Introdungcing English language part 39: 'In this exciting new textbook, Louise Mullany and Peter Stockwell have provided a fresh and imaginative set of alternatives for teaching and learning a huge amount about the English language. The book allows tor creative and lateral approaches to developing an understanding of important linguistic concepts and, together with the thought-provoking activities, and accessible readings, guarantees there is something to stimulate every learner. | D4 214 EXTENSION LINGUISTIC READINGS Joan Cutting Cutting suggests towards the end of the excerpt that personality type might be a factor in the data and more tentatively she suggests that the data can indicate broad personality types at least as far as discursive behaviour goes. The observation illustrates the position of pragmatics between psycholinguistics A7-D7 and sociolinguistics A9-D9 . Do you think a speech act analysis of the type undertaken by Cutting can be used to discriminate personality types rather than social variables How would you design a study such as this D4 PREFABRICATED EXPRESSIONS IN SPOKEN LANGUAGE As you will have discovered across strand 4 the study of syntax ranges from the most theoretical discussions to the most applied forms of linguistics. In this extract Jenny Cheshire examines closely the argument that syntax is potentially highly innovative and creative and discovers that everyday discourse is full of phrases and idioms that are like ready-made templates that we bolt together in order to engage in quick conversation. She examines the syntactic role of these prebricated expressions also called lexical clusters phraseological units or formulaic sequences but her discussion retains an applied linguistic focus. Her examples come from transcription data collected in a sociolinguistic study in the southern English city of Reading and also from large language corpora. It is interesting to read this excerpt alongside the corpus linguistics of Sinclair in D2. Cheshire sets her sociolinguistic approach termed varia-tionist here against the traditional theoretical generativist approach see also A13 . Jenny Cheshire Jenny Cheshire reprinted from Syntactic variation and spoken language in L. Cornips and K. Corrigan eds Syntax and Variation Reconciling the Biological and the Social 2005 Amsterdam Benjamins Many researchers working on spoken language have claimed that linguists tend to overemphasise the creative aspect of language. There is no .
