chair – teaching Ukrainian as a foreign language.
The semantics covered by a term " applied linguistics ", today is dramatically wide. The
problems of the discipline explain the ability of applied linguistics to increase contacts
of linguistics of various branches (Gorodetsky). Interdisciplinary researches influence
linguistic theory, promote updating of the conceptual terminological devices of modern
linguistics. Nowadays the applied linguistics is understood - as functional activity,
dealing with scientific knowledge and theoretical conclusions of such activity.as well.
The last understanding – is in the focus of modern theories. The beginning of applied
linguistics as independent scientific discipline dates back to 50-ties of XX century. It
was a time of a high automatic development of speach recognition, machine translation,
automatic classification of technical terms and textual optimization of literary texts.
Step by step primitive software changes the tradition of reading and understanding of
sacral texts, the Bible in particular. Thus was a very responsible thing to translate Bible
from their original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into modern speech
computer helped to preserve coherence of a text, informative footnotes and to compare
different versions of translation.
FUNCTIONS OF A DISCIPLINE
One should distinguish communicative, epistemic (pertaining to the conditions of
acquiring knowledge), cognitive functions of language which, certainly, are not
homogeneous and can be divided into smaller parts. So, communicative function
includes fatic and informative components, function of influence, social function
(which is shown in a language policy). From the point of view of epistemic function
the language system appears as a way of storage and transfer of knowledge together
with reflection of specifically national flavour. Cognitive function covers the area of a
artificial language and deals both with thinking and with the knowledge of the person.
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With the help of artificial language - knowledge is interpreted, that results into
generation of new knowledge (compare concept of interpretation of knowledge in
[Звегинцев ]. From the functional point of view the applied linguistics can be
determined as scientific discipline in which ways of optimization of functioning of
language are studied and developed. Functions of language set reference points for
classification of huge area of domains of linguistic knowledge. Such disciplines, as the
theory of translation, machine translation the theory and practice of teaching of native
and non-native language, the theory and practice of informative systems, generation of
information in artificial languages, the theory of coding and decoding are fully engaged.
Social function of a language as a part communicative process – is deep rooted into
sociolinguistics, language planning and language policy.
Applied linguists draw upon theoretical models and analytic work for practical
purposes. Computer parsers (analyzers), artificial intelligence (e.g., speech recognition
and synthesis), and machine translation form the computational side of the applied
linguistic family. It’s history in USA starts with practical usage. Linguists have been
hired as consultants to help in the simplification of legal documents and in documenting
the identities of tape-recorded human voices in trials. They have helped the
governments of emerging nations devise alphabets and establish public policies on
language. In education, they have provided methods of language teaching (e.g., foreign
languages, including English as a foreign or second language, and bilingual education).
It works as a “linguistic pillar” to innovative designs for English curricula, such as the
Whole Language approach. In spite of many contributions, linguistics hasn't made its
full impact on education. Perhaps teachers fear the technicalities of a discipline that
claims English study to be a science. Some may see linguistics as a threat to traditional
values in teaching. But the future of English education, I am convinced, lies with the
broadening of the artificial borders in which the discipline has confined itself since the
nineteenth century. Such school of “applied studies” is already developed in Warsaw
University (Poland). Prof .George Axer, a founder of “OBTA” integral approach in
Western Europe runs a course “Seminarium Klasyczne” on the basis of Latin Grammar,
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Literature, Anthropology, and History of Art. Prof .George Axer is considered to be a

pioneer of Modern European Philology and a follower of prof. Losyev. Sandwich
courses in applied translation studies are provided by prof. Adam Pomorski. He was the
first to translate Goethe’s “Faust” into Polish, to research the problems of statistic
anlysis in fiction, and the first to understand “vertical context” as a sociologic motive.
Initial theoretical and methodical issues of material representation predicts a wide
understanding of applied linguistics which is not narrowed only to computer linguistics,
machine translation or a technique of teaching of foreign languages. The sphere of applied
linguistics is considered widely enough. It allows us to give a clear picture of areas of
practical linguistic activities: bibliographic sources and publications. Nevertheless, not all
the directions of my small appendix of linguistic knowledge will be described in detail.
The genre of the course allows us to differentiate various applied disciplines. The basic
emphasis will be made on the spheres for which, as a rule, separate lectures are not
provided. For example, sociolinguistics and computational analysis (applied to regional
varieties of a language which are carried out in the frame work of a course project),
machine translation in industrial branches, translated literature in Internet (a
modified course which was initially launced by prof. V.Serduchenko in the course of
professional literary criticism), on dialogic utterance of software, Syntax of MT
Administrator. A great attention will be paid to political linguistics, theory of linguistic
influence, communicative linguistics, terminology and terminography, linguistic aspects of
neurobionic programming, etc.

METHODS
A variety of methods of applied linguistics is quite comparable to a variety of
concrete areas of the appendix of knowledge of languages. Each concrete applied
discipline possesses the unique set of methods. For example, quantative linguistics uses
methodical toolkit of statistics, the computer linguistics uses widely hte methods of the
theory of programming and knowledge representation. The theory of influence is based
on a significant variation of language structures. Nevertheless it is possible to identify
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something common, some general parameters for a method of applied linguistics in a

whole. This general part is well visible in comparison to the methods described. Even in
pre-linguistic period there was such problem as the description of the facts of language
on various levels. Apart from it - in the foreground there is a method of classification,
that is revealing of the scope of parameters, which allows us to capture all relevant
properties of languages of structure. The theoretical linguistics forms representation
about relevance in conceptual models of language. Conceptual models of functioning of
language are not simply described, thy are explained by the observable facts, predicting,
and failures (метод проб и ошибок) for example, parameters of occurrence.
Modeling in theoretical linguistics is the essential for our faculty. M.Bilinskiy used
modeling in his thesaurus of synonymous fields. His linguistic formulae are based on
statistic facts of occurrence. Much was done by (for ex.: prof. Z.Partyko from Linguistic
Institute or prof. L.Nelubin from St. Petersberg University). They applied statistics in
their linguistic practice.
What I am driving at is the fact, that the teachers of are the key figures in healing
the rift (or bridging a gap) between the sciences and the humanities. One of the aims of
the course of mine is to initiate you into the linguistic point of view and to provide you
with the literacy that you will need to enter the next century. As we have tried to show
in this lecture, applied work grows out of theoretical and analytical frameworks.
Without those contexts, application is nothing more than sterile gadgetry doomed to
failure for lack of intellectual roots. Moreover, theoretical and analytic notions can
provide you with intellectually stimulating and rewarding future activity as a
professional translator .