Who Needs Linguistics?
The fact that linguistics is the most precise and developed among the sciences of man is recognized by almost all social scientists. According to Piaget, "linguistics is certainly the most advanced of the social sciences through its theoretical structuration as well as precision of its tasks and it has the most important relations with other disciplines". As Moulton would like to put, linguistics at present has established itself, at one and the same time, as the most scientific of the humanities and most humanistic of the sciences. The position of language is so central to the life-pattern of human beings that man is now being defined as homo loquens, i.e., man the talker and a field like social anthropology is now being characterized as the science of man as a 'writing animal'. There are many schools of philosophy which insist that problems related to philosophy can only be solved after giving due consideration to different aspects of language. Wittgenstein once said that philosophy is a 'battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of a language".
The position of language is so central to the study of man and society that linguistics is being called upon to provide a framework for study of myths, taboos, kinship roles, marriage, etc. Its influence has become so pervasive that even economists, have started using concepts of linguistics to explain various constructs of their discipline. For example, Talcott Parsons systematically treats money as a very highly specialized language, economics transactions as certain types of conversation, the circulation of money as the sending of messages and money system as a code in the grammatical syntactic sense.
Sapir's words have indeed proved prophetic: "It is difficult for a modern linguist to confine himself to his traditional subject matter. Unless he is somewhat unimaginative, he cannot but share some or all the mutual interests which link linguistics with anthropology, and history of culture, with sociology, with psychology, with philosophy and more remotely with physics and physiology". We find now anthropologists developing a more comprehensive frame work for micro-analysis of the significant patterns of communicative behaviour, psychologists giving depth to the study of underlying concepts behind language, philosophers providing insights into the various modes of activities to which words are related, mathematicians contributing to the development of a more adequate model of linguistics structure, computer technicians devising mechanico-electronic routines for analysing linguistic data etc. With linguists responding favourably to these multi-faceted contributions to the study related to language, linguistics has become more global, not only in its orientation but also in its effects and application. Since the range of research activity concerning language is extraordinarily large, practical applications of its theories are also many and varied.
The fact that language enjoys a privileged position in the pattern of human behaviour and linguistics plays a cardinal role in the different sciences of man, demands that linguistics take on both academic and professional (social) responsibilities. There are very few linguistics who have earnestly responded to this need. Those who have heard or read the Presidential Address delivered by Bolinger to the L.S.A. at its annual meeting on December 28, 1972, will recall how he showed that a linguist till very recently had been more or less a useful sideliner but not a social critic. He stressed that apart from the fact that subject and verbs agree, linguists should also deal with the question whether statements and facts agree. Once we move in this direction, the lie 'the big lie', becomes a proper object of study for linguists and a necessary one, specially when lying is cultivated by the government, politicians, journalists, writers and even by linguistics, etc., as an art. As members of society, we have an obligation to contribute our knowledge and skill to expose this act of lying. Viewed from this perspective, applied linguistics becomes a socially meaningful academic activity, since here linguists are called upon to utilize their knowledge and skill to reveal the implicit assumptions made by speakers for the benefit of common users of language.
In the year 1956, Archibald Hill read his paper 'Who Needs Linguistics' at the VII Annual Round-Table Meeting, where he pointed out mainly three such sections who are pointed out mainly three such sections who are in need of lingusitic knowledge: (i) native and foreign language teachers; (ii) literary scholars, and (iii) those concerned with problems of mental disorders. All those who are concerned with translation, lexicography, literacy compaigns, development of writing systems, spelling reforms, language policy, simulated speech, computer techniques, and the like, face difficulties in achieving their ends without the help of linguistics. But what is more important, in this context, is what Hill concluded his paper with: It is the linguist who need linguistics: it is we who have the task of making linguistics sufficiently adult, and its results sufficiently available so that all people of goodwill who work within the fields of language, language-art and language-usage can realise that there are techniques and results which are available to them.
The present volume consists of three parts: 'Literacy and Language Education',. 'Linguistics and Literary Studies' and Widening Horizons' that include vibrant areas of applications of linguistics to various needs of our society.
Part-I has a bi-focal orientation - one that centres around the concept and problems of literacy in multilingual settings and the other that concerns itself with problems of organizing language teaching in multilingual-pluralicultural countries of South-East Asia. Organizing language teaching in the developing multilingual and pluricultural countries of South-East Asia is a kind of educational exprience which is radically different from what we have in the monolingual countries to the West. It is to be noted that form these developing countries bilingualism has been a natural state of verbal behaviour for several millenia. This grass-root societal bilingualism is not to be confused with the atypical bilingual situations that exist in some parts of the Western World. In this section of the volume it is suggested that before developing and evaluation an educational programme of literacy, mother tongue or other tongue teaching, we have to ascertain different and the speech community. In addition to this, we have also to work out the sociolinguistic assumptions implicit in the programme-objectives.
Part-II discusses the relationship between language and literature (as discourse), a relationship which has been problematic in literary, aesthetic and linguistic theories. The major issues discussed are choice of language for literary discourse, language(s) in fictional discourse, language in written discourse and language with stylistic meaning and rhetorical significance. Another major issue discussed is that of Text-Reader dynamics. The sections suggests how stylistics should make linguistic and literary studies work for rather than against each other. To ensure this, a semiolonguistic approach has been proposed.
Part-III covers five distinct areas of linguistic application, viz., language pedagogy, lexicography, translation, sign-language and artificial languages. Scholars working in these various fields now find themselves at a loss when they try to achieve their ends without the aid and insights of linguistics. These papers reiterate the mutual gains to be made, because it is not just that linguistics can help in these fields, but that work done in these diverse fields helps us to make linguistics a mature and a truly adult discipline. In this process of mutual interaction, linguistics has developed as a scientific field of inquiry to an extent that it can provide easy solutions to many problems of several fields. However, there are still many areas in which linguistics has to become ripe for a paradigm-shift. The papers in this sections are indicative of some of these areas and problems.
