CLINICAL LINGUISTICS
The ultimate goal of clinical linguistics is to formulate hypotheses for the remediation of abnormal linguistic behavior … clinical linguistics can help clinicians to make an informed judgment about ‘what to teach next’ and to monitor the outcome of an intervention, hypothesis, as treatment proceeds. (Crystal 2001: 679)
The terms ‘remediation’ and ‘teaching’ suggest that clinical linguistics is very definitely applied work since it sets out to diagnose what problems there are in an individual’s communication system and then attempts to provide appropriate remedies. The best-known practitioner is the speech therapist (or pathologist) who works with childhood speech defects (caused for example by a cleft palate) and with adult aphasias (caused by strokes and by road and other accidents). But there is more to it.
The speech therapist’s work draws on descriptive work in language acquisition and language loss, including sophisticated speech synthesis using state of the art computer technology, on phonetic and grammatical accounts of deficit, what we might call (drawing on the analogy of pedagogical grammar) a deficit grammar, that is to say an algorithmic inventory drawn up to exemplify the areas of loss most likely to be experienced by the therapist’s patients (e.g. the protocols of Anthony et al. (1971) and of Crystal et al. (1975/1976). The linguist’s interest is, once again, primarily in change: to what extent is non-acquisition (as exemplified by the child with some speech impairment) systematic in that it relates regularly (but negatively) to so-called normal acquisition. Similarly with loss (whether through age, illness or trauma): to what extent does loss mirror acquisition so that it is possible to establish a relationship between the two? While such research is of obvious applied interest since it would allow swifter and more precise diagnosis both of children’s defects and of adults’ traumas, it also is of profound concern to the linguist’s understanding of what language is through knowing what it is not. The path is through changed states to failure of changed states to what it is that causes language to exist at any one time as a system and which enables it to change into another system.
Where does the applied linguist fit into clinical linguistics? If my premise is accepted, then what drives the applied linguist is an interest in achieving stable states and in improving (and ameliorating) communication. Thus the applied linguist will have two roles in clinical linguistics (and thus, of course, overlapping with but at the same time separate from the role of the linguist who becomes involved in applications here). The first role is that of the speech therapist him/herself. And the second is that of the trainer of speech therapists. Indeed the two go together, because once we accept that the applied linguist has a role in the training of speech therapists then the trained speech therapist becomes, by definition, an applied linguist.
