Language for Special Purposes (LSP)

• Lecture focuses on Language for Special Purposes (LSP)

Two Kinds of LSP

• Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) refers to two areas within applied linguistics
• One area is focusing on the needs in education and training
• Another area is focusing on research on language variation across a subject field
• LSP can be used in any target language needed for specific purposes
• LSP is often applied to English (English for Specific Purposes, or ESP)
• Examples of LSP include legal English, business English, tourism English, science English, and engineering English
• The text discerns the study of language variation from language teaching

What is a Language?

• Basic conceptions related to language include language, sublanguage, and LSP
• A language is a whole or total language, also known as language for general purposes (LGP) or common language
• No one speaks a whole language
• Hypothesis: Every speaker speaks only a portion of a language, i.e., a sublanguage, despite having the potential to speak the whole LGP
• A corollary of this is that a group of speakers also speak a sublanguage
• LSP is the sum of Language and Special Purpose, meaning an LSP is a sublanguage

Definition of Language

• Empirically, a language is the set of sentences its speakers use for communication
• A language is the total of all its speakers' sentences
• Vocabulary of a language is all its speakers' vocabulary
• Syntactic patterns are all its speakers' syntactic patterns
• X of a language would be combined speakers' X

What is Sublanguage

• A sublanguage is the language of a restricted, technical domain
• A "domain" can be a speaker or a thing
• A group of speakers also form a "domain"
• Mathematically, a sublanguage includes language closed under some operations of the language
• Examples of closed subsets of language include numbers, time expressions, cuisine names, and greetings
• "Closure" do not equal limited/fixed number of members

Alternative Definition of Sublanguage

• Hirschman & Sager changed the definition
• A sublanguage is a particular language used in a body of texts dealing with a circumscribed subject area or science subfield
• The documents' authors should share a common vocabulary and common habits of word usage
• Interest/focus in terminology is the latter of spoken vs written forms
• Speciality is special knowledge, not habits

Language Competence Hypothesis

• Everyone has similar language competence
• Competence is the ability to acquire/use a language; this is tied to Chomsky's universal grammar (UG)
• Every speaker of a language speaks the same common language
• Everyone speaks their own sublanguage
• This comes from limited lexical and syntactic choices, and differences in syntax and vocabulary
• All sublanguages merge together to form a language

Special Purpose Role

• Language is used in communication for some specific purpose each time
• Can occur one time, many times, all the time, or regularly for the same purpose
• A group of people may communicate with the same purpose in regular manner(s)
• Purpose determines what people use, do, where, when, and how
• What they use for these aforementioned purposes is an LSP

What Constitutes a "Purpose"?

• It's for communicating/exchanging special knowledge/expertise
• Examples like inviting friends to lunch vs greetings for Chinese Lunar New Year
• Greetings and blessings includes spoken and written components
• Unique features identify sublanguage
• Examples such as shopping, bargaining, talking to a travel agent, banking, or seeing a doctor, dentist, or real estate agent
• Involves people working on specific topics/tasks but not for communication of special knowledge in any special domain

Key Features

• There's no clear-cut boundary between LSP and general language
• Any part of common language can be an LSP
• May be used in a way that is difficult for a layman to understand
• Language used to mean something via a protocol shared between speakers and listeners
• These are not features of LSP used for communication of special knowledge
• Any part of LSP is within common language, and can be understandable through teaching or explanation

Further Key Features of LSP

• It is purpose-driven like other human activities
• Situation-dependent based on event, topic, domain, and people
• Examples include jargon or sign language
• Content-specific, resulting in controlled syntax, style, and discourse
• Results in controlled/limited vocabulary and fixed expressions
• Lexicon-enriched and specialized with number of terms to convey knowledge

Terminology

• Terminology as a set of terms, is the core vocabulary of LSP
• Problem: LSP lexicon overlaps with common language vocab
• Solution: LSP vocab includes a special (terminology) and common part

Sublanguage: Person Names

• Purpose: Identifying, labeling, and calling people
• Pattern: First/given name(s) + last name/surname
• Constraint : surname = family name, passed from generation to generation, from the father
• Generation name is optional
• Names cannot be changed and arbitrariness with given names is allowed
• Knowledge in person names is limited

Family Names

• English family names are from occupations (e.g., smith)
• Chinese family names are from place names of ancestors

Culinary Terms

• Domains include Catering trade/industry
• Is an LSP but a part of LGP
• Requires how foods are made, served, materials, product types, cooking methods, and shape

Culinary Lexicon

• List is in Chinese cuisine names
• Encoding any special knowledge is required
• Categorization of words is beyond parts of speech

Food Categories

• Main categories include rice, meats, eggs, vegetables, salad, drinking, soup, milk-like foods, and desserts

Food Subcategories

• Includes: rice, noodles ("Japanese" is udon), pasta, sushi, porridge (rice or millet), dim sum, bread, etc.

Subcategories by Material

• Vegetables and fruit
  • Vegetables, beans, fruits, melons, nuts, mushrooms, etc.
• Meats
  • Poultry: chicken, goose, duck, pigeon, etc.
  • Meat: pork, beef, mutton, venison etc.
  • Others: snake, fish, crab, shrimp, squid, shell etc.

Lexical Items

• These items fall into categories: advertising, place, person, spice/seasoning, cooking methods, modifier, ingredient name, shape, and container
• Also includes rice/noodle category, and abbreviations.

Cooking Methods

• Includes sautéing, frying, tormenting, roasting, steaming, baking, quick-frying, braising, boiling, bursting, simmering, and stewing
• Modifiers describe degrees or ways of cooking

Body Parts

• Terms come with animal anatomy
  • Head, neck, wing, thigh, leg, foot/paw, etc.
  • Internal: Heart, liver, lung, kidney, tripe, etc.
  • Other: Blood, bone marrow etc.

Sauces and Seasoning

• Ginger, onion, garlic, vinegar, chili, pepper, curry, "Sha Die," "Wu Xiang," soybeans and chili, spiced salt, XO sauce, white sauce, "Nan Ru" sauce, Sichuan pepper/sauce, Ba Bao thick chili, Wu Liu sauce
• Includes thousand island dressing

Taste and Smell

• Includes sour, sweet or spicy
• Smell is related to apricot, jasmine, and stench

Color and Temperature

• Color includes red, yellow, and green. More specifically rainbow bright red, white jade, a shade of dark green, green jade
  • Can also be metaphoric
• Can be modified to imply temp such as refrigerated, frozen or hot

Nomenclature

• Includes descriptions that refer to a name or number

Artistics Styling Linguistic Patterns

• Includes a sense of Purpose, time and situation
• Requires linguistic structure

Descriptors

• A general pattern occurs with the addition of a descriptive specifier alongside a category name.

Areas for Study

• All the patterns mentioned here call for more studies from different perspectives

Phraseology

• Phraseology dictates the sentences themselves which are divided into nouns, adjective, verbs and adverbs to indicate sentence diagram and the action of description within
• [NP_subj] [V_main] [NP_obj] are examples of this structure and how to define it as an academic field

Cognitive Mechanisms

• Real place names, conceptual mapping through metaphors and metonymy is popularly involved
• Metaphor uses body parts in comparison, to relate a body position to mountain for example
• The method of Metonymy: Use the name of a closely related thing or intrinsic feature, instead of its geographic category
• A category name is assigned if the human geographic entity is established

Statistics

• All the following is independent depending on the variables used/displayed
• The target and source Domains are not independent, that is, significantly related
• The target domain and the ways of mapping/structuring are not independent