An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

EXERCISE 2A (ON CHAPTER 2)
R. Harris, ‘Communication and Language’, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978,
in N. Love (ed.), 
Selected Writings of Roy Harris
, London: Routledge, 1990, pp.
139–40.
In the following text, the author, Roy Harris, considers how the nineteenth-century
experimental chemist, Joseph Priestley (who was also an amateur linguist), would
view current attitudes towards applied linguistic issues. Harris notes that for Priestley
language could not be removed from other aspects of human life. Priestley, so Harris
imagines, would be bewildered by linguists’ lack of interest in the social role of
language. Priestley saw language as given to man by God, just as the human body
is, and as the doctor watches over the body and endeavours to keep it healthy, so the
grammarian watches over the health of the language, generally taking care of it.
[Priestley] would be surprised to see what a great gap had opened up between
theoretical linguistics, on the one hand, and practical linguistics on the other. He
would find, for example, that many a modern phonologist would be extremely
unsympathetic to the idea that phonologists have anything to learn from
experimental investigation into the facts of phonetics. Similarly, he would find
that remarkably few modern theories of grammar show any great inclination to
discover for themselves to what extent the grammatical rules they posit are borne
out by observable speech behaviour.
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What would strike him about much of modern linguistic theory would be
its remoteness from practicalities, the very abstractness – one might almost say
unreality – of its more prominent controversies, the degree of social irrelevance
which it had achieved, and, in many ways, seemed only too pleased to have
achieved. He might ask why linguistic matters of immediate importance to
modern society were often rejected by linguistic theorists as being outside the area
of their main concern. He might ask why, for example, it was still necessary in
1975 for the Bullock Report to state that ‘all subject teachers need to be aware of
the linguistic processes by which their pupils acquire information and under -
standing’. He might ask why, in an age of newspapers, radio and television, so
little is known about the linguistics of the mass media (about how, for instance,
a news bulletin should be structured in order to achieve maximum communi -
cational effectiveness.) He would be struck by the fact that whereas we claim to
have a theoretical linguistics, we have no linguistics of the living-room, or of the
court room or of the class room, or of any other form of socially institutionalised
linguistic exchange. He might ask why the theoretical linguistics of a civilisation
which depends increasingly on language can apparently tell us so little about how
the processes of linguistic communication are shaping the very form and content
of that civilisation.
He might even go on to ask himself why the linguistic theorist does not
apparently feel any social obligation to concern himself with such matters, but is
content to pass the questions on to educationalists, sociologists, psychologists or
whoever else happens to be standing by. For he surely would not fail to see how
the very terms ‘applied linguistics’, ‘sociolinguistics’, ‘psycholinguistics’, and so on
reflect the theoretical linguist’s view of the subordinate status of those fields, and
of his own central importance.
In short, something that would strike Joseph Priestley most forcibly, I suggest,
is the extent to which modern theoretical linguistics had somehow managed to
lose sight of the fact that language has to do, in the first and last resort, with com -
munication between human beings, or managed at least to treat this central fact
as if it were somehow a concern of subsidiary or peripheral importance.