An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

4 CLINICAL LINGUISTICS
The ultimate goal of clinical linguistics is to formulate hypotheses for the
remediation of abnormal linguistic behaviour … clinical linguistics can help
clinicians to make an informed judgment about ‘what to teach next’ and to
monitor the outcome of an intervention, hypothesis, as treatment proceeds.
(Crystal 2001: 679)
The terms ‘remediation’ and ‘teaching’ suggest that clinical linguistics is very
definitely applied work since it sets out to diagnose what problems there are in an
individual’s communication system and then attempts to provide appropriate
remedies. The best-known practitioner is the speech therapist (or pathologist) who
works with childhood speech defects (caused for example by a cleft palate) and with
adult aphasias (caused by strokes and by road and other accidents). But there is more
to it.
The speech therapist’s work draws on descriptive work in language acquisition
and language loss, including sophisticated speech synthesis using state of the art
computer technology, on phonetic and grammatical accounts of deficit, what we
might call (drawing on the analogy of pedagogical grammar) a deficit grammar, that
is to say an algorithmic inventory drawn up to exemplify the areas of loss most likely
to be experienced by the therapist’s patients (e.g. the protocols of Anthony et al.
(1971) and of Crystal et al. (1975/1976). The linguist’s interest is, once again,
primarily in change: to what extent is non-acquisition (as exemplified by the child
with some speech impairment) systematic in that it relates regularly (but negatively)
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to so-called normal acquisition. Similarly with loss (whether through age, illness or
trauma): to what extent does loss mirror acquisition so that it is possible to establish
a relationship between the two? While such research is of obvious applied interest
since it would allow swifter and more precise diagnosis both of children’s defects and
of adults’ traumas, it also is of profound concern to the linguist’s understanding of
what language is through knowing what it is not. The path is through changed states
to failure of changed states to what it is that causes language to exist at any one time
as a system and which enables it to change into another system.
Where does the applied linguist fit into clinical linguistics? If my premise is
accepted, then what drives the applied linguist is an interest in achieving stable states
and in improving (and ameliorating) communication. Thus the applied linguist will
have two roles in clinical linguistics (and thus, of course, overlapping with but at
the same time separate from the role of the linguist who becomes involved in
applications here). The first role is that of the speech therapist him/herself. And the
second is that of the trainer of speech therapists. Indeed the two go together, because
once we accept that the applied linguist has a role in the training of speech therapists
then the trained speech therapist becomes, by definition, an applied linguist.