Interview

Ronald Carter

Professor Ronald Carter is a professor of modern English language, Chair of the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) and Fellow of the British Academy for Social Sciences. His main interests are in the broad field of applied linguistics, working on the relationship between language and education, linguistics, language learning and teaching and the interface between language and literature. He is an acclaimed author of over forty books and one hundred articles. He has been at the University of Nottingham, U.K. since 1979, director of the Centre for English Language Education and head of the School of English Studies.

He gave this interview in July, 2004 with Gui Qingyang, a visiting scholar at The University of Nottingham from The School of Foreign Languages, China Jiliang University, Hangzhou, China.

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GQY: As you know, the latter half of the twentieth century and onwards is a remarkable time for linguistics in the world and you are one of those most centrally involved in linguistics in this period. Will you please reflect on how and why you went into linguistics, what branches of the subject attracted you, what formative influences you were exposed to and how you reacted to them?
RC: There are two names that stand out for me as major influences, as colleagues with whom I have worked and as linguists who have shaped the subject in their interesting way. One of them is Prof. Michael Halliday and the second is Prof. John Sinclair. Both of them are significant in that they have taken a view of language as essentially social in meaning. They have both worked against the background of a very powerful tradition of mentalistic and psycholinguistic views of language developed primarily by Noam Chomsky whose influence has been extensive throughout the world and who has quite explicitly stated that he is interested rather more in how the mind works to process language.

Sinclair and Halliday operate in different traditions in that they are interested in how people communicate using the language. They are interested in the functions of the language and above all, they are interested in real language. Chomsky is really only interested in producing language, if necessary, he is interested in making up, inventing the language, which tells us something about the structure of the brain. Halliday and Sinclair are both linguists who have spent a lot of time working with real language with all its complications and messiness. They don't like the idea of inventing language, making things up. They want to see how people really use it. And I have been influenced by that tradition of real language use and of examining the functions of language in society, and social meanings and social purposes, and cultural meanings and cultural purposes.

Now both of them have been influential in other ways, too. They have been influential in the description of a language and how language works. They have always tried to recognize the levels of discourse, discourse organization and discourse patterning. Much linguistics in the early years of the subject looked at rather small units of language, morphemes, phonemes, individual words and so on. Sinclair and Halliday are always interested in the large patterns of meaning that are communicated by small units of language.

So most linguists in the early part of 1950s and 1960s worked in what is called a bottom-up way. They worked from the smallest units of language up to the largest units of language. Sinclair and Halliday are interested in working bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. So they are interested in language variation, language and culture, language and literature, language and society and then how the smaller units of language reveal larger patterns of meaning. And I have been someone I think who has worked much in that tradition. Hence my interests primarily in language and society, language and culture, language and literature and discourse analysis and in how language works in real situations.

The other contribution that Sinclair has made and Halliday to a lesser extent is in obtaining large quantities of evidence about the language, so that when they describe the language, they do so on the basis of analysis which is comprehensive. Sinclair in particular has been probably one of the fathers of corpus linguistics in the world, where he in the early 1980s built one of the largest corpora of spoken and written language anywhere in the world and used computational methods to isolate the most frequent patterns of the language and try to help better understand how the most frequent patterns of the language work.

This approach through corpus linguistics gives us more information about the language than we have ever had before. If you have, like Sinclair developed at the University of Birmingham, a 450 million-word corpus of the English language, spoken and written, then your statements about the nature of a language, about grammar, about vocabulary use, about discourse organization are very authoritative. Sinclair, I think, has probably shaped the way that all linguists will eventually have to work in the 21st century. They will not be able easily to say things about language without referring to evidence about how it is actually used by lots of people in everyday contexts of use.

Both of these figures are particularly important therefore for teaching English as second or foreign language, because what learners need is evidence about the most frequent words of the language, how they work, why they work the way they do. They need to be able to handle of course the smallest units of the language, but they also need to know how the smallest units of the language contribute to discourse, culture and functional meanings.

This is very important for learners of English, because if you can only communicate at the lowest level of words, you can only reach a certain level of competence. It is very important that you develop discourse competence, an ability to handle interaction in language. And we are learning more and more about this from corpora, from particularly corpora of spoken English.

So those are the two figures who have most influenced me and they have also influenced linguistics institutionally so that in the last 20 years in England there are now more and more courses for undergraduates and postgraduates which embrace social-linguistics, discourse analysis, language and culture, corpus linguistics and MAs in applied linguistics and language teaching which pay attention to these views of language. Dictionaries, grammars, lexicons of English are now increasingly being written for non-native speakers of English, for learners of English around the world whether it be English as a second language or foreign language. And these materials are being increasingly informed by functional approaches of language and by corpus-informed approaches of language.

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