A drastically condensed version appeared in Journal of Sociolinguistics 3/1, 1998, 128-139.

Language and society:

The real and the ideal in linguistics, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics

ROBERT DE BEAUGRANDE

abstract

The relations between real language and real society have often been marginalised in modern linguistics, which either has idealised language to be a stable and uniform system and disconnected it from society for motives of theoretical rigour and purity, or else has idealised the society of speakers to be stable and uniform as well. The emergence of sociolinguistics was thus delayed and was beset by uncertainties about its theoretical foundations and practical methods. Work with very large corpora of real language data now offers us major opportunities for a fresh assessment of our conceptions of “language” and of its relation to society. Some current and future implications are discussed and illustrated with data from the Bank of English at the University of Birmingham.

The unity of the social milieu and the unity of the immediate social event of communication are conditions absolutely essential [for] a language-speech fact. [But] the organised social milieu [and] the immediate social communicative situation are in themselves extremely complicated and involve hosts of multifaceted and multifarious connections, not all of which are equally important for the understanding of linguistic facts, and not all of which are constituents of language.

— Valentin N. Vološinov (1973 [orig. 1929]:47)

1. “Language,” “social,” and “society” in influential discourses of “modern linguistics”

1.1 Replacing real language with ideal language

For most people, the social aspects of language and its central roles in society should be readily obvious. But “modern linguists” have, from the early stages of their science, nurtured a deep-lying uncertainty about whether and how those aspects and roles should be taken into account. They were doubtless uneasy about the “multifaceted and multifarious connections” like those envisioned by Vološinov, whose critique was suppressed in the Soviet Union and ignored in the West until recently.

If we examine some influential discourses of early linguists, e.g., in frequently cited authoritative books, we might detect a range of positions like these:

(A) The social basis of language can be firmly acknowledged, and an active co-operation can be advocated between linguistics and social science or sociology, and possibly ethnography or anthropology as well. The work of Firth, Halliday, and Pike would fit here, e.g., when Firth (1957 [orig. 1936]:75) “stressed” “the very fine distinctions in speech behaviour, determined by typical recurrent social situations.”

(B) The social basis of language can be candidly acknowledged, but arguments can be advanced to show why linguistics should be programmatically independent of social science or sociology. Saussure’s Cours of lectures delivered in 1909-11 and published from student notes in 1916 would be a pivotal instance we shall return to in moment.

(C) The social basis of language can be curtly acknowledged, but nowhere reflected in linguistic theory, as when Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena opened by declaring that “language” is “the ultimate and deepest foundation of human society” (1969 [orig. 1943]:3), but went on to propose a “linguistic theory” making no reference whatsoever to this “foundation.”

(D) A partial or temporary disconnection between language and society can be favoured on the assumption that a reconnection in a later stage will not encounter serious problems. This position has been quite pervasive but has usually remained implicit, so that its problematic status has not been adequately explored.

(E) The disconnection of language from society and social science can be expressly asserted and defended as matter of scientific principle. Such has been a theme of Chomsky’s middle and late work, e.g., when he stated that “very theoretical few proposals have been made” for “theories concerning the study of language in society” (1977:54).

(F) The social basis of language can be quietly left unacknowledged, e.g., when Chomsky’s early Syntactic Structures (1957) simply never mentioned “society” or a single “social” factor.

This range of positions on language and society does not appear to constitute a coherent historical sequence, partly because linguistics has manifested little sustained sense of its own history and historicity, i.e., its place within the evolution of society and the latter’s institutions (Beaugrande 1997b); and partly because “modern science” has often been idealised to be a disinterested search for general truths in studious detachment from the fluctuating concerns and pressures of day-to-day social life.

Still, we might discern some general trends. On the whole, early modern linguistics favoured guarded or non-committal acknowledgements of the social basis of language. Society was episodically invoked as the basis or source of the regularity, uniformity, and self-sufficiency the linguists felt a “language” must have in order to constitute a valid object of scientific inquiry. More recently, the discipline has become polarised between programmatic claims that, in principle, language either should or else should not be disconnected from society for purposes of investigation. The relation between language and society has indeed come to constitute a central dividing line for an intricate network of decisions about theory and practice within a science of language, even (or especially) when linguistics declined to address it explicitly.

A divisive scenario for modern linguistics was already prepared by Saussure’s (1966 [orig. 1916]:232) resounding credo that “the true and unique object of linguistics is language studied in and for itself” — “langue” situated in a pair of rigid dichotomies against “parole” (“speaking”) and “langage” (“speech”). Such a move doubtless seemed highly strategic when linguistics was anxious to establish and justify itself as a discipline, whence the staunch support from whole schools and generations of linguists. But if the term “language” indeed refers to “language by itself,” then it simply does not refer to “language” as humans actually encounter it, which is always language in society, even when society is represented by a group of professional linguists — an issue we shall return later on. The participial modifier “studied” in the Saussurian credo glossed over any reservations about whether language can be and should be “studied in and for itself.”

Saussure also abetted the ambiguity between a real “language” like English versus “language” in the abstract: a ideal construction underlying all real languages (cf. 4.1). Speculating that “all idioms embody certain fixed principles that the linguist meets again and again in passing from one to another,” he counselled us to “determine what is universal in them,” even though he also vowed that “each idiom is a closed system” (1966:99, 23). In precisely this context, he dejectedly remarked that “the ideal, theoretical form of a science is not always the one imposed upon it by the exigencies of practice; in linguistics, these exigencies” “account for the confusion that now predominates in linguistic research” (1966:99).

A thorough examination of some influential discourses of theoretical linguistics (in Beaugrande 1991) “theoretical linguistics,” taken here to be the accredited “scientific” discipline that deliberates on the nature and properties of language. has led me to conclude that search for “the ideal, theoretical form of a science” has fomented the paradoxical enterprise of seeking scientific accreditation by replacing real language with ideal language (Beaugrande 1997c). Attempting to circumvent or bypass the “exigencies of practice” has encouraged projects that unwittingly just trade one mode of “confusion” for another. The resolve to describe “language by itself” as a uniform and static system manoeuvred Saussurian linguistics into pursuing the peculiar question of “what would language look like when the members of a society were not using it?,” without properly considering whether such a question might have no rational answer. As a close corollary, linguists have been rendered intensely self-conscious about which issues, factors, and so on, are either properly “linguistic” or else “external” and “extra-linguistic,” where further confusion has arisen from the portentous ambiguity of “linguistic” (and its direct translations) meaning “pertaining to language” versus “acknowledged by linguistics.”

The irony was perhaps too rich for Saussurian linguists and their doctrinaire successors to digest: the more pressure they exerted upon “language” to isolate its “true and unique self,” the vaguer both the term and the concept became. Just because “language by itself” cannot be encountered, neither can we determine exactly where its borders should be drawn and what should go inside or outside. A predictable recourse has been the unadventurous principle: “when in doubt, put it outside.”

For similar reasons, we may have difficulty determining when the very term “language” may have ceased to refer to what it would mean for most members of the society, including most scientists outside linguistics. The term may rather refer to a self-validating ideal system which linguistics feels authorised to construct. Since idealisations are by definition “abstracted away” from real data, the role of real data in constructing or validating a “theory of language” has been a continuing source of confusion. Debates in theoretical linguistics have often seemed to revolve around the invidious contention that “my idealisation is better than yours!”

A science “investigating” an ideal system it has to construct on its own is likely to be defensive, as we can surmise from some rhetorical moves by well-known linguists. They have reassured us that “idealisation is inevitable” (Lyons 1977:586) or even that “idealisation” “is the sole means of proceeding rationally” (Chomsky 1977:54) (cf. 3.1). Here, “rationality” too has acquired a peculiar meaning. Whilst defending “idealisation,” Lyons vowed “it is pointless to argue that there is no such thing as a homogeneous language-system underlying the language-behaviour of the whole language-community — this is true but irrelevant” (1977:586ff). With comparable equanimity, Chomsky, who has famously declared that “linguistic theory is primarily concerned with an ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly” (1965:4), cheerfully granted that the “speaker of an idealised system does not exist in the real world” (1977:192). What can be so “rational” about a science declaring that “there is no such thing” as its own object of investigation, and that its “primary concern” is a human being who “does not exist in the real world”? Instead of its usual meaning, “rational” would seem to mean “based on rationalism,” the “philosophic doctrine that reason alone is a source of knowledge and is independent of experience” (Random House Webster’s p. 1119), as famously argued by Descartes.

Other defensive moves have worked in the reverse direction by suggesting that studying language in society would be the irrational enterprise. Saussure’s (1966:14, 9, 11) own optimistic declaration that “language is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts” was accompanied by his grim reservation that we won‘t find it by examining those “facts”: “speech cannot be studied,” nor indeed can it be “put in any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity.” Saussure’s proceedings evidently prevented him from seeing “the unity of the social milieu and the unity of the immediate social event” invoked by Vološinov in my opening quote. The tenor was the same when Chomsky (1965:4, 20) declared that “observed use of language” “surely cannot constitute the subject-matter of linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline”; and that “sharpening the data by objective test is a matter of small importance for the problems at hand.”

Again, we see the quest for the “ideal, theoretical form of a science” attempting to circumvent or bypass the “exigencies of practice.” For Chomsky (1957:52), “it is unreasonable [i.e.. not “rational” in his special Cartesian meaning] to demand of linguistic theory that it provide” “methods of analysis that an investigator might actually use, if he had the time, to construct a grammar of a language from the raw data”; “it is very questionable that this goal is attainable in any interesting way.” His objection is circular: the “demand” is “unreasonable” if the “investigator” is really an idealiser who has no intention of expending the “time to construct a grammar” from “data,” and who vows to “never consider the question of how one might have arrived at the grammar,” because “questions of this sort are not relevant to the programme of research we have outlined above; one may arrive at a grammar by intuition, guess-work, all sorts of partial methodological hints, reliance on past experience, etc.” (1957:56).

Circular too was the denial that “useful procedures of analysis” could be “formulated rigorously, exhaustively, and simply enough to qualify as practical and mechanical” (1957:56): such “procedures” are obviously not “practical” when the “analysis” is actually a process of converting real data into ideal data. (cf. section 2.2). And such is precisely the function of the “analysis” and “description” by means of “derivation,” “transformation,” “formalisation,” and so on: these operations propose to “explain” or “account for” data by getting rid of them in favour of data whose “structures” and “features” the linguist is authorised to invent. The operations are made to seem innocuous by avoiding real data from social discourse and using isolated invented sentences, where a good share of the idealising has been anticipated by the inventors.

And circular yet again were the denials that “elaborate and complex analytic procedures” could “provide answers for many important questions about the nature of linguistic structure”; and that “reliable operational criteria for the deeper and more important notions of linguistic theory” “will ever be forthcoming,” just because “knowledge of the language, like most facts of interest and importance, is neither presented for direct observation nor extractable from data” (Chomsky 1957:53; 1965:18f). These “important questions” and “deeper notions” had been deliberately formulated to be wholly inaccessible to “analytic procedures,” “direct observation,” and “extraction from data.” Our real question here should be what makes these “notions” so “deep” and “important” at all.

A “linguistic theory” that doesn’t provide “methods of analysis” can expediently assume that “language” is given in advance (cf. section 3.1). After Chomsky decided to “consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences” his thematic resolve was to “assume that the set of sentences is somehow given in advance” (1957:13 85, 103, 18, 54). Circular yet again: the set is not “given” at all, even if we assume, against the grain of other formulations (e.g. Chomsky 1957: 23f; 1965: 16, 142) that the set is not “infinite” but “finite.” What is given for any real language is a very large set, finite but open, of discourse data (cf. section 4).

Saussure’s above-quoted notion of fixed universal principles” that “all idioms embody” now returns as the call for “a theory of linguistic structure in which the descriptive devices utilised in particular grammars are presented and studied abstractly, with no specific reference to particular languages”; “each grammar is related to the corpus of sentences in the language its describes in a way fixed in advance for all grammars by a given linguistic theory” (1957:5, 14). For a “theory” of this kind, we would indeed be “unreasonable to demand methods of analysis that an investigator might actually use,” let alone “objective tests for sharpening the data.” By “not referring to particular languages” and by “fixing all grammars in advance,” the “theory” has become wholly independent of data; and the replacement of real language with ideal language is ordained.

Anyone who has not yet registered that the term “language” being used here does not refer to “language” as the term is normally used should take note when a formalist announces in his inaugural lecture for a university chair that “linguistics is not about language, or languages, it is about grammar” (Smith 1983:4). Perhaps he intended a magisterial admonition for hold-outs who, like myself, still believe, nay insist, that linguistics is about language. But he could have saved himself the trouble, since the linguistics he favoured has worked so hard to establish that “language” and “grammar” both “refer to” the same thing. He could have far more aptly said: “our kind of linguistics is not about what most people mean by ‘language’ or ‘languages’; it is about what we mean by ‘language,’ namely, ‘grammar.’

1.2 Replacing real society with ideal society

Saussure did not deny the social basis of language, but he did invoke it in non-committal ways that implicitly marginalised it. His empty assertion that “the concrete object of linguistic science is the social product deposited in the brain of each individual” (1966:23) presented a wholly inaccessible “object” as a “social product” whilst skipping over the social questions about how it might have gotten “deposited in the brain” and whether and why (to keep his Swiss banking metaphor) some specific social groups might get smaller or larger “deposits.”

His most significant invocation of the “social” ironically accompanied his most famous idealisation: “in separating language [langue] from speaking [parole] we are at the same time separating what is social from what is individual” (cf. 3.2); “language” “is the social side of speech” and “exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community” (1966:14), where we might well ask what social obligations the “contract” would stipulate. The “social” was also enlisted for the idealised stability of “language” in Saussure’s “synchronic” viewpoint, viz.: “of all social institutions, language is the least amenable to initiative; it blends with the life of society, and the latter, inert by nature, is a prime conservative force”; and because “language” is “a product of both the social force and time, no one can change anything in it” (1966:74, 76). This unexplained “social force” allowed Saussure to waffle by acknowledging that “evolution is inevitable” whilst maintaining that “no individual, even if he willed it, could modify” the language “in any way,” and that “the community itself cannot control so much as a single word” (1966:76, 71). The central control got consigned instead to “arbitrariness,” which further blotted out all the social and individual motivations Saussure’s conception of “language” had declared “external.”

A similar waffling was performed shortly after by Sapir (1921:206, 221): “language” “is probably the most self-contained, the most massively resistant of all social phenomena”; yet “language” “is the most fluid of mediums.” He too attributed the complex but tidy order of language to some unexplained social force, or, in his favourite term, “drift,” viz: “back of the face of the history are powerful drifts that move language, like other social products, to balanced patterns” (1921:122). Later on, we find Chomsky (1965:59) asserting that “the structure of particular languages may very well be largely determined by factors over which individual has no conscious control and concerning which society may have little choice or freedom”; but his own account invoked “principles of neurological organisation” plus the human “capacity to acquire knowledge,” these two factors uniting in his well-known “language acquisition device.” As I have documented elsewhere in detail, such invocations of neurology and biology signal the intent to convert linguistics from a social science into a natural science without working out the details (Beaugrande 1997d).

But for the present discussion, we should emphasise that the same move effectively bypassed social factors by moving onto a plane where total uniformity — and along with it, the validation for the theory — gets imposed by biological necessity, recalling Saussure’s already cited “social product deposited in the brain.” Thus, Chomsky (1991:66) appealed to “a highly determinate, very definite structure of concepts and of meaning that is intrinsic to our nature; and as we acquire language or other cognitive systems these things just kind of grow in our minds, the same way we grow arms and legs.” As for Saussure’s “deposits,” no explanation was given of why this process might not work out well for specific social groups; the implication is rather that it must work the same for everybody. And “rationalism” in the philosophic sense of “knowledge being independent of experience” becomes both the mode of explanation and the phenomenon to be explained. We then need not surprised by the otherwise wildly irrational denial that “information regarding situational context” “plays any role in how language is acquired, once the mechanism is put to work and the task of language learning [sic; should be: acquisition] is undertaken by the child” (Chomsky 1965:33).

Still less should we be surprised that influential linguists have suggested a reciprocity whereby language derives its uniformity from society whilst helping to keep society uniform. For Bloomfield (1933:42), “the close adjustment among individuals which we call society” “is based on language.” For Sapir (1921:148), “something like an ideal linguistic entity dominates the speech habits of members of each group,” so that “the sense of unlimited freedom which each individual feels in the use of his language is held in leash by a tacitly directing norm,” and “the individual’s variations” “are silently ‘corrected’ or cancelled by the consensus of usage.” Chomsky (1965:3) could then portray “the position of the founders of modern general linguistics” to have been, as we noted, that “linguistic theory is primarily concerned with an ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly.” Here, not just the term “language” but also the terms “speaker” or “community” carry special meanings and refer to abstract idealisations. Just as we saw “language” getting separated from real data, the community gets separated from real speakers.

With reality safely out of the way, the validation of the “theory” can be built right into the terminology. Then, a “theory of language” is automatically valid because “language” is defined to be precisely identical with the “theory” and vice versa. The same holds for both “theory of grammar” and “grammar of language” . What any of the three terms actually refers to in a human society has remained strategically vague, since after all “there is no such thing” as “language” in this sense (Lyons); whatever it is, all three terms refer to it.

Such is exactly the import of “using the term ‘grammar’ with a systematic ambiguity to refer, first, to the native speaker’s internally represented ‘theory of his language’ and, second, to the linguist’s account of this”; and of “using the term ‘theory’ — in this case ‘theory of language’ rather than ‘theory of a particular language’ — with a systematic ambiguity to refer both to the child’s innate predisposition to learn a language of a certain type and to the linguist’s account of this” (Chomsky 1965:25). These two “ambiguities,” which sustain a third one (already noted for Saussure’s discourse) between “language” and “a particular language,” oblige anyone using the “terms” to take it as given that “the native speaker” does hold an “internally represented theory of his language,” that the “child” does have an “innate predisposition,” and, best of all, that “the linguist” does have the valid “account.” The terms are defined in ways calculated to forestall inopportune questions.

But where does the “linguist” get the “account,” once real language and real speakers have been replaced with idealisations, and once we have disowned “methods of analysis that an investigator might actually use” (1.1)? The popular but problematic answer: by “constructing a description, and, where possible, an explanation, for the enormous mass of unquestionable data concerning the linguistic intuition of the native speaker, often himself” (Chomsky 1965:20, my emphasis). The chief (though rarely noticed) problem stems from the discourse of those same linguists emphatically denying that the “speaker of a language,” who has “mastered and internalised a generative grammar, is aware of the rules of the grammar or even” “can become aware of them” (Chomsky 1965:8). Such denials, though they were presumably intended to bolster the defences against real speakers and real data, should justly apply to linguists whenever they assume the role of native speakers. Otherwise, they would be purporting to hold super-human powers for “becoming aware” of the “perfect knowledge” constituting the “grammar” of the “ideal speaker-hearer.” Such super-powers would ostensibly be conferred by an academic degree in “theoretical linguistics”; and we would need to investigate just how degree programmes could achieve so momentous a result.

The mutual and parallel idealising of language and society may have been strategies for evading the problems inherent in linguists being members of both society at large and of the specialised society of academic linguistics. They are socially positioned and implicated in respect to language but have been encouraged since Saussure’s time by the decorum of “science” to proceed as if they were positioned outside of language. Manoeuvring for such a positioning would tend to alienate the linguists from the society and, through sheer theoretical bootstrapping, to position language outside of itself by making the term “language” mean something other than the socio-semiotic system (to use Halliday’s term) they themselves use in their ordinary lives and in their professional work. At advanced stages, this process proliferates theories whose respective merits or validity (“adequacy,” “power,” etc.) can never be conclusively determined because the competing theorists mean incompatible things by the term “language” but do not deal with the matter.

This impasse has fomented a procession of moves whereby the discourse of theoretical linguists has acknowledged that real “language” differs from their own ideal image, yet has cheerfully proceeded as if the differences were irrelevant for scientific inquiry. Linguists have long recognised that a language consists of multiple dialects yet treated it as a single uniform “standard”; they have noted the importance of language change whilst describing the language as a static (or “synchronic”) system; and they have declared the spoken language of the whole society (or community) to be the primary or even the sole concern whilst drawing both the theoretical and the methodological orientation from written language. Since the “ideal speaker-hearer” is simulated by the theoretical linguist, the “language” and “grammar” can quietly incorporate the features of the dialect of white, male, middle-class academics (cf. Cameron 1992).

The truly rational solution — if we use “rational” in its ordinary sense — is neither to ordain that “idealisation is inevitable” (Lyons) and briskly go on speculating about an ideal speaker who admittedly “doesn’t exist in the real world” (Chomsky); nor to flatly “reject idealisation,” as Chomsky (1977: 58f) has accused “sociology” and “sociolinguistics” of trying to do. Instead, we can rationally inquire how the varying conceptions of “language” in respective social groups might entail definable classes of idealisations, such as Sapir’s above-cited “ideal linguistic entity dominating the speech habits of members of each group,” and what social consequences result (4.1; 4.2). Idealisation would finally come under investigation as a constellation of socially real processes adapting to the goals of groups of real speakers: story-tellers, film and television actors, advertisers, politicians, bureaucrats, administrators, teachers and learners of language (or their parents), compilers of dictionaries or grammar-books, and, yes, linguists.

2. The order of language

2.1 Moving through the “levels”

The notion that linguistics can disconnect language from society for purposes of investigation should also be understood within the evolution of the discipline through the “levels” into which language was subdivided during early research. If we arranged the progression of levels according to the respective size and constituency of their theoretical units (as proposed for instance by Bloomfield 1933), we might have “phonemes - morphemes - lexemes - syntagmemes” corresponding to the respective practical units of sounds - word parts/words - words - phrases/clauses. To be sure, this progression is not clear-cut, e.g., about whether words match morphemes or lexemes; nor was it distinctly reflected in the evolution actually documented in the major discourses of the discipline. But it does shed light upon the enduring aspirations of linguistics to reapply successful methods of analysis and description from one level to another.

In early research, “phonology” plus “phonetics” confirmed the aspirations of modern linguistics to discover an ideal theoretical and uniform system of stable and deterministic underlying units plus a set of well-defined practical methods for the analysis of language sounds in terms of “phonemes,” each described by its “features.” Linguists working in phonology and phonetics candidly acknowledged that, in practice, the members of a society actually pronounce any one sound within a range of variations; indeed that, in fine detail, each production is a unique event. But (much as with Sapir’s “silent corrections”) these variations could be safely discounted as irrelevant to the stable and deterministic status of the underlying “phoneme.” Real speakers proceed as if all its realisations were equivalent, so linguists are socially justified in doing the same.

The situation was already less reassuring in “morphology,” which adopted an outlook parallel to phonology by postulating a theoretical system of stable and deterministic form-units (the “morphemes”) persisting much like the system of sound-units (the “phonemes”). But for most languages that have developed a morphology, the system was plainly larger and less uniform. And the members of a society may differ widely in their conscious or unconscious awareness of such units, notably in a language like English, whose morphological repertory is overlaid by exuberant importations from Greek, Latin, and French. Throughout the Early Modern period, these importations were the mainstay for coinages in specialised or technical vocabulary, and have conferred social privileges upon those who could recognise their components, ranging from managing the pedantic menagerie of English orthography over to participating in socially important discourse on “expert” issues.

Still, morphology shared with phonology the decisive advantage of postulating form-units that correspond to recordable and discoverable segments of real language data. Also, morphology achieved its early key successes through extensive fieldwork with real speakers, where real language was observed in the social contexts of situation, whether or not the relevant factors would count as “linguistic” either as “pertaining to language” or as “acknowledged by linguistics” (section 1.1). Unless fieldwork linguists see clear counter-evidence, they can safely assume that the members of society are using the language in ways which represent the underlying morphological system.

Had the discipline of linguistics expressly been moving from smaller toward larger units and constituents, the study of word-parts as “morphemes” on the “level” of morphology would have logically been followed by the study of whole words as “lexemes” on the “level” of “lexicology.” But that “level” was horrendously incompatible with the established conception of “language” in being far from stable nor uniform and in resisting a general description in terms of the tidy “units” and “features” that function so nicely in phonology. The lexicon of any real language represents the concepts and classifications for which diverse groups in a society provide motivations (4.1), such as the advances in technology that, as noted, have also powerfully affected the morphology of English. A direct consequence, for which modern linguistics was blankly unprepared, is that, apart from a few tidy “lexical fields,” neither the size nor the internal organisation of the system of lexemes could be consensually determined by establish theoretical methods. Units fade out or fade in, and their meanings steadily evolve during the social practices in and accompanied by language (cf. section 4). Moreover, the members of a society indisputably differ among themselves in the knowledge of lexemes much more sharply than in their knowledge of phonemes and morphemes; indeed, the lexical store of any one speaker might well be unique. For all these reasons, the relative neglect of lexicon and lexicology in modern linguistics could be grasped as a further reflex of the reluctance to seriously acknowledge the rich diversity and detail that a society maintains within the real language it speaks.

Linguistics preferred to seek new successes on the “level” of “syntax,” whose arrangements of units in sequences appeared vastly more amenable to rigorous analysis and description than did the lexicon. But appearances were deceiving. When you are not just identifying and labelling sound-units or form-units but trying to describe or explain the mutual positions within whole arrays of units, you need to inquire why the units might have been chosen and arranged in particular ways. Most formalist “theories of syntax” in modern linguistics have assumed on principle that the language system or its “grammar” subsumes a system of “rules” determining which units are positioned where in which sequences. And, as we saw in section 1.2, some “theories” have directly equated “language” with such a rule-system or “grammar” in a further step toward unrelenting idealisation. Predictably, most theories also assumed on principle that this rule-system could be cleanly differentiated from the motivations of specific speakers or social groups when they put words in one order rather than another, witness the opening chapter title of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures: “the independence of grammar.”

Ironically, none other than Saussure had long before aired a canny reservation against any such project during his ruminations aimed at excluding syntax from his concept of “language” (“langue”). He wrote: “in the syntagm there is no clear-cut boundary between the language fact, which is a sign of collective usage, and the fact that belongs to speaking and depends on individual freedom; in a great number of instances it is hard to classify a combination of units because both forces have combined in producing it, and they have combined in indeterminate proportions” (1966:125). In light of the present discussion, Saussure’s reservation implied that syntax could definitely not sustain the disconnection from society, and that the border between socially determined “collective usage” versus “individual freedom” would remain “indeterminate” in principle (cf. section 4).

Paying no heed to these implications, “syntax” embarked upon a radical replacement of real language with ideal language. As we have seen in 1.2, real society was correspondingly replaced with an ideal society who “knows the language perfectly”; and real speakers were declared unable to “become aware of the rules of the grammar.” The self-confident proponents of such a “theory of syntax” studiously failed to notice how they were putting themselves in an untenable social position, both in theory and in practice, as adepts holding super-human powers. They could exploit a long tradition of disregarding the implication of linguists being speakers of one or more language whilst they scaled new heights in discounting the both the “observed use of language” and “methods of analysis” for dealing with it.

The “indeterminate” border between socially determined “collective usage” versus “individual freedom,” which had led Saussure to suspect that syntax would spread across both “language” and “speaking,” now vanished, because the “homogeneous community” and the “ideal speaker-hearer” are fully interchangeable and yet fully intangible. Holding “perfect knowledge of the language,” this “speaker” in theory knows everything about the language via “competence” and in practice says nothing in the language after having been “idealised” out of “performance” (cf. Chomsky 1965:4); perhaps “he” stands transfixed in “tacit introspection” upon that wondrous “infinity of sentences” he would be “competent” to say. “He” is thereby the “ideal” representative for the language when the members of a society are not using it: just what Saussurian linguistics set out to describe in the first place.

The most significant long-term effect of placing ideal language and ideal society at the centre of “syntax” has been the fragmentation of linguistic science through a dramatic proliferation of competing theories and models. The contention that “my idealisation is better than yours!” has become acutely polemic as the field underwent a severe breakdown in consensus:

there seem to be a great many approaches “on the market” whose interrelationships remain as poorly understood as ever. In fact, it is not easy to even determine which of the thirty-odd major syntactic frameworks that have appeared over the last forty years continue “alive.” [Some might] not have been “theories” at all, but just “formalisms” built in such a minimalistic way from the very beginning that practically no progress was possible in principle (Escribano 1993:229f)

Unintentionally, the “minimalist framework” still on the market (e.g. Abraham et al. [eds.] 1996) symbolises how “syntax” as understood in this conception of linguistic theory by no means constitutes a complete stable and deterministic system of “rules,” but merely a modest range of frozen islands which the grammar of a particular language happens to have accumulated (Beaugrande 1997a) — in many languages far fewer than in English, which, fittingly enough, has been most often subjected to formalist analysis.

A radical conclusion might be that the “level” or “component” of “syntax,” in the sense predominating over the last forty years simply does not exist: it is a theoretical construct engendered by the peremptory resolve to disconnect “language by itself” from language in society. The disconnection is retraced and repeated all across the conceptions and terminologies, such as “competence” versus “performance,” “deep structure” versus “surface structure,” and “universal” versus “language-specific,” each pair offering the ideal in place of the real and implying the super-human powers of linguists over the rest of society.

Indeed, if “much of the actual speech observed consists of fragments and deviant expressions of a variety of sorts” (Chomsky 1965:201), then all the members of society, including linguists when they’re not on the job. are “deviant” speakers. In yet another rich and unintentional irony, we behold in a new guise the old disparagements cast upon everyday language by the self-appointed guardians and grammarians whose views had been indignantly rejected by early modern linguistics, notably by Bloomfield and Firth. Whereas the deviance had formerly been attributed to speakers being “ignorant,” “uneducated,” or “illiterate,” it would now be attributed to the failure of speakers, presumably distracted by social factors, to conform to the deterministic “grammaticalness” which the syntacticians confidently situated at the very base of “competence.”

2.2 Order and disorder

In their determination to establish the “perfect” order of “language by itself,” some influential linguists have evidently viewed the real language observable in society as a massive disorder. This view implied the remarkable corollary, which I have not yet found explicitly stated, that when the members of society use their language, it undergoes a special “catastrophe” in the technical sense of “catastrophe theory” (cf. Thom 1989), namely an abrupt transition from stable and integrative order to unstable and disintegrative disorder. I cannot conceive how such a system could operate at all, let alone with the impressive efficiency and precision we can observe in social interaction and communication. Speakers and hearers would be obliged to desperately convert language data back and forth between two totally disparate modes of order corresponding to ideal language and real language, respectively. And the failure of highly-trained formal linguists to agree upon how such conversions could be achieved, let alone to align ideal language with real language in any consensual way, already signals how implausible such a mode of operation would for be ordinary speakers.

A far more plausible conclusion would be that theoretical linguistics since Saussure has routinely attributed to “language” an inappropriate mode of order: the actual order of language elaborately supports the order of discourse without fully determining it. The transition from language into discourse specifies and applies numerous constraints that become decidable only on the plane of the actual discourse and not on the plane of the virtual system, as we shall see in section 4. Conversely, attempts to navigate a transition from discourse over to the abstract language system creates a margin of undecidability; and precisely that margin forecloses the prospects for any deterministic formal syntax or rule-system that could “generate all the sentences of a language.” So the breakdown of consensus in linguistics and especially in syntax is a foreseeable outcome of the unproductive assumption that “language by itself” comprises its own complete set of “purely linguistic” constraints or “rules,” concerning which discourse — “actual speech” with its “heterogeneous mass” (Saussure) and its “fragments and deviant expressions” (Chomsky) — is uninformative or downright misleading. The productive assumption would rather be that discourse is the domain wherein the constraints of the language are actualised, but also specified, modified, evolved, and so forth, in an ongoing dialectic with social interaction (4.1). If you discount that interaction and misrepresent the dialectic as a dichotomy, the language drifts out of control, and you may feel animated to start inventing an arbitrary and gratuitous apparatus of “rules” and “features” to re-impose control.

Now if, as I have suggested in section 1.1, the “analysis” and “description” by means of “derivation,” “transformation,” “formalisation,” and so on is in practice a process of converting real data into ideal data, then we would have an artificial transition from order into disorder in exactly the opposite direction as the one implied by Saussurian and Chomskyan linguistics. Such would be the outcome of the “idealisation” that Lyons (1976:588) has called “decontextualisation,” whereby “system-sentences” “are derived from utterances by elimination of all the context-dependent features.” Strictly speaking again, the results would not be “system-sentences” but uniformly meaningless strings of sounds or characters — the ultimate disorder of total entropy. In practice, the operation is never performed, because contexts are the ultimate basis for any linguist identifying the units and patterns of language. At most, linguists can pretend that the units and patterns are, like Chomsky’s monumental “set of sentences,” “somehow given in advance” (1.1). The “theoretical linguist” who consents to situate ideal language in the place of real language acquires, as a package deal, all its “deep” and “surface” entities suspended in a timeless context-free space. But when the same linguist sets about “eliminating context-dependent features from utterances,” the results are conspicuously not reliable or convergent, so we’re lucky they won’t be put to any use by real speakers in society (cf. 3.1).

3. Sociolinguistics between real language and ideal language

In the foregoing sections, I have essayed to sketch the complex array of issues and problems in the evolution of modern linguistics regarding the relations between language and society and between ideal language and real language. I shall use that background for examining some issues and problems in the field of sociolinguistics.

First of all, the background might help explain why the consolidation of a discipline of “sociolinguistics” was postponed for decades or confined to programmatic statements such as Currie’s (1952), who was apparently the first to use the term, as far as I know. Apparently, the decisive motive for its eventual emergence in the 1960s was not a shared perception among theoretical linguists that idealising language and marginalising social factors had seriously misrepresented human language; on the contrary, the 1960s witnessed a fresh burst of radical idealisations, as I have noted. Instead, the motive was to attenuate the worsening socio-economic problems and inequalities in the 1960s through institutional initiatives directed toward divergent language varieties within the society. When the dominant “Western economies” moved away from unskilled labour and factory production toward communication and information management, the actually prevailing variations among real languages or varieties were judged to be serious obstacles to “economic growth”, which seemed to call for a wider integration of the “working classes” and “minorities” by “improving” their language-dependent skills. Governmental institutions in the U.S, the U.K., and Western Germany among others, decided to sponsor extensive research in the field that came to be called “sociolinguistics.”

The new discipline might have adopted several scenarios:

(a) The theories and methods of linguistics could be substantially retained whilst modifying some of the available terms and concepts to refer to “social” aspects or factors, e.g., “sociolect” and “idiolect” as two further constructs of “linguistic competence.”

(b) The theories and method of linguistics could undergo cautiously regulated revisions to admit some socially relevant parameters of “variation” and restrict the uniformity and “homogeneity” assumed so far, e.g., by postulating “variable rules” alongside the usual “categorical rules.”

(c) Linguistics could be split apart into a “non-social” sector continuing as before and a “social” sector taking up a new programme for “sociolinguistics.”

(d) Linguistics could restore its focus upon fieldwork, which had continued along the margins of the mainstream, e.g., in the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

(e) Linguistics could stand aside and the research could be allotted to sociology proper.

(f) Linguistics and sociology as established so far would be combined.

(g) A novel discipline would be institutionalised, related to sociology and linguistics but developing new theories and methods.

To varying degrees, all of these scenarios have been favoured, at times in combination. But the willingness to deliberate and negotiate has been modest at best.

Linguistics might well have seemed a perplexing enterprise for social science and sociology, who would be nonplussed by announcements like “language exists perfectly within a collectivity” (Saussure 1966:14). Saussure himself had expressly posed the question, “must linguistics then be combined with sociology?” but had proceeded to suspend it by situating the concerns of sociology within an “external linguistics” tailored to subsume “everything” whose “exclusion” was “presupposed” by his “definition of language” (1966:6, 20).

Some later comments sound more defensive. Sapir blamed the “social sciences” for creating “the most powerful deterrent of all to clear thinking” by “instilling an evolutionary prejudice” that certain “familiar languages represent the highest development,” which modern linguistics sternly repudiated along with all “popular statements as to the poverty of expression to which primitive languages are doomed” (1921:123, 22). Chomsky was, as usual, bluntly dismissive: “most things in the social sciences” have “no intellectual depth” (1991:88).

On the other side, Firth (1957 [orig. 1935]:27) announced that “sociological linguistics is the great field for future research.” His own “schematic construct called ‘context of situation’” was intended to “make sure of the sociological component” (1957 [orig. 1950]:182). “We must take our facts from speech sequences verbally complete in themselves and operating in contexts of situation which are typical, recurrent, and repeatedly observable”; and these “contexts” should be “placed in sociological and linguistic categories within the wider context of culture” (1957 [orig. 1935]:35). Yet when Firth was conjecturing that it would be “much easier for a student of linguistics to acquire sufficient” “sociology” than for a “sociologist to acquire the necessary linguistic technique,” he recommended “building on the foundations of linguistics” more than “aiming at linguistic sociology” (1957 [orig. 1935]:28).

At all events, the term “sociolinguistics” has remained a signpost for the resolve that the field will be more “linguistics” than “sociology,” even though the former had long been indecisive about the relation between language and society. A troubling issue for sociolinguistics would be whether to maintain “theoretical linguistics” along with its conceptions of ideal language; or else to inaugurate a more “social linguistics” derived from real language.

3.1 Maintaining theoretical linguistics

To no one’s amazement, Chomsky has been a vociferous advocate of maintaining “theoretical linguistics” in the version he believes he can dominate. His distaste for “social science” he cannot dominate has hardened into a grim conspiracy theory about “social and political analysis being produced to defend special interests rather than to account for the actual events,” and to create the “false impression” that “only intellectuals equipped with special training are capable of such analytic work” by “pretending to be engaged in an esoteric enterprise, inaccessible to simple people” (Chomsky 1977:4f). His majestic unawareness of having done precisely this in linguistics is a bit breath-taking; but he evidently feels compelled to use every means for defending his own enterprise against “theories concerning the study of language in society” (1977:54). He has go so far as to allege that “the intellectually interesting, challenging, and exciting topics, in general, are close to disjoint from the humanly significant topics” (1991:88), with the marvellous corollary that the linguistics he favours would be all the more “interesting” for being “humanly insignificant.” And he made this corollary explicit too when he denounced the “real fallacy” in saying:

“I’m a linguist; therefore, in my time as a linguist I have to be socially useful.” That doesn’t make sense at all. […] your professional training as a linguist […] just doesn’t help you to be useful to other people. […] there is a lot of careerism in this. (Chomsky 1991:88).

Can this defiant repudiation of “social usefulness” have been provoked by swelling anxieties about the fate of the whole formalist programme in “theoretical linguistics,” which has been sustained all along by the frankest “careerism”?

When asked what “sociolinguistics” might do, Chomsky (1977:57) envisioned it “seeking to apply” “sociology to the study of language.” But his vision might astound many sociologists, since he again took ideal language to be given in advance (1.1). “The sole means of proceeding rationally” would be:

You study ideal systems, then afterwards you can ask yourself in what manner these ideal systems are represented and interact in real individuals. Perhaps sociolinguistics might come up with some sort of principle. (1977:54)

The term “study” can only mean here “invent and speculate about.” We might join him in being “sceptical” whether such a “study” could “draw much from or contribute much to sociology” or could “influence linguistic studies in some significant way” (Chomsky 1977:57, 192). Yet surely the “rational procedure” would be if anything just the reverse: to “study real systems” and “then afterwards” ask what mode of idealisation might lead to a suitable representation in terms of what those systems have in common (cf. section 4.1).

Chomsky’s strange vision accentuates still another rich irony: the “agreement,” diagnosed by a comprehensive survey of sociolinguistics like Dittmar’s (1976:132-3), that the “grammar model first proposed by Chomsky (1957, 1965) and later extended must be the starting point of all theoretical discussion” (as in Durbin and Micklin 1968; Kanngiesser 1972; Loflin 1970). A proximate step would be, as Chomsky’s own adumbrations intimated, to retain the heavily idealised deterministic, stable, and abstract notion of “language” whilst softening the assumption that language and society mutually render each other fully uniform.

Here, sociolinguistics might draw upon the conception of “dialects,” which has been prominent in historical philology and in fieldwork linguistics. Some early statements of linguists had episodically cited dialects among their reservations about how to delimit any language: “the dividing lines between languages, like those between dialects, are hidden in transitions,” and “it is impossible, even in our hypothetical examples, to set up boundaries between the dialects” (Saussure 1966:204); or “there is no absolute distinction to be made between dialect boundaries and language boundaries” (Bloomfield 1933:445). But these admission were quickly left aside; Saussure couldn’t see that using “hypothetical examples” was the greatest obstacle against “setting up boundaries.” And his notion that “given free reign, a language has only dialects” makes you wonder how the language might be “reined” when he himself had decreed, as we saw, that “the community itself cannot control so much as a single word” (1966:195, 71) (1.2).

In another typical waffling, Lyons conceded that “a linguist” “will normally restrict his description to some pre-theoretically distinct dialect,” but still justified the “assumption” of an “overall system” which is “relatively neutral” about “differences of dialect, situation, medium, and chronological period” (1977:588). Just as we saw Saussure darkly vowing that “speech cannot be studied” “for we cannot discover its unity” (1.1), Lyons marginalised “language varieties” by arguing that “it would be absurd to hope to describe, or even to determine, all these differences within what we call, pre-theoretically, English” (1977:587). In light of the foregoing discussion, the irony of calling a real language a “pre-theoretical” entity should be exquisitely savoured along with the spice of Lyons vowing (in the same passage) that “idealisation” will rescue us from “absurdity,” after idealisation has regaled us with absurdities for decades.

Perhaps because the older conception of “dialect” was not deemed sufficiently “theoretical” (i.e., idealised), a contrastive pair conceptions was introduced: the “idiolect” as “individually different speech behaviour, individual competence,” versus the “sociolect” as “speech behaviour specific to social groups, group-specific competence” (Dittmar 1976:133; cf. Decamp 1969). These conceptions might have spelled the end of the “homogeneous language community” and the “ideal speaker-hearer” (cf. Klein 1974), but some sociolinguists had other plans. Through a minimal “extension of generative grammar,” the over-arching “grammar” in the Chomskyan sense was said to “generate all the idiolects of the language and only these,” where each “idiolect” is (what else?) “an infinite set of sentences” and has its own “idiolectal grammar” comprising (what else?) “a specific finite set of rules of an individual speaker-hearer’s linguistic competence” (Decamp 1969:18). Described in these terms, the “individual” is every bit as “ideal” as Chomsky’s own “speaker,” albeit no longer in a “completely homogeneous speech-community,” and still “knows the language perfectly,” even if he may be the only one around who knows it. Chomsky’s (1965:25) much-quoted idea that “as a precondition for language learning,” a child “must possess a linguistic theory that specifies the form of the grammar of a possible human language” would imply that the speaker’s “theory of language” given as an “innate predisposition” (1.2) also specifies the over-arching “grammar” which “generates his own idiolect” as well as the others. He might then be “multi-idiolectal” and prone to “idiolect-switching,” and his knowledge would encompass “multiple infinities” constrained only where the grammar stipulates which “idiolects” cannot be “generated.” The prospect arises of an extended “derviational history” wherein every sentence starts in the over-arching “grammar” and gets “generated” along into the “idiolectal grammar” before our “speaker” can say anything — although, if we use our terms strictly, as I pointed out in 2.1, the ideal speaker never does say anything because he has been “idealised” out of “performance,” quite apart from standing transfixed by at least one “infinity of sentences.”

Yet, as we saw, Chomsky’s “speaker” avowedly “does not exist in the real world” (1.1.) and is fully interchangeable with the “homogeneous community” (2.1). In terms of practice, these two factors would be highly inauspicious for sociolinguistic research on “idiolects,” witness the absurdity salvaging the “homogeneous community” by assigning it only one “speaker-hearer.” If, as Labov (1969:759) has surmised, “constructing complete grammars for idiolects” is a “fruitless task,” then chiefly because the established conception of “grammar” is too idealised to admit of individual specifications, and because many specifications of an idiolect would be not “grammatical” but lexical or “lexicogrammatical” (cf. 4.1). Proposals such as Decamp’s raise the troublesome prospect of complicating the relation between a real language in society and the ideal “language” of Chomskyan linguistics with multiple “grammars” whose “complete construction” remains far out of reach. The already muddled status of “methods of analysis for constructing a grammar,” which Chomsky had excused “linguistic theory” from “providing” (1.1), would become even more unruly.

In terms of theory, however, we might consider how the introduction of “idiolects” could bear on the problematic method, scrutinised above, of allowing the “ideal speaker” to be represented by a theoretical linguist whose “idiolect” might entail some untypical features, e.g., a proclivity to produce sample sentences like John is as sad as the book he read yesterday or is Brazil as independent as the continuum hypothesis? (Chomsky 1965:183). Such an “idiolect” (you might almost say “idiotolect”) is symptomatic for a highly unrepresentative “performance” calculated to provide reverse evidence for “competence” through “deviations from the rules” that would not be found in “the actual use of language” (cf. Chomsky 1965:4)

At all events, sociolinguistics has focused not upon idiolects but upon “sociolects” on the reasonable though still unproven assumption that these are fairly well-defined and not unmanageably numerous or individualised. A prominent and paradigmatic contrast, no doubt encouraged by the mandate to integrate minorities in the U.S., was drawn between “Standard English,” which had hitherto been quietly identified with “English” per se by generative linguists, versus “Black English Vernacular” (Labov, Cohen, Robins, & Lewis 1968) or “Negro Nonstandard English” (Loflin 1969). Once more, the usual conceptions of “grammar” and “competence” were retained, but now implicating a fresh decision between two prospects, each entailing its own problem. The more pessimistic prospect (already raised for “idiolects”) would be that each variety has its own separate and independent “grammar”; then the acquisition of the “standard” by speakers of a “non-standard” would require essentially learning a second language against substantial interference from the first. The more optimistic prospect would be that the varieties of English share their “grammar” in respect to “deep structure” or “competence” and differ only in their “surface structure” or “performance” (cf. Loflin 1969); the problem there would be that “deep” and “surface” or “competence” and “performance” were not conceptualised to underwrite concrete language programmes. In fact, if “universality is claimed” for “deep structures” (Chomsky 1965:118), then they are equally and necessarily accessible to all speakers, and such programmes would be pointless (cf. Beaugrande 1997e).

Some sociolinguists did remark that a language variety is more stable and orderly than would be suggested by the orthodox view of “performance” (quoted above) having many “deviations from the rules.” We might postulate a new level in between “competence” and “performance,” e.g., as “systematic performance” in contrast to “actualised performance,” or as a “contingency grammar” (cf. Houston 1969, 1970). Real language would be circuitously described as “neither a set of rules nor a set of sentences” but as “actual sound realisation which completes well-formed sentences with hesitation pauses, repetitions, ungrammatical sequences, anacolutha etc.” (Houston 1970:11). We witness here a demonstration of Chomsky’s own notion of starting from ideal and moving toward real, again as if the set of “grammatical sentences” were given in advance of all “actualised performance,” whereas the rational ordering which linguists follow in practice — if they still work with “sentences” at all — must be just the reverse: taking real language and idealising it into “grammatical sentences” or into Lyons’ “system-sentences” (2.2).

An alternative option for sociolinguistics, one not too far removed from these notions, would be to retain the uniformity of the language system across a whole society whilst relaxing the determinacy within the system. Instead of multiple “language varieties,” we could then have “variable rules” within one language (e.g. Labov 1969). Predictably, some linguists protested that “variable rules” could foster “drastic and undesirable changes in current theories” (Bickerton 1971:460). A key issue there would again be the illustrious dichotomy between “competence” versus “performance,” about which Labov (1969:759) did indeed feel “not sure whether this is a useful distinction in the long run,” fearing the “use of performance as a waste-basket category, in which all convenient [or inconvenient?] data on variation and change can be deposited.”

In retrospect, we should take special note of how the orthodox notion of “rules” was taken over even into programmes that otherwise departed quite dramatically from conventional linguistic theory, such as Hymes’ (1967) and Klein’s (1974). Back in sections 1.1 and 2.2, I aired the problem that rules, notably the “transformations” and “rewriting rules” we still see in these programmatic studies, may simply get rid of the data they are claimed to explain or account for. In particular, complex or variable data might get suspended by converting them into simple and uniform data even where variation was just what sociolinguistics set out to describe. Even odder would be the construction of “rules” to convert grammatical sentences into “ungrammatical” ones, as in Houston’s “contingency grammar,” since whatever the “rules” of “grammar” might do, generating “ungrammatical sentences” is surely the one thing they must not do.

So the status of the new types of “rules” remained somewhat evasive. For Labov et al. (1968: 88ff) (quoted in Dittmar 1976:134), “categorical rules are difficult to define, as they are never broken” and “are invisible to speakers”; and “variable rules” “are known to the analyst as a result of his investigation” whereas “normally speakers cannot make any direct pronouncements” about them. The very moves to postulate two different modes of “rules” already carried the reservation that both are “invisible” to speakers, which might remind us of Chomsky’s original denial (critiqued in 1.2) that the “speaker of a language” “is aware of the rules of the grammar or even” “can become aware of them.” A further problem impends if the concept of “categorical rules never being broken” might imply at least some domains of a language where “performance directly reflects competence,” which Chomsky (1965: 3f) has roundly declared “it obviously could not” “in actual fact,” though it could “under the idealisation” of the “speaker-hearer,” where we might wonder how to recognise the “direct reflection of an idealisation” when we see it. Such “categorical rules” would be empirically intractable if we could establish them only after demonstrating the impossibility of “breaking” them in an “infinite set of sentences” or even just in a corpus of real data so large that we can be reasonably certain we have covered all relevant cases; and I shall indicate in section 4 why we are still far from any such goal, although some of our corpora are several orders of magnitude larger than sociolinguistics could have envisioned during the stages examined here. A disturbing corollary would be that all rules may prove to be variable when we have enough further “results of the investigation”; and this would definitely lead to “drastic changes in current theories” (although my own proposals for shelving the concept of “rules” in section 4 will be considerably more drastic). Alternatively, we could define “rule-breaking” in some specialised terms, e.g., by unloading all “breakings” into the class of “errors,” which, virtually by definition, constitute negative confirmations of the “rules”; or by introducing strange “rules” whose sole function is to break other rules during “actualised performance” (Houston again). Either way, the border between “variations” versus “rule-breakings” would remain empirically intractable, like that between “categorical rules” versus “variable rules.” insofar as neither the idealised “grammar” nor the “ideal speaker-hearer” who “knows” it “exist in the real world” (Chomsky), whereas real speakers might be rendered unreliable or unrepresentative by their own “idiolects.”

These then, are some problematic implications of those scenarios that would maintain the established conceptions of “theoretical linguistics” either in a separate non-social domain or else with some cautious revisions in “grammars,” “rules,” etc., adapted to “sociolinguistics.” The gravest source of problems has continued to be the ambition of sustaining ideal language and the “idealisations” which linguists since Saussure have expected would somehow make “language” into a “well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts” but which, I submit, have cumulatively had just the opposite effect of keeping it ill-defined.

3.2 Inaugurating a social linguistics from real language

The converse scenarios for would be to inaugurate a genuinely “social linguistics” derived from the real systems of languages as we can observe them in society. For Labov (1970a), “it seemed natural enough that the basic data for any form of general linguistics would be language as it is used by native speakers communicating with each other in everyday life”; and Fishman (1971:9) expected a “real linguistics” to emerge as an “extended notion of speech analysis” “once it has been accepted that speech descriptions should take account of the social context” (cf. Dittmar 1976:131f). But we have surveyed a constellation of issues that would have to be resolved before we could expect a “real linguistics” to be “accepted” as “natural.”

Sociology exerted some pressure from the other direction in its efforts to adhere quite closely to “reality” and to be sceptical about high-level theorising. A symptomatic stance in “Western” sociology has been called “positivism,” purporting to “objectively describe” a society and “construing its work as ideologically neutral,” without providing “any useful analysis of the social, cultural, and political implications of its practice” (Pennycook 1994:138).

Insofar as the field of sociolinguistics was expected to actually alleviate language-related problems, positivism was hardly an appropriate stance. In the 1960s, social change would have seemed to be a highly constructive and welcome motor for unlimited “economic growth,” to which sociolinguistics could materially contribute. Yet its official mandates did not specify how projects for alleviating language-related problems might merely forestall genuine social change or make some minor cosmetic changes to help the current structure of society work more smoothly and to de-fuse potential conflicts. along with their “social dynamite” (du Bois-Reymond 1971:40). “Pacifying the ghettos” (Dittmar 1976:ch. 7) would be the ideal evasion for not dealing with the fact that ghettos ought to be incompatible with a modern democracy.

To grasp the mandate of sociolinguistics within its wider context, I would diagnose a pervasive discrepancy between theory and practice (Beaugrande 1997a, 1997e, 1997f). In “modern capitalist societies,” key terms like “social stability” and “economic progress” have theoretical meanings sharply at variance with their practical meanings; and assiduous effort goes into mystifying the variance. In theory, they designate the maintenance of a peaceful and orderly society, free of major crises and conflicts, where prosperity steadily rises for the benefit of all citizens. In practice, they designate the maintenance of conditions wherein the winners who really are benefiting do not get seriously challenged by the losers who are not, even when the winners are vastly less numerous than the losers, the gaps are wide and growing, and the real trends add up to a carefully concealed or denied economic shrinkage. The winners who benefit from the “flow of capital” are majestically indifferent to the social inequalities among the losers, who are constantly told by public media and “conservative” politicians to blame themselves alone (cf. Reich 1991).

Similarly, “civil rights,” “equal opportunity,” “free market,” and so on in theory designate the basic guarantees of a “capitalist democracy,” but in practice designate the mechanisms whereby the society can be “freely” reshuffled to suit the restless movement of “capital” (Martin & Schumann 1996; Ohmae 1996). In some stages of modern consumerism (e.g., the 1950s and 1960s), “economic growth” has meant spreading the capital around within a larger consumership who buys huge quantities of moderately-priced commodities; in others (e.g., the 1980s and 1990s), it has meant concentrating the capital within a smaller consumership who buys modest quantities of high-priced commodities, which are being multiplied by the runaway advances in expensive technologies with rapid turnovers, and which can be swiftly distributed to a world-wide elite and proudly displayed as symbols that the whole society is improving its “modern way of life.” Whereas profits were formerly dispersed among workers in societies with strong unionisation and worker-benefit laws, profits are now being concentrated among the elite owners, managers, and shareholders of multinational corporations who withhold benefits from their workers and suppliers by operating wherever wages and raw-material prices are cheapest and labour laws are the weakest (Manley 1991; Reich 1991, 1993). By locating their headquarters in “offshore” tax havens and transferring their operating costs from place to place, these corporations pay little or nothing back into the social programmes of local governments, and even demand massive public subsidies for starting or maintaining production sites (Martin & Schumann 1996).

Back in the 1960s, the real “economic growth” in “capitalist democracies” made improvements in “civil rights” and “equal opportunity” seem affordable, indeed profitable, for integrating talented and industrious individuals from a wider spectrum of society. However, the integration was made contingent upon assimilating to the social order and accepting the allegiances and values of the “mainstream culture” (cf. Cross 1974). This contingency was duly reflected in the mandate for sociolinguistics: to investigate how a wider spectrum of the society could be included in “economic growth” on the condition of assimilating to the “standard language,” but not to attenuate language differences as sensitive factors in economic competition. Indeed, linguistic assimilation could be an excellent test for an individual’s diligence to subserve “economic growth” and the “mainstream culture” of its chief beneficiaries.

Under any conditions, scientists and academics tend to be anxious about vacating the serene position of ideological neutrality, particularly when they are pressured to consider whether and how society should be stabilised or transformed on the basis of their research. The anxiety would naturally be acute among sociolinguists, given the history of modern linguistics making it a foundational principle to renounce all traditional projects to change or “improve” language. Already in Saussure’s estimation, “no society” “has ever known language other than as a product inherited from preceding generations”; “we can conceive of a change only through the intervention of specialists, grammarians, logicians, etc., but experience shows us that all such meddlings have failed” (1966:71, 73).

Sociolinguists might have quietly suspected that they were being handed an ambivalent enterprise entailing a “moral dilemma,” to borrow a phrase from Paulston (1971). A provisional solution would be to view it as two distinct enterprises: (1) describing the linguistic status quo regarding language varieties and sociolects; and (2) designing programmes for interventions in the status quo. The first was where sThis dualistic solution had its precedents within sociology proper. There, the results could be exploited by social institutions either to maintain the status quo by describing the “social order” as a set of “objectively given facts”; but those results were also a precondition for any realistic projects to transform the status quo (cf. Beaugrande 19%%97 world English ). ignificant advances were achieved in describing in language varieties and highlighting their major differences. But the second encountered substantial obstacles against recommending and implementing language changes through workable programmes.

Modern linguistics had in fact sustained its own version of the disconnection between theories of equality and inclusion versus practices of inequality and exclusion (Beaugrande 1997c). As we have seen, the “collectivity” or “community” of speakers was conceived by linguists like Saussure and Chomsky to be “perfect” and “homogeneous,” possessing neither the “will” nor the “control” to shape or change the language. This counter-intuitive conception falls into place when we recognise that their term “language” refers to a ideal system, whereas speakers can only shape or change real systems. The next step in this reasoning converts both the “community” and the “speaker” into ideal beings who know the ideal system “perfectly” and are not troubled by the “incalculable accidents in the exercise of language (accidents de la parole)” (Hjelmslev 1969 [orig. 1943]:94). When Saussure’s (1966 [orig. 1916]:14) proposed to “separate language [langue] from speaking [parole]” in order to “separate social from individual,” he also vowed to be “separating is essential from accidental” (cf. 1.2; 4.1). So the global and explicit inclusion in the “social” domain entailed the local and implicit exclusion of the “individual” real speaker, which ominously matched the strategies in “modern democracies” for crediting the society with the humane effects of the social order whilst blaming individuals for the inhumane effects. The social order is essentially democratic and fair, and only accidentally undemocratic and unfair — even when, as in the 1990s, the majority of the citizens rightly suspect they are being treated unfairly, e.g., in the now-familiar scenario where a profitable company suddenly give its workers the choice between accepting lower wages or getting laid off.

The paradox of a fair society somehow totalling up from a mass of unfair “accidents” bears an eerie resemblance to the submerged paradox of a “perfect language” somehow totalling up from a “heterogeneous mass” of “ fragments and deviant expressions.” The second paradox implies yet another absurdity: “language” being not just independent of “speaking,” but a wholly different type of system.

Such a paradox would be a debilitating heritage for sociolinguistics by suggesting “good” values for sociolects and “bad” values for idiolects. The next absurdities soon follow: since every idiolect is to a large extent based upon at least one sociolect, exactly those features which distinguish the idiolect must be the “bad” ones; and developing an idiolect would be like surrendering to “accidents” or acting in socially “deviant” ways.

To make substantive progress, sociolinguistics had to proceed on quite different assumptions: some sociolects (e.g., those of discriminated minorities) do carry low values, whilst some idiolects (e.g., those of popular rock stars) do carry high values. The institutional mandate for “assimilation” ominously encouraged sociolinguistics to accept differential values as given and permanent social facts. Depending on how the relations among sociolects and idiolects are defined — the options were compared in 3.1 — “compensatory” language programmes would assign to individual speakers one of two tasks: either to switch their whole sociolects from a bad “non-standard” one to a good “standard” one; or else to would strip away just the “bad” features of their own idiolects and paste on “good” features. Either task presupposed that an individual’s sociolect or idiolect is a matter of free personal choice; and that the specific features of a language variety and their relative values have been precisely and consensually defined; and sociolinguistics has provided overwhelming evidence to the contrary (cf. Pennycook 1995; Phillipson 1992).

So the inclusive theory of “standardisation” has persisted alongside exclusive practices. Speakers who have assimilated are judged “qualified” for “upward social mobility,” whereas those who have not or could not are judged “unqualified” and perversely clinging to their “ignorance” and “illiteracy.” Public outcry over a supposed “literacy crisis” has diverted attention toward a hunt for scapegoats, usually among the language teachers, and away from the social bias that mistakenly sees illiteracy in what is actually the language diversity that leaps into view when school and colleges finally adopt “open-door” policies (Beaugrande 1984).

In this ambience, the “deficit hypothesis” was highly likely to emerge, but just as likely to be misunderstood. In “capitalism,” whose very name announces that money is the primary factor in human society, speaking low-valued sociolects would be accounted a “deficit”: a pungently economic term intimating that youa lack something comparable to capital, and can expect to come up short. The “free society” would in turn offer to “qualified” individuals the chance to “pay back” or “pay in” the “deficit” by assimilating to the “standard.”

The fairness of the social order would be proven by offering a language ladder to the “socially disadvantaged,” this last being a term which, like most of its counterparts (e.g. “culturally deprived” and “educationally deficient”), cautiously avoided mentioning economic inequality (cf. Dittmar 1976:85). Like our other social ladders, this one continues to have some missing or slippery rungs toward the bottom, so that learners whose home sociolects are closer to the “standard” will climb much more easily, while the rest are subjected to a protracted process of disconfirming their “language c