Linguistics was a hot topic at the recent University of South Australia Mount Gambier Campus public lecture.
The lecture, ‘Who are linguists? And what can we learn from them?’ was presented by UniSA Education Futures senior lecturer Dr David Caldwell.
Dr Caldwell defined what a linguist is, what they do, and said the term ‘linguist’ was very broad.
He outlined two ways in which a linguist might define themselves, the first being according to the field of application, such as computational linguistics, educational linguistics, neurolinguistics.
The second was according to the unit of language analysed, such as phoneticians examine small units (sounds), grammarians analyse slightly larger units (sequences of words in sentences), and corpus linguists might analyse millions of words or texts.
“We should be aware that not all linguists speak another language,” Dr Caldwell said.
“Linguists are generally descriptive and prescriptive and tend not to talk about right and wrong language use but rather describe language in all its weird and wonderful messiness.
“Linguists are not judging or analysing how you speak or the extent of your vocabulary.
“Everyone is a linguist, in so far as they are expert in ‘doing’ (speaking, listening, reading, writing) the very complex language system.”
Dr Caldwell also reflected on his personal experiences as an applied linguist and outlined two of his projects, including his language analysis of hospital patients with depression and the on-field language of AFL footballers.
During these reflections, Dr Caldwell emphasised the importance of linguistics and language analysis to solve real-world problems in various fields.
UniSA Regional Manager Mount Gambier Ian McKay was impressed with Dr Caldwell’s lecture, which received a great turnout.
“Our April public lecture with Dr David Caldwell was well attended by a very engaged audience with a particularly interesting question and answer session following Dr Caldwell’s lecture,” Mr McKay said.
“UniSA Mount Gambier Campus continues to be delighted to host a monthly public lecture series featuring some of the best researchers at UniSA.”
UniSA Mount Gambier’s next free public lecture will be held on Tuesday, May 16 featuring UniSA Creative journalism lecturer Dr Chrisanthi Giotis, with pre-lecture drinks commencing at 6pm.
