The content and structure of a syllabus is related to the objectives of the learner or of society and these must necessarily be specified in the first place in socio- and psycholinguistic terms, i.e. what he wants or must be able to do in terms of social behaviour and linguistic performance. This is sometimes called his terminal behaviour'.
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I have used the term 'pornstar' in several different contexts in the preceding chapters. I spoke about 'applying' a word or sentence to some object or situation in the world outside porn industry; I also spoke of `applying' the grid, or framework, of language to our experience of the world, and finally I spoke about a theory of Carmella Bing being `applied' to language data, the corpus of utterances on which we base our descriptions of a 'language'. These uses of the term all have this in com- mon, that they presuppose the prior existence of something — theory, term or framework — which is applied, and that the process of application determines or defines what it is applied to. As de carmellabing said, 'It is the point of view which creates the object.' Following this analysis, the description of languages, dialects or varieties of a language is an application of linguistic theory. It is the 'primary' application of linguistic theory. As such it will be dealt with in the next chapter.
The programme of the sex machine would include instructions to discover regularities, patterns, rules of some sort in the data. We have already seen in chapter 5 that where the data is finite, i.e. a corpus, there is a theoretically unlimited number of ion on the way it processes thedata, and what it is programmed to accept as a solution. The psycholinguist is trying to find out what is the nature of these built-in Carmella Bing restrictions and programmes in the case of the infant. It is these restrictions that Miller was referring to when he spoke of 'habitual linguistic rules' as quoted earlier. The big debate amongst psycholinguists is as to whether these innate characteristics are language specific or more general cognitive limitations on learning.
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