I was born in a country that doesn’t exist any more. The country’s name was USSR – a rightly dreaded and detested one, I must say. Anyway, the good thing (the only good thing!) about that country was it gave good education.
I started to learn English about 20 years ago, when I started to live in another country without moving from my flat. Now my country was called ‘The Republic of Armenia’, and it was claimed to be independent and democratic. It still does, in a way.
But the ‘independent’ Armenia preserved the only good thing there was in the USSR, the educational system. Now it’s experiencing radical changes (they call it the Bologna treaty, I reckon), but I was lucky to be educated in the good old times when there were no credits and no modules, and everything was quite simple – either you do your homework or you bribe the teacher and get your marks.
I managed to survive in that environment without giving a single bribe to anyone, which means I was one of the best students at the faculty. I get somewhat nostalgic when I talk about my student life because things have become more complicated since then. I am certainly not one of the best students of the PhD programme at the University of La Laguna, what a blow to my self-appraisal!
Those were happy times when I thought linguistics consisted of Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Lexicology and Stylistics, and there were a couple of related disciplines such as the Theory of Translation and History of English-Speaking Cultures. I could easily fit any subject that we did into this scheme, thus, the History of English language was a diachronic study of all these layers, but especially Phonology and Morphology, and partly Lexicology, whereas Literature stood apart as a gigantic monolith related to language just because it actually made use of it. Then I found out (that was my last year at the University, I think) that there was such a thing as Dialectology which I never studied. This made me feel sad and sort of incomplete, and I decided to read as many books as possible on Dialectology… some day. That’s where my habit of procrastination comes, I gather, the bloody Dialectology is to blame for everything!
But there were more blows coming up. I wrote a brilliant (as everybody insisted) diploma paper on Phraseology involving some sort of comparative study and received my MA degree, after which I had to confront the biggest shock in my life.
After wasting my time merrily during some four or five months in Yerevan (attending all the jazz concerts and all the live music clubs and occasionally teaching English at a university), I came to Spain to do a PhD programme. And there it happened – I discovered that what I had been studying at my university was in fact a rudimentary and insignificant part of the whole science about Language. Moreover, it turned out that my writing, speaking and research skills are useless in the big World of Academic English. My innocent knowledge of the existence of five main styles in any modern language and their perfect handling was ruined by the unquestionable fact that there were… err… about 50 times more styles according to the most ascetic calculations. Furthermore, I became aware of the existence of such mysterious things as Sociolinguistics, Descriptive Linguistics, EAP, Genre Analysis etc.
I must say, though, that this sort of very rigidly structured and limited syllabus does have certain advantages. First, it doesn’t saturate the students with information which they will fail to assimilate. Second, it gives you criteria for critical thinking and analysis of data which are very useful if you don’t want to get drowned in the ocean of current academic thought. Third, it teaches you to associate and relate phenomena in order to memorise and categorise them more efficiently. Finally, it is a powerful research instrument, though not very good for pragmatic reasons indeed. And it doesn’t teach you anything except the approved syllabus on those five levels of language (layers we used to call them), nothing about Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, EAP or Applied linguistics.
Not that I hadn’t ever heard of them, just the contrary – I had precisely heard of them and never known what they really are. I’m still not sure I do know what they are.
Back at the University, we were taught that there was no other linguistics except Saussurean linguistics, that Ferdinand de Saussure was the father and founder and progenitor of modern language studies, and that Port-Royal was the Mecca and Medina of Linguistics. I discovered, to my utter horror, that at the University of La Laguna (and other European Universities) they were falling into an interminable range of heresies, and everyone was free to choose their own as long as they cited a sufficient number of authors to support themselves. I reckon they call it democracy. I saw no possibility of converting any of the heretics, so I fell into a heresy myself. The heresy that I liked best of all is called Genre Analysis and is based on the work of John M. Swales who is (sorry for this subjectiveness) about 10.000 times cooler than Saussure!
A major influence for me was the director of my thesis and an amazing person, Sally Burgess, who has done a great amount of work in this area and also has been extremely patient with my constantly erring and faltering self. Thank you, Sally, you’re by far the best tutor in the world!
Now, thanks to Sally and other professors of the Faculty, I can claim to be at least familiar with contemporary tendencies in linguistics and (as some of them claim) able to write a PhD thesis on Genre Analysis. They are very optimistic, aren’t they? Anyway, there’s no other option available for me – I’ve spent too much time on this beautiful island to go back to my country without a PhD diploma.
Even though I think I’m familiar with some of the recent work in Linguistics, I still come across a lot of incognita which I’ll be discussing in this blog.
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