Incorporating Linguistics into ESP Courses
Vol.5,No.2(2016)
The aim of this paper is to explore the possibilities of teaching particular linguistic subfields within a course of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) intended for the students of political science. Unlike the majority of ESP courses, this course does not focus predominantly on the specialised lexis or on the four skills (listening, reading, speaking and writing) in the domains related to the learners’ expertise, but rather on some typical linguistic features of the language of politics. In order to be able to identify these typical features in political debates and speeches, students need to become familiar with various kinds of linguistic meanings, as well as the concepts of semantic prosody and loadedness in language. These concepts are situated on the intersection of the linguistic domains of lexical semantics, pragmatics and corpus linguistics. The present paper focuses on both the linguistic theory on which the course is based, as well as on some examples of the loaded language found in the texts analysed by the students in the course.
English for Specific Purposes; semantic prosody; loaded language; purr word; snarl word
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