Page 8 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

viii Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos

teaching methods. These contrastive descriptions in turn have to be based on the
descriptive methods developed in theoretical linguistics.
However, in the light of the recent epistemological developments outlined
above, it may be useful to reinterpret Back’s notion of “Theoretically Applied
Linguistics”. As he himself points out, dealing with practical problems can have
repercussions on the development of the theoretical field. Often new ap-
proaches, new theoretical concepts and new methods are a prerequisite for deal-
ing with a particular type of practical problems, which may lead to an – at least
in the beginning – “application oriented basic research” in applied linguistics
itself, which with some justification could also be labelled “theoretically ap-
plied”, as many such problems require the transgression of disciplinary bound-
aries. It is not rare that a domain of “Theoretically Applied Linguistics” or “ap-
plication oriented basic research” takes on a life of its own, and that also
something which is labelled as “Applied Linguistics” might in fact be rather re-
mote from the mundane practical problems that originally initiated the respect-
ive subject area. But as long as a relation to the original practical problem can be
established, it may be justified to count a particular field or discussion as be-
longing to applied linguistics, even if only “theoretically applied”.

2.2. Applied linguistics as a response to structuralism and generativism
As mentioned before, in the Anglophone world in particular the view still
appears to be widespread that the primary concerns of the subject area of ap-
plied linguistics should be restricted to second language acquisition and lan-
guage instruction in the first place (see, e.g., Davies 1999 or Schmitt and Celce-
Murcia 2002). However, in other parts of the world, and above all in Europe,
there has been a development away from aspects of language learning to a wider
focus on more general issues of language and communication.
This broadening of scope was in part a reaction to the narrowing down the
focus in linguistics that resulted from self-imposed methodological constraints
which, as Ehlich (1999) points out, began with Saussurean structuralism and
culminated in generative linguistics. For almost three decades since the late
1950s, these developments made “language” in a comprehensive sense, as
related to the everyday experience of its users, vanish in favour of an idealized
and basically artificial entity. This led in “Core” or theoretical linguistics to a
neglect of almost all everyday problems with language and communication en-
countered by individuals and societies and made it necessary for those inter-
ested in socially accountable research into language and communication to draw
on a wider range of disciplines, thus giving rise to a flourishing of interdiscipli-
nary areas that have come to be referred to as hyphenated variants of linguistics,
such as sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, psycholinguistics, conversation
analysis, pragmatics, and so on (Davies and Elder 2004).