Current Trends of Applied Linguistics

Current Trends of Applied Linguistics

Professor Ram Lakhan Meena, Professor & Head, Department oh Hindi, School of Humanities and languages, Central University of Rajasthan- 941330022

Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methodology and theory from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, neurobiology, communication disorders, neuropsychology, and computer science. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics proposes are necessary in producing and comprehending language.

Neurologists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information related to language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, using a phasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology, and computer modeling. Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry,computer,  engineering,  linguistics,  mathematics,  medicine  and  allied disciplines, philosophy, physics, and psychology. The term neurobiology is usually used interchangeably with the term neuroscience, although the former refers specifically to the biology of the nervous system, whereas the latter refers to the entire science of the nervous system.

The scope of neuroscience has broadened to include different approaches used to study the molecular, cellular, developmental, structural, functional, evolutionary,computational, and medical aspects of the nervous system. The techniques used by neuroscientists have also expanded enormously, from molecular and cellular studies of individual nerve to imaging of sensory and motor tasks in the brain. Recent theoretical advances in neuroscience have also been aided by the study of neural networks. Given the increasing number of scientists who study the nervous system, several prominent neuroscience organizations have been formed to provide a forum to all neuroscientists and educators.                            

Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistic knowledge, methods and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics. There are principally three areas of application for linguists working in forensic contexts - understanding language of the written law, understanding language use in forensic and judicial processes and the provision of linguistic evidence. The discipline of forensic linguistics is not homogenous; it involves a range of experts and researchers in different areas of the field.

A linguistic fingerprint is a concept put forward by some scholars that each human being uses language differently, and that this difference between people involves a collection of markers which stamps a speaker/writer as unique; similar to a fingerprint. Under this view, it is assumed that every individual uses languages differently and this difference can be observed as a fingerprint.  It is formed as a result of merged language style. A person's linguistic fingerprint can be reconstructed from the individual's daily interactions and relate to a variety of self-reported personality characteristics, situational variables and physiological markers (e.g. blood pressure, cortical, testosterone).

In the process of an investigation, the emphasis should be on the relative rather than absolute difference between the authors and how investigators can classify their texts, however, argues that although the concept of linguistic fingerprinting is attractive to law enforcement agencies, there is so far little hard evidence to support the notion. In order to carry out the Cusum test on habits of utilizing two to three letter words and vowel-initial words in a sentential clause, the occurrences of each type of word in the text must be identified and the distribution plotted in each sentence. The Cusum distribution for these two habits will be compared with the average sentence length of the text. The two sets of values should track each other. Any altered section of the text would show a distinct discrepancy between the values of the two reference points. The tampered section will exhibit a different pattern from the rest of the text.