linguistic theory and the real world

LINGUISTIC THEORY AND THE REAL WORLD1

Robin Lakoff University of California, Berkeley

Traditionally, applied linguists have looked to theoretical linguistics for help, and not vice versa, and they haven’t found much enlightenment. Recent work by theoretical linguists on the interaction between language use and real world phenomena may begin to change this situation. Language teachers have realized that some aspects of language are harder to teach than others: the use of particles like “well,” hedges like “sort of,” and “I guess,” sex link uses of various sorts, and forms marking levels of politeness. Although analogues are found between languages, exact parallelism between a form and its function in two languages seldom exists. Theoretical linguistics is becoming able to formalize the properties of this area of language use. Its discoveries could aid teachers in explaining the uses of these forms. Conversely, there is much not yet understood by theory. For one thing, we don’t know which of the properties of these forms are universal. Applied linguists know where second-language learners make mistakes and what kind of errors they make. The nature of these errors should prove a diagnostic aid to theorists, showing what is common to all languages and what is not. Thus, in this area as in many others, progress can best be made by theoretical and applied linguists if they will work together as equal partners.

With few exceptions, linguistic acts are performed by a speaker to apprise an addressee of real-world facts. But it is equally true that the majority of sentences uttered give clues, in one way or another, as t o how, precisely, that utterance is to mediate between the speaker’s mentality and the real world outside. That is, not only does language provide an outlet for information about the world outside the speaker’s mind, but it also enables a speaker to encode internal information. This is not, in the strictest sense, information, though i t is of course communication; but since it carries no immediately useful denotative content, practitioners of rhetoric are occasionally heard to advise speakers to eschew these

‘This paper was prepared for presentation a t the 1974 Annual Conference of the B.C. Association of Teachers of English as an Additional Language, and for the 1974 Convention of the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Research for this paper was partially supported by the National Science Foundation, under Grant NSF (38-38476.

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internal-state signals, to restrict their communications to purely external information, and thus to save time and the listener’s patience. What is realized too seldom is that this scorned information is at least as valid as the “useful” kind; one should be aware that one is communicating on both channels, and one should be aware of the message one is sending via the internal signals, as much as the external (see Larkin and O’Malley 1973).

Internal-state signaling devices occur in all languages, though different languages encode them differently. The second-language teacher therefore has as one of his functions to make learners aware of the correspondences between internal-state signals in their languages and those in the language they are learning. At first glance this may seem a less essential task than teaching the denotative lexical items-but one thing I hope to show here is that both types of linguistic information are crucial to adequate communication. I t is essential that the applied linguist understand the use and form of these signals. and be able to identify them in the language he is teaching, as well as in the language of the students he is teaching. Further, the applied linguist, if he does this, is in a position to make significant and unique contributions to linguistic theory.

Let me talk a little about the sorts of data I mean, where sociological information affects the linguistic form of an utterance. I shall confine my discussion here to English, but those familiar with other languages can easily adduce similar forms in those other languages.

First, there are interjections, (see James 1972 and Catford 1959), often considered meaningless hesitation-markers or place- holders. Traditional transformational grammar treats them as “performance facts”-neither describable by nor of interest to syntactic theory. James’ work belies both of these assumptions. She shows that the meaning of the rest of the sentence governs whether the speaker can use these interjections-e.g., oh, ah, er, say-they are not just thrown in randomly, but perform specific functions and affect meaning in predictable ways. Therefore they are not performance facts; they belong to our linguistic competence as much as, say, the rules for the formation of passives. James further shows that these particles interact with syntactic rules; some of them cannot occur in islands as defined by Ross (1967), some can. Some cannot occur in complex NP’s, others may. These are syntactic facts, and are rulegovemed, and hence are part of the syntactic rules of English, as well, of course, as pzll.taking of semantic and pragmatic information. James’ work,

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then, is one strong piece of evidence that syntax, semantics and pragmatics do not function as independent compoments, but are interrelated. I have shown (R. Lakoff 1973a), additionally, that hesitation-makers like well and why are appropriate for use in certain kinds of semantic-pragmatic situations, not others; they, too, are not randomly thrown in, but rule-governed.

Let me give a few instances. James (1972) notes that there are differences in the interpretations possible for apparently synonymous sentences, when these “meaningless” interjections are found in them. Thus compare the sentences of (1): (1) (a) Ah, Newsweek reports that Kissinger is a vegetarian.

(b) Ah, it is reported by Newsweek that Kissinger is a vegetarian.

(c) Ah, that Kissinger is a vegetarian is reported by Ne wsweek.

The ‘ah’ in ( l a ) might be commenting on either the main or the subordinate clause of the sentence: that is, ( l a ) might be roughly equivalent to, “I have just found out, and i t is significant that, Newsweek has made this report,” where i t is the report’s occurrence in Newsweek that is the prime interest (the report itself need not be accepted by the speaker as true, but it amuses him that a journal such as Newsweek has seen fit to publish such a report). But there is another reading, in which i t is Kissinger’s vegetarianism itself that is crucial: suppose the speaker of ( l a ) has invited Kissinger t o dinner, and has been worrying about what to serve. Then the complement sentence is the one commented on by the interjection ah the effect is t o say, “I have just heard, and it is significant, that Kissinger is a vegetarian.”

James next notes that “when a sentence is embedded in an island, it seems that i t cannot embody the main piece of information the speaker is interested in conveying” (1972: 166). Since ah’s function is to pick out and comment on the main piece of information, ah cannot, therefore, refer t o a sentence within an island. This can be seen in examples ( l b ) and (lc). In ( lb ) , in which extraposition has taken place, the complement is not an island; in ( lc) , without extraposition, it is. Hence, according to James’ principle, the first is ambiguous just like ( la) , but the second has only one reading: “Newsweek’s reporting is what is new and significant.”

Thus, the presence of an island serves to disambiguate ah, and thus i t can be seen that ah interacts with syntactic phenomena. Additionally James points out that the various


interjections have strictly-defined semantic and pragmatic spheres of usability: they are not mutually interchangeable, as one would expect them t o be if they were all merely meaningless place- holders. Thus she contrasts the pair in (2):

(2) (a) Oh, you’re leaving tomorrow! (b) Ah, you’re leaving tomorrow!

and points out, among other things, that (a) may be an order, as well as a declarative utterance; but (b) may not be interpreted as an order.

So forms like these, and others we shall be discussing momentarily, have their roots, as i t were, in the pragmatic end of things: they reflect a speaker’s emotional stance on what he’s reporting: is it new? is it significant? does he find i t surprising? And, at the same time, their leaves are up in the syntax, the rules of which they depend upon crucially. The individual speaker’s psychological makeup and his feelings about the speech-situation determine whether he can use such forms, and the syntactic structure of the sentence determines where in the sentence he may use them, and what part of the meaning of the sentence they are t o be interpreted as referring to,

Particles play other roles too. The much-maligned “well” serves a crucial function-commenting on the speech-act to which the sentence in which i t occurs is a response, or providing an explanation for the sentence in which it occurs.

Unless we are engaged in certain forms of psychotherapy, we are not typically accustomed to commenting explicitly on speech acts directly after they are made-our own or someone else’s. So if someone asks me, “Did you break my priceless Ming vase?” normally I won’t rush right in and say, “I want first of all to state that the answer I am about t o give is not complete in certain ways, but. . . .” This seems unduly windy or legalistic. But we do have a device that gives this information indirectly, the particle well. Thus contrast the examples of (3) as possible answers to that question.

(3) (a) Yes.

The second means, “I did, but there are extenuating circumstances.” Hence, we don’t normally use it when the answer is not one where extenuating circumstances might arise, as in (4). (4) Q. How much is 2+2?

A. *Well, 4.

(b) Well, yes.


(Such a reply is good only in case the question meant more than its superficial form suggested; e.g., “How could you make such a stupid error on your income tax? Just look at this addition.. . . How much is 2+2? Surely you can see that you really owe much more than $1,000, here, more like $4,000.” And the reply might then be construable as (say) “I know it’s really 4, but you’re not taking into account the oil-depletion allowance, which enables us to deduct $3,000.” But the reply t 51 A’. Why, 4. has a very different meaning: “The answer is so obvious, I can’t imagme why you bother t o ask the question at all.” With why, the burden of justification has been shifted from the speaker (where it rests with well) to the addressee.

It is significant, and a point I shall return to, that often in English one may find-instead of, or in addition t o one of these interjections-a special stress or pitch pattern. Thus, an effect similar t o that of (4A) can be obtained with the simple “yes” of (3a) uttered in a rising-plus-falling contour, which is the same contour naturally found in sentences superficially containing “well.” It is unprofitable to speculate here on precisely how this is to be theoretically interpreted: is the pitch or the interjection, or both, the basic form? But i t is significant that in English, we sometimes have a free choice between pitch and a lexical item to express semantic information, two very different encoding mechanisms.

There are many other forms that express a speaker’s emotional involvement in what he is talking about. One of these has been discussed by G. Lakoff (1972~) as “hedges.” Hedges- words like “sorta,” “you might say,” “typically,” “in a manner of speaking,”-are another class that has been much abused on the grounds that they, like interjections, weaken the force of a communication. There is, among rhetoricians, an implicit assumption that strongest is necessarily equivalent t o best. Any diplomat will expound t o you the hazards of living under such an assumption, and in fact you don’t need to be a diplomat; it’s enough t o be a Democrat talking t o a boss who is a Republican, or a graduate student, for that matter, defending a dissertation. One uses these expressions when one has reason not to want t o commit oneself: either because one really isn’t sure, or because one wants t o be polite, to avoid offense. (A fuller discussion on the rules of politeness can be found in R. Lakoff 1973b.) One can qualify speech-acts in other ways, too; by phrasing statements and requests


as tags, and by prefacing questions with “I wonder whether. . .?”, as in the examples of (6): (6) (a) You’re late again, aren’t you?

(b) Take out the garbage, won’t you? (c) I guess I’m late again. (d) I wonder if I could ask you how much that degree

cost. We must be aware, in describing such forms, that their hesitancy or politeness is often a mere convention, a sham: under many contextual conditions, (6b) does not give my addressee the “out” of refusing, but merely makes it look as though he has it. But the very fact that I am willing to undertake this deception is interpreted as meaning I am polite, whereas if I utter a straight imperative, like “Take out the garbage,” I will be thought a boor, and probably my command will provoke only insolence, not compliance. So such hedges don’t always have their full face value, but they do always impart some sort of meaning to a sentence: they indicate that the speaker is expressing real or sham deference to the addressee; and sham deference is better, anyhow, than real brusqueness. Although, here, too, denotative meaning is not necessarily conveyed by these forms, and therefore in one sense they merely stretch out the communication without informing the addressee any further, in another sense they are rich in communicative function, and you eschew them at the risk of incurring ostracism.

Lest it be thought that since these forms are hesitation- markers, they occur only in speech, note that they have their analogs in writing. When a writer begins a sentence with “certainly,” he means that there is some element of doubt; and the academic writer’s use of passives, we and one is a distancing device, used to indicate that the writer feels some hesitancy about expressing his ideas, so he is removing himself some distance from them. (Of course, this is at least partially conventional again, since if he really felt that hesitant, he would (a) write anonymously or (b) not write at all.)

Returning t o oral speech, we might note too that the particularly maligned particles-like, y ’know, I mean-play similar roles, letting the speaker comment on his utterance. All suggest that the addressee may not sympathize with the communication; in the case of like, that it may seem too forthright: the speaker has doubts about his own authority to make such a strong statement; y’hnow suggests that the speaker feels his world-view is so far from


the addressee’s that he needs the assurance that the addressee shares enough of his real-world assumptions to have understood him; and I mean suggests that the speaker feels he has not, the first time, made himself clear. They do not, then, provide additional real information, but do provide, as it were, a commentary on the information given elsewhere in the sentence. It’s true that, by using them to excess, a speaker can project uncertainty and lack of self-confidence, but there are times when this is just the image one wants to project. Rather than condemning all these devices out of hand, one should tell students why they are used, what sort of image the addressee receives of a speaker who uses them, and what the alternatives are; and then let the student decide how he wants to come across. That’s his business.

It has recently been pointed out by DuBois (1974) that correction-markers do more than merely erase missteps; sometimes their use is not, in fact, a signal that a misstep has been made, but rather they invite the addressee (or reader) to choose among two or more alternatives, suggesting that there’s something to be said for either, the writer doesn’t want to be pinned down. Again your rhetorician would condemn these as admissions of indecision, but sometimes it’s wise to be indecisive, when there’s something to be said for both choices. Again, in sentences like those of (7), below, the false starts add no extra denotative meaning to the sentence, but suggest that the speaker is subtly changing his perception of what he’s talking about-that there is more than one way to approach the issue.

(7) John was drunk at the office party-or rather, he seemed a little under the weather. Mary is in trouble-I mean, she is having difficulties. This scholar’s carelessness about sources-one might almost be tempted to call it immorality-is reason to beware in reading his work.

A sentence such as (7c) might well appear in written prose, where the writer, of course, had ample time to correct his false start by crossing it out on the typewriter, had he so desired. The fact that such sentences appear in print is ample proof that the starts are not so false, and that they enhance the communication rather than hindering it.

And finally there are the choices one can make among lexical items that do not affect the denotative meanings of these items, but rather, reflect the speaker’s personality, social or educational

(a)

(b) (c)


status, or sex. Sometimes, of course, a speaker is totally unaware of the effect his choice of a particular form may have-that it stamps him as ill-bred, badly-educated, fuzzy-minded or ir- responsible; but sometimes he is perfectly aware of the connota- tions that his choice conveys. The clever speaker may use one form of expression at one gathering, another at another, communicating in both cases the same information, but in each, communicating at the same time different things about himself, as in (8). ( 8 ) (a) One ought t o be less concerned with the mor-

phology of the lexical item than with its semantic structure. Never mind how you say it, it’s what you say that counts. I really do feel so strongly, you know, that words are only what you mean by them, right?

The first is pedantic, the second colloquial, the third a language we might call “women’s language” (see R. Lakoff 1973c), all expressing essentially the same idea. But the impression the addressee gets from each is different. Of course, usually one is smart enough t o use the first in a formal gathering where learning may be openly paraded; the second under less formal circumstances, and the third if one, as a woman, wants to make a “feminine” impression. But if we confuse our signals, while we get the same denotative information across in each case, if we are so foolhardy as t o utter (a) at a party, (b) when talking t o a roomful of prospective colleagues and employers, or (c) when we want to appear in control, decisive, and nonfuzzy, we will get into a great deal of difficulty. And we won’t be able to correct the difficulty by explaining what we meant. The impression will have been made. Here, again, the idea is not to tell students t o avoid these styles as pedantic, folksy, or feminine, but rather to inform students that the choices exist, tell them where, if anywhere, each is appropriate in our culture, and let him decide. The hardest part, of course, involves the interaction of the language with the culture in which it is spoken. In one culture, it is appropriate t o remain pedantic, formal or &stant, until fairly late in a relationship; in another, one adopts colloquialism fairly early on. Merely identifying the styles is not enough; beyond this, if the language learner is t o go out fully equipped, his teacher must teach him what each of the possible styles connotes. This is a tremendously difficult, though one would hope not impossible, task. We will talk a bit later about why it is Particularly important in language teaching. We could extend this

(b)

(c)


list: all languages have devices to indicate politeness and formality. But for some languages, politeness must be encoded into every sentence: there are obligatory markers of status, deference and humility. Other languages express politeness less overtly, or differently : perhaps in choice of vocabulary, perhaps in intonation patterns, perhaps by smiling, or in the stance, or distance kept between participants in an encounter. A speaker from one culture translated to another will not, perhaps, know how to match his feelings to the signals he is supposed to give. If he comes from the sort of culture where politeness is made linguistically explicit by markers indicating humility and deference, perhaps he will try to force deference and humility into his every utterance in the second language-which may be one where politeness is expressed by smiling and indications of interest. This may be why, when Japanese come t o America, they often appear overly polite, and why Americans appear to Japanese overly informal, too quickly intimate. On the other hand, still a third culture expresses politeness by stiffly bowing, and maintaining a distance between speaker and addressee. To the American, such paralinguistic behavior will seem arrogant and stiff. And this may be the difficulty Germans have assimilating t o our culture. So merely teaching “please” and “thank you” is not sufficient if we want non-native speakers t o be at home in our language and culture. It is especially important to be aware of these variations for this reason: if someone is evidently not a native speaker of your language, and he mangles the syntax and the phonology and maybe the lexicon, you tend t o be very understanding and forgiving: you figure it’s a language problem, nothing personal, and you bend over backwards to understand what he’s saying. But suppose he uses too many deferential expressions, or too few? Uses direct imperatives where you might have expected a tag, or indirect request? Asks questions without apology that are, you think, none of his business, or bristles when you call him by his first name, after you’ve known him a few days? You then are not so prone t o be forgiving-particularly if you’re just a normal speaker of English, not a language teacher. You won’t ascribe his odd behavior to a failure t o digest certain forms, but rather you’ll think of it as a personality defect-he’s too shy, too polite, too stuffy, too arrogant. And as you meet his countrymen and many of them act the same way, you’ll develop a national stereotype-“they ’re all like that.” Actually, they’re not “like that;” it’s their culture that is like that, and they just haven’t learned how t o translate intentions from theirs to yours i t ’ s really parallel t o learning how


to use the pluperfect, or the passive. I t isn’t that cultures are different, it’s that they express similar feelings in different ways. But socially the results of not having been taught are much more disastrous, which is why I say that, hard as the task may be, the language teacher should think about how to teach it.

We need not cross national borders to get into trouble this way. There are innumerable subcultures within the United States, each with its clearly-defined rules for determining polite, and friendly, behavior. The more isolated a particular subculture remains, through discouragement of intermarriage and confinement to ghettos, for instance, the more idiosyncratic their rules are apt to be. It has been noted by Labov that the rules of conversational logic are differently applied by lower-class black and middle-class white children in New York City schools; and since teachers in the school system, whether black or white, are overwhelmingly of middle-class backgrounds, these teachers assume their black children don’t know the rules-don’t know any rules, in fact, since their own system is all they can conceive of. In reality, of course, both have rules, in fact the same basic set of rules, but apply different ones under different circumstances. The same is true of the rules of politeness: they exist and are followed in all subcultures, but the conditions determining the applicability of the different rules differ from one group to another. I t is important for the teacher who deals with cultures different from his or her own to recognize this, and to learn to interpret unexpected forms of behavior as conforming to a different set of equally-strict rules, rather than indicating unruliness or chaos.

But this diversity of subcultural politeness systems within our society creates problems, in turn, for the teacher of English to members of another culture altogether.

In effect, we have t o teach, let us say, a speaker of Japanese, how he should project his Japanese personality via linguistic and paralinguistic means, into a particular sort of Berkeley resident, or (quite differently) native New Yorker, or middle-American. That is, there must be some way of keeping the personality, and the impression produced by it, constant, while changing as necessary the surface signs used to represent and recognize that personality type.

I am well aware that this is not a task for the language teacher, or at least, is a task for the psychotherapist and the language teacher together, if indeed it is in any sense doable. Interesting attempts have been made to present stylistic differences in conversational behavior, between cultures: Roy Miller’s (1 967)


Japanese textbook is one very nice example I am aware of, and I am told by Elena Greavu that similar attempts are being made in the teaching of English in Rumania; but I think that, now that speech-acts and their superficial representations are becoming better understood by linguistic theorists, perhaps some of their insights could be smuggled out of the ivory tower and into the streets.

I have noted that we are entering into the realm of the psychotherapist; and I might also note the interest shown by therapists in another area mentioned above, namely that of paralinguistics. In one sense, everything I’m talking about here is “paralinguistic” in that it functions as a comment on the message, not generally as the message itself. Certainly we must start thinking in terms of broader horizons for our field, an erasure of the boundaries we have tended to guard jealously: this is linguistics; this is kinesics; this is sociology; this is psychology. If we are going to solve problems-both applied, like language teaching, and theoretical, such as how messages are understood-we must be willing to erase these lines, blur these definitions, and do some serious mind-stretching.

Even within linguistics, it’s evident that subfields cannot be kept pure. I have discussed briefly the use of well. This aspect of language use would in some theories be relegated to syntax, since it has to do with the placement of words in sentences. But I also noted that a specific pitch-contour was associated with the use of well; and, indeed, that sometimes this pitch-contour alone could substitute for well in sentences. Then we must, even in a non-tone language like English, assign certain semantic-pragmatic functions to certain intonation patterns; the only question is, how widespread is this relationship? And how inviolable? Then another intriguing question rears its ugly head: we know that in many languages (Japanese and Classical Greek, to name a couple), particles are rife. There seems also to be a relationship between a language having phonemic tone, and having a wide assortment of particles. Now consider the case of well in English (and the same sorts of relationships might very well be found to exist between other interjections and other pitch-patterns; it is our inability to describe and precisely and unambiguously represent in writing pitch-systems that is, in large measure, keeping us from doing much work in this area): either tone alone, or tone + particle serves to get the meaning of well across. In a language in which tone was phonemic, we would be denied the use of tone in expressing these meanings. So we would expect to find a richer


interjection system in such languages-or a t any rate, in languages with phonemic tone, we would expect to find expressed lexically those semantic-pragmatic concepts that in other languages might be expressed by various pitch contours. This is saying that a purely phonological phenomenon and a purely semantic phenomenon should sometimes be treated as two sides of the same coin- something that is anathema to a classical transformational grammarian, but seems unavoidable if we are t o deal with facts like this in linguistic theory. And it is also unavoidable if we want to teach speakers of English the correct use of Japanese particles, and speakers of Japanese the correct use and interrelationship between English particles and pitch contours.

As suggested in the last sentence, linguistic theory and applied linguistics share many common interests, and common difficulties. The applied linguist can, and should, do more in these difficult times than sit by and see which of the various competing theories looks like it’s winning, and pick it; he has a serious stake in the outcome, and besides, his evidence is crucial in deciding what sort of linguistic theory must be devised for handling this shadow-area of extralinguistic phenomena. Let me talk about this a bit, first noting the course of development these ideas have had in recent linguistic theory, and then mentioning how and why the applied linguist and the theoretician should be in close cooperation.

At various points in my prior discussion, I have found it necessary t o remark that paralinguistic facts are the business of the linguist t o analyze and incorporate within his theory. I have noted that they participate in syntactic and phonological rules, as well as having semantic and pragmatic functions. I have further remarked that in some languages-hopefully a subset that can be precisely defined by their own morphological properties-the concepts that we have been mentioning are regularly expressed by explicit particles, or interjections; in others, phonological markers alone, such as pitch or stress contours, can be used for the same purpose. Now facts such as these have got to be incorporated somehow into one’s linguistic theory, if this theory is to have even minimal adequacy in the description of languages. If a linguistic theory cannot handle these facts, it ought not t o be considered a viable theory qua theory, let alone as a means toward a more practical end- method for second-language teaching, or for gaining an understanding of child language or stylistics, or as a means of penetrating the depths of pathological language use-in schizo- phrenia, for instance. For an inadequate theory will virtually force the applied linguist either to overlook vital factss ince one


principal use of a theory in applied work is precisely in directing workers’ attention to perhaps-obscure facts about language-or to misinterpret them, to relate things that ought not to be related and to miss relationships and generalizations that do exist; and thus, t o end up, through no fault of his own, with a plan that is less useful for the intended purpose than it might ideally be. Therefore it behooves the applied linguist, of whatever kind, to carefully examine a theory he feels is potentially useful to him, to see if it has the built-in ability t o deal with all the facts he, through real-world experience, has a t his fingertips; whether, with ex- tensions, such a theory might be potentially usable; or whether, finally, the theory is basically unable to deal with these data, and thus best ignored. Too often the theorist, brimming with prestige from within his ivory tower, presents the applied linguist with his theory as a fuit uccompi: “here’s the latest stuff, you better catch up with it and use it if you don’t want t o get left behind.” And the hapless applied linguist, bewildered by the formalism, figures that if it has all this technical stuff in it i t must have some merit, and willy-nilly, bends reality to meet the theory, ignores facts he knows about full well when the theory can’t encompass them, and distorts his intuitive sense of the structure of a language in order that the structure he uses as a base may look like the one envisioned by the theorist, with lots of neat boxes, arrows, ru lesnone of the messiness he knows is really there. He is humbled by technical brilliance; he is afraid to suggest revisions in the theory t o meet the needs of reality. He is afraid to discard a theory that does not match reality at any point. If he is clever, and a good teacher, and a sensitive linguist, he will work around the theory, pay it lip-service, use some concepts from it but not others, and thus be successful in his efforts despite the theory that is supposed to be his salvation. But it’s silly to be a slave to any theory, especially one that isn’t appropriate, and it’s silly t o twist facts to match some idealization of the way language ought t o be, but isn’t; and it’s silly to burden oneself with theoretical mechanisms that one must pick his way around, mechanisms that fight his intuition rather than support it. This has gone on too long, and really ought t o stop. Applied linguists have t o start asking themselves questions about the theories they are thinking of adopting-this is potentially the most significant contribution anyone could make to theoretical linguistics. For certainly the theorist gets into trouble by not having his hands on enough red data, by not having the facts forced t o his attention, having people contrast reality with idealism as presented in his theory. If he ends


up with an imperfect model, an unusable theory, it is at least in part due to his isolationand only the applied linguist can dispel this. I know that in the past the theoretical linguist has always sat, haughty and alone, in his ivory tower. If the applied linguist wanted to sit at his feet and be enlightened, well, the theorist would do him that favor. But the notion that enlightenment was a two-way street-that each could learn from the otherseldom occurred to anyone, least of all to the theorists, whose theories as a result tend to get more arcane and less relevant to the real-world tasks at hand with each passing revision.

We can look at an illustration of what I mean: a theory developed pretty much in isolation, by theorists trained not in language learning as their principal interest, but in philosophy, information science, mathematicsdisciplines remote from real- world intervention. And they devised a very elegant system of language description, most attractive, very compelling-as long as you didn’t look too hard at the facts you were intuitively aware of. Intuition was scorned: if you couldn’t formalize a relationship, if you couldn’t write rules, make it submit to the grammatical theory that supposedly was a tool for the understanding of language, then you’d do best to forget the whole thing. And this is just why the system was, superficially, so very elegant: the nasty complicated fuzzy parts, the parts that did not fit neatly into the scheme, were assumed not to exist, or at least, not to be of interest of the linguist. Rugs in that part of the world got very bulgy.

I am not inventing a parable or a fairy tale. I am talking about transformational grammar, which should be no surprise to you. I think the sins committed, the confusion perpetrated in its name have been legion over the past dozen years, and I think it’s precisely because all the input came from the theorists, most of whom had never taught languages, or were ashamed to admit it if they had, particularly if comparison among the languages they knew revealed data that could not be reduced to the neat form prescribed by orthodox transformational theory.

Actually, I am being perhaps nastier to transformational theory than I ought. There is a time in the life of every theory when oversimplification is not only inevitable, but necessary for the development of greater understanding (Kuhn 1962). In order to be able to get an allover picture of the sort that a theory of language must be, one must first oversimplify, pretend that the facts are more amenable to organization than, actually, they are. Ideally, it is better even at this stage not to fool oneself; to admit


privately anyway that the treatment gains its elegance through the overlooking of data that will have to be dealt with some day. The ostrich-treatment, in which one declares in effect, “My nice elegant theory can’t handle this phenomenon, so I hereby declare it non-linguistic and thus keep my theory correct and neat,” is less desirable, as should be obvious, beacuse it will prevent any developments or improvements in the theory, ultimately rendering it too rigid to be a useful heuristic tool-which in the end is the very least as well as the most we ask of a theory.

Now the problem with transformational grammar is not that it started out with the declared goal of handling only relationships observable in and reducible to superficial syntactic formulations. Such early work as Chomsky’s on the passive (as in the 1962 Texas conference), Klima’s (1964) on negation, and Chomsky’s treatment of tense and modality as auxiliaries (1957, 1965) were the only imaginable way of reducing the complexities involved to a formal system, at that time, which is pre-1965. At that time transformational theory was still groping, evolving from the kernel-sentence system exemplified in Syntactic Structures toward the more mature version of syntax, with deep and surface structures, developed in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. In this formative stage, it was valuable just to have some means of marshalling the data, reducing them to some ordered system, generalizing merely by assignment to superficially-relevant categories. This is essentially what was done in early work like these, and later work would not have been possible without this stage. It is significant, too, historically, that it was the relatively simple work, uncluttered by complications, epicycles, but’s and maybe’s, that caught the non-theorists’and the world’s in general- imagination, that made “transformational grammar” a pair of household words in a remarkable number and diversity of households. But after 1965 transformational grammar seems to have stabilized, to have evolved a sort of dogmatic rigidity, an unwillingness to incorporate real changes in the theory, so that much of this early work-which can easily be shown to be inadequate, both theoretically and practicdy-is still believed and used as the basis of new work today. I t is this refusal to grow, to incorporate new insights, that has, essentially, killed transformational grammar as a heuristic model and as a means of gaining insight into applications of lingustic theory.

Let me give a couple s f illustrations of what I mean. I alluded above to three of the most impressive developments of preclassical transformational grammar: the treatment of passives, auxiliary


verbs, and negation. All these early treatments had in common the notion that the distribution of forms could be predicted on purely syntactic grounds: semantic and pragmatic information did not figure. Now, clearly some cases of all of these can be dealt with purely syntactically; but much more often, in order to hold to such a theory, one must ignore many facts, predict false results, be unable to predict what actually occurs. But certainly it is the simplest of the barely adequate models imaginable; at an early stage in the development of the theory, keeping different kinds of facts-phonological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic-segregated and dealing with each as a separate component makes it possible to get somewhere, makes i t possible for one to distinguish at least the general outline of what’s going on. But later on, one must come closer to approximating reality.

For instance, let us look briefly at Chomsky’s classical treatment of auxiliaries. You will recall that, as late as Aspects (and beyond) his phrase structure rules as shown in (9) prescribed a bifurcated tree, that of (10). (9) S + NP Pred P

Pred P-, Aux VP Aux -, T (M) (have) (be) . . . VP + V (NP) (Adv.P) . . . for a simple sentence like Sincerity may frighten John.

(10)

/NP /PdP\

/vp\ V NP

/ Aux\ N

M I

Sincerity T I

John. I I

may frighten I

pres

Now, the first question asked by a classical transformational grammarian, in determining the adequacy of a model of language, is, “Does this theory generate all and only the sentences of the language?” That is the minimal requirement. As it happens, it has repeatedly been shown that these phrase structure (PS) rules don’t even do t h a t a n d in a moment we’ll show that they are inadequate in more sophisticated ways as well.

First, we can show that these rules coupled with the necessary transformational (T) rule of affix-hopping (11) (Burt 1971:14) will both generate sentences that are not sentences of English and additionally that there exist structures that native speakers of


English agree are well-formed sentences of English which cannot be produced using these rules.

(11) Taf: X - [Affix] - [Verb] - Y * 1 3 2 4

So given these facts, this model of the auxiliary system of English is inadequate. I t is proved so not through theoretical proof of its inadequacy as a formal system, but rather by recourse to the facts of English, as discussed in Borkin et al. (1972).

First, let us note that we are tolerating, for the moment and for the period of pre-classical transformational grammar, a formulation such as the above on the grounds that it lets us give order to chaos, to specify classes of similarly-acting items so as to show how they may all undergo the same rule. Then the least we have a right to expect from such a theory is that its categorial organization should be pretty neat. Now, I have given the statement of Affix-hopping found or assumed in all classical transformational grammars. The first oddity we notice is that this rule operates on a tree, one constituent of which has no deep-structure correlate: it has not been generated by the PS rules. This is the crucial item Affix. A bunch of items-tense, -ing, -encue lumped together under this designation, since they all function similarly in the rules of Affix-Hopping and Do-Support. So according to the Chomsky-Burt formulation it looks as though we have achieved a generalization: by calling all these deep- structure items Affixes, we seem to provide an explanation of why they all work alike. But by doing it this way, we make our intuition about the structure of English work overtime, doing work for the theory and its formalisms that the formalisms ought t o do for themselves, as their prime justification for being. Remember: a formalism is valid only so long as i t tells us at least as much as the corresponding informal statement tells us, in clearer form. Unfortunately, the PS rules plus T-rule here don’t do that. As Borkin et al. note, we might just as intuitively lump Tense, Ing, and En together under the name of Slopbucket: that would tell us just as much, namely that “they all behave the same with respect to Hopping (that is, Slopbucket-Hopping) and Do-Support.” To call these all Affix tells us nothing more than what we already know: All these items behave similarly in two respects. What we would like to know is, What do they have in c o m m o n i n their semantic or syntactic structure-that causes them to behave similarly? If we knew that, we would understand the connection

Obl

1 2 3 4


among them. If we don’t then their similar behavior is, for us, accidental. Now of course sometimes we don’t understand a phenomenon, and under these conditions it is preferable to state that there is a similarity that we don’t understand, rather than saying nothing at all; perhaps some student will then be inspired to dig deeper-this is how research is done and knowledge is accumulated. But this is not what the classical transformational treatment does. By putting tense, -ing, and -en together under a plausible-sounding name, it attempts to deceive the reader into believing that the relationship has been stated: “They all work alike because they’re all affixes.” Inventing a name and writing a rule as Burt-Chomsky have gves the impression that there is no more to be learned, where in actuality there is everything to be learned. So at best the treatment is deceptive. The same is true of the treatment of other elements in the Aux: the items Modal, Have, Be all function similarly in Tag formation, Neg-Emphasis placement, and Subject-Verb inversion. This fact again leads classical transformational grammar to lump the three together under the resplendent name of Auxiliary. But this tells us nothing.

The problem gets worse, however: sentences occur that cannot be generated in this model and vice versa. Consider for instance the examples of (12). (12) (a) John need not leave.

(b) John doesn’t need to leave. ( c ) *John need leave.

In the first of the sentences of (12), need acts like a modal: affix hopping and do support do not apply to it, as they typically do not apply to modals. In the second, however, d o support has applied, and in addition the complementizer to is inserted after need. Using the traditional notion of synonymy, that invoked by virtually all transformational grammarians who have dealt with the issue, namely identity of truth-values, these sentences are synonymous. (Actually, closer examination would reveal that they are not substitutable one for the other in all contex tsa more useful notion to work with, but one that, as we shall see, is antithetical to traditional transformational grammar in that it forces one to make use of pragmatic and/or semantic information in doing a syntactic analysis.) Then it makes sense to say that the two occurrences of the lexical item need represent the same underlying lexical item-by Ockham’s Razor, if not sheer common sense. Yet one behaves as a modal, one as a real verb; and, according to the rules we have given above, in traditional transformational grammar


you must make a choice: a form may be a modal auxiliary, or it may be a true verb, but it is meaningless within this theory t o say i t partakes of both. So, given this theory, we will be unable t o generate either (a) or (b), take your choice, depending on whether we classify need as a modal or as a true verb. Traditional tranformational grammar might hide this embarrassment by assuming two accidental homonyms, needl and need2, also by chance synonyms, but one a Modal and one a Verb. Note, by the way, that according to this theory need might as well be either or both-no attempt is made to define either true-verbhood or modality in terms of semantic properties, but rather assignment to the category is a given, determined by the superficial syntactic function of the word. And the superficial syntactic function of the word . . . is determined by the category to which it is assigned, as we have seen. Well.

With the last sentence of (12), things rapidly get worse for this analysis. We find that modal-like behavior is possible with this verb only in case there is a negative present in the sentence. I t is by no means clear what one property has to do with another. The classical transformational grammarian’s solution t o this problem is an illustration of pushing under the rug if ever there was one. What they said is that the two needs were two different lexical items-one a Verb, one a Modal, and that the Modal, unlike any other modal in English, might be selected only in case the sentence contained-what? Here again, they brushed over the issue, calling it “an item of negative meaning” which brings in semantics, but doesn’t illustrate the full complexity of the problem. To do so, look at (13): (13) (a) John need not leave.

(b) Need they make all that noise? (c) Need I say more about Watergate to convince the

veriest fool that Nixon is involved? (d) ? Need I say more t o Fred t o show him how t o

cook Peking Duck, or will he manage by himself? (e) I need to see no one-I’m important enough to

decide who t o deal with. (f) ? I need see no one-it’s important right now that I

be left strictly alone. (g) *John needed not leave.

Clearly more is going on here than mere superficial-syntactic criteria for the distribution of modal-need and verb-need. All these sentences are potentially negative environments in Kiima’s sense.


One criterion seems t o be whether the speaker is expecting a negative response: “No, you need say no more,” “no, no one need worry.” (But it’s not that simple, as (g) indicates.) We are dealing with the sort of situation discussed by Borkin (1971), who showed that certain polarity items were possible, in non-positive environments, only in case the speaker anticipated a negative response. But this, I scarcely need say, is not syntactic information but semantic-pragmatic: I need to know what the addressee is apt to have in mind. Putting features on words in sentences like [-affect] or [+negative feeling] may look like a way to make this information syntactic, and this is the way out commonly advocated by diehard transformationalists presented with facts like these and Borkin’s; but it is imprecise, and if it is understood at all, it is understood as a code for semantic information, a way of making it look syntactic. Calling it syntactic doesn’t necessarily make it so. Thus, the classical TG treatment of Auxiliary and Real Verbs embodies, necessarily, the following deficiencies:

It lumps together a number of different phenomena, without explanation. It causes us either:

to have two lexical items, unrelated and belonging to different lexical-syntactic categories, with closely similar meanings and virtually identical form

to be unable t o predict the grammaticality of certain sentences and the ungrammaticality of others. We will generate some sentences that are not good, and be unable to generate others that are found in English.

In either case, we must make false generalizations and false claims about certain aspects of the English language. Our theoretical mechanism has led us to do violence to the truth, and therefore it is suspect.

Similar examples are legion. We could show that the same false generalizations and inability to predict whether a sentence will be good or bad, will be found in the traditional passive analysis, the analysis of negatives in Klima, and virtually any other analysis within traditional transformational grammar. Is it any wonder that transformational theory has proved less than the panacea it was touted as for teaching languages?

It is important t o note here that the problem with classical transformational grammar is not one that could be solved by changing the rules a bit, writing a slightly different tree, or being

or

LINGUISTIC THEORY 3 29

more careful about defining Affix. The real trouble resides deep within the basic assumptions of the theory: which, paradoxically, happen to be the very same assumptions that make the theory look so simple and elegant, and make it so attractive. The fact is that we must discard much of this elegance, if we are ever to have a theory that tells us something about the use of language-one that functions as a predictive model, and allows us to generate all and only the sentences of a language.

It was attractive, but in the long run destructive, to devise a theory of autonomous syntax, which of course transformational grammar is. Attractive, as I have said, because it allowed us to wear blinders, screening out many of the really dreadful difficultiessuch as, to give one small example, the distribution of “verbal” and “modal” need. There were other kinds of problems we could pretend we didn’t have to deal withsuch as the ones I discussed at the beginning of this paper, where the choice of a form of linguistic expression was directly dependent on one’s psychological attitude, or one’s status in the real world. These were declared by fiat to be out of the realm of linguistics: the linguist need not concern himself with them. But these issues, and similar questions based on assumptions about the addressee’s expected response, as with need, turn out to be unavoidably mixed up with the syntactic decisions on grammaticdity. A theory was needed which did not separate levels of analysis, did not assume the autonomy of any part of language, that did not, further, assume that language use was necessarily independent of other means used to achieve communication, that allowed for the incorporation of non-linguistic information into our grammar.

I t should be clear that such a theory is far more complex, far harder both to formulate and to understand, far less immediately elegant than was classical transformational grammar. But I hope I have already made it clear that these losses in beauty are necessary, if the truth is to be approached at all. So as I detail a few of the assumptions of the beginnings of a theory that will, if it is ever fully formulated, embody all these desirable characteristics. I would hope the reader will bear in mind that its awkwardnesses are necessarysome, because of its relative youth, others because of the scope of its ambitions.

Suppose first of all we question the most sacrosanct assumption of classical (Aspects-vintage) transformational grammar. Is there a demonstrated need for a syntactically-relevant level of deep structure, and therefore a level of autonomous syntax, with a semantic component not directly relating to the syntax, but merely


interpreting its output? For obviously if it cannot be demonstrated that deep structure is necessary, it must be discarded. Its necessity could be proved by showing that there existed at least one generalization in one language that could be expressed by rules assuming a deep structure, and not without. To date, despite strenuous efforts by its adherents, no such case has been found. Indeed, cases have been discovered that seem to suggest the very opposite: if we assume a level of deep structure, there are explanations for phenomena we become incapable of making. (For a sample of the argumentation and counter-argumentation on these topics over the last several years, see Baker and Brame 1972, Bresnan 1971 and 1972, Chomsky 1970, and G. Lakoff 1970, 1972a and 1972b.) For instance consider the sentences in (14) (from G. Lakoff 1972d). (14) (a) Everyone expects to die.

Several facts are of interest here. 1. These sentences are not synonymous, in anyone’s sense of synonymy. 2. (14a) is derived from some more abstract structure in which the subject of die is explicitly present. This subject is normally treated as deletable by the rule of equi-NPdeletion, whereby, given sentences of a certain structure (of which the sentences of (14) are examples) the second of the two identical noun phrases acting as subjects of respectively the main sentence and its complement may be deleted, since it is fully recoverable. Thus, a sentence like (14a) may be assumed to have a derivational history parallel to that of (15a), which in turn has something like (15b) underlying it at a deeper level of analysis. ( 1 5 ) (a) John expects to see Fred.

Johni expects Johni to see Fred. (The i’s indicate that the two occurrences of John refer to the same individual.) But the two sentences of (15) are essentially synonymous (or would be if (b) were good) in a way that the two sentences of (14) are n o t a n d in addition, while (15b) is not normally a good superficial sentence of English (though it does exist as an intermediate structure), (14b) is perfectly good: it’s needed as a superficial possibility, since (14a) is not equivalent to it. But then, how are we to account for this set of facts?

First, we must look at the meanings of the two sentences in (14). Since they have different meanings, we would expect that, at the level of analysis at which meaning is pertinent, these two

(b) Everyone expects everyone to die.

(b)


would be differently expressed. The first means that each person expects himself to die; he has no expectations according to (14a) for anyone else. So here the subject of die is, indeed fully coreferential with the subject of expect, and it’s not surprising that equi-NP-deletion has occurred.

But in (b) something else is happening. Here, each person expects that each person, including himself and everyone else, will die. So the person doing the expecting is not fully coreferential to the person or persons doing the dying. Hence equi-NP-deletion is inapplicable. So the meanings are different, based on different possibilities of quantification in the two sentences; or, as it would be expressed in logical symbolism, (16):

(16) (a) = (14) (a) (V) Expect (x, Die(x)) (16) (b) = (14) (b) (V) Expect (x, (VY) DidY)) Therefore, in order to disambiguate these sentences we must have recourse to non-lexical items, to highly abstract entities like the quantifier V. A part of the definition of deep structures (Chomsky 1965:136 and 224) is that they may contain nothing but items that might be superficial lexical items, or at least members of those classes, or one of a number of specific symbols: INDEF, A, PASSIVE. . . but not quantifiers. So representations like those in (16) are explicitly forbidden as deep structures. Thus, there is no means of expressing in any nonad hoc way the relationship between the sentences (14) so that we account both for the differences of meaning between the two and the differences in syntactic behavior. And as should be clear, the two are intimately related. A deep-structure based theory cannot capture this generalization. A theory in which basic elements of meaning- among them, quantifiers-are possible units at the deepest level of syntactic relevance can do so. Many facts of the same kind are now known, suggesting rather conclusively, I think, that if you insist on a level of deep structure, you will necessarily miss generalizations and be forced to rely on very ad hoc statements of rules. For this reason a number of scholars have, in the last several years (roughly since 1967) gradually been coming to the conclusion that the basic level of syntactic analysis is also the level of semantic structure, and is far more abstract, as well as universal, than the deep structure envisioned by Chomsky, which is both concrete and English-specific (containing as it does modals, articles, and by+PASSIVES).

This is the basis of the theory that has been called generative semantics. Very simply, there is no separation of levels: a single,


highly abstract, underlying structure underlies the semantics, the syntax, and the phonology, and further, syntactic information may be used in the statement of phonologcal or semantic rules, and conversely. (Examples showing the necessity of this are given in G. Lakoff 1970.)

Such a theory allows, in fact forces, us t o take real-world contextual information into account in determining whether a sentence is well-formed. Real-world linked information that a speaker uses t o determine whether a sentence may be gram- matically or appropriately uttered in a given context is, in such a theory, available t o the speaker as part of his grammatical information.

It is often objected t o by people hearing this whirl-wind description for the first time, “But that means every bit of information a speaker has about anything must be represented in his grammar!” And this, then, sounds like a terrible load, an incredible excrescence of redundancy. Actually it’s not.

First of all, all that information is in the speaker’s brain, somewhere. The only questions are, where? And how accessible is this information to his grammar? We might, conceivably, want to say that the speaker’s entire conceptual system is coded linguistically, that the grammar does indeed have access t o all the cognitive equipment possessed by a person. But the grammar does not have access t o it directly; probably all this real-world information is encoded into broad categories, and it is on the basis of these categorizations that linguistically-relevant distinctions may be made. The speaker assigns his knowledge t o these broad categories, in order t o determine how to speak of it. The categories are probably assumed by most speakers to be at least culture-wide, perhaps universal; hence consternation commonly ensues when it becomes clear to one participant in a discourse that another is operating with different categorizations.

We might list a few of the categorizations now known to exist:

1. What is being communicated is newlold information to the addressee

The use of definite (old) vs. indefinite (new) articles is partly determined according to this category:

(17) I saw (“a‘} man in (““a”> red coat this morning.

2. The subject under discussion is/is not unique (Articles are also assigned according to this categorization.)


{Tie} guy I used t o date is going with Mary

3. What is being talked about is good/bad.

the murders. admits takes credit for The SLA {

4. The speaker of the sentence vouches/does not vouch/ explicitly disbelieves for the truth of a complement sentence attributed to another speaker.

that the noon is made of green cheese. imagmes j

As the reader will see, often several of these categories will figure in the eventual superficial form of a lexical item or a whole sentence; sometimes, perhaps, none will come into play. There aren’t really too many categorizations possible-those that have been identified are quite broad. But the reader will note that it is the assignment of a sentence t o a category that determines syntactic or lexical choice, not specific sentences one by one. So we don’t have infinite possible contexts to deal with, but rather, a relatively few context-types, to which contexts are matched and into which they are fitted. While we can, theoretically, subdivide our impressions of the real world innumerable ways, only a relative few (certainly under 50) of these ways will be linguistically relevant: that is, effect the superficial form of sentences. (For discussion of some of the contextual categorizations relevant in English in determining the choice of lexical items, cf. Fillmore 1969 and 1970.) That is not t o say there are no problems for this theory.

The actual determination of possible categories in universal grammar is one, and a difficult one, as is the related question: how many such linguistically-relevant categories are pertinent in a given language? How much variation may there be between languages in this regard? Here is where the isolated theorist can fall into a pit: he needs input from the real world, if he is t o avoid such a pitfall. We know of some idiosyncratic choices certain languages make; but this should merely show us how much more we need to know.

For instance, we know that there are languages which insist on making a particular distinction that one either may or may not make in another language, and has no means of making save by elaborate circumlocution in still a third. These are the situations that bedevil translators: either you leave something out, or you put


i t in very awkwardly and unnaturally, or you footnote. I can give an example from one of the few languages besides English I know anything about at all, in (21):

corrupisse t . corruperat. (21) (a) Marcus Publium necavit quod uxorem eius

(b) “M. killed P. because P. had seduced M’s wife.” Now the English sentence is ambiguous: it either means that Publius actually, according t o the speaker of (21)’ did seduce Marcus’ wife, or that this was the excuse Marcus gave for killing Publius, but the speaker doesn’t know whether this is the real reason, or even whether Marcus’ wife had been seduced. In Latin, the subjunctive (the first of the two choices in (21b) is used when the speaker disavows the responsibility for the truth of Marcus’s reason, and the indicative is used when the speaker expressly vouches for Marcus’ reason. In English we sometimes have ways of expressing the distinction: we can sometimes say, “John objected to Bill’s candidacy o n the grounds that/because he was too liberal,” in which on the grounds that suggests that it’s only John’s reason, while because suggests that the speaker goes along with the subject. But for some reason, neither of these options is very natural in the translation of (21), and so we are stuck with either an ambiguity, an awkward translation, or a circumlocution like, “M. killed P. becauseand it’s a fact-he, etc.” which itself changes the sense of the sentence perceptibly by changing a presupposition t o an assertion.

We know that there are languages in which, in every sentence uttered, the speaker must indicate whether what he says is his own opinion, someone else’s or generally-assumed truth : these languages use verbal affixes called dubitatives when the speaker is relying on someone else’s information. Some languages, as we know, such as Japanese, must encode markers of relative status of speaker and addressee into every communication, sometimes on several levels: choice of lexical item, choice of sentence-particle, or choice of verbal inflectional ending. Speakers of such languages feel a void when they speak English: there isn’t anything to put where they feel the need for a marker; so often they resort to circumlocution, and this is another thing that gives the English spoken by native speakers of Japanese an artificially over-polite sound.

The language teacher has had much experience with data of this sort. He knows what, in one language, is easy for a speaker of another language to learn, and what is impossible. A speaker of English finds one thing particularly difficult to master, say, in


Russian; a speaker of Japanese might find the major hurdle altogether different. And some th ing seem to occasion a great deal of difficulty for language learners of all backgrounds: we would hypothesize that such things were relatively rare phenomena, not occurring in very many other languages in that overt form; other things, however morphologically complex they looked superficially, might be fairly simple t o grasp; these, we would surmise, were relatively widespread phenomena in the languages of the world, so that someone learning a language with such a feature would be less apt to find i t unique.

I t is of great theoretical importance t o us to identify these different kinds of traits and differentiate among them, since this would give us some clue as to how t o set up universal underlying structures in a non ad hoc or English-dominated way. We need ways of relating culture-wide psychological assumptions to linguistic output, as well: how shall we incorporate the fact, in our grammar, that the Eskimos have six words for snow, that Americans have ten or so euphemisms for bathroom, none for kitchen; that Germans have different words for eating done by people and by animals; Obviously the categories in which we arrange our assumptions about reality will differ somewhat from language to language, although the core groups-like true-false; good-bad-will probably remain the same. But we need to know the extent of this variability, and only people who have dealt with several languages in detail can help us here. The theorist can, certainly, eventually give some help t o the applied linguist: he can suggest ways of making analogies, resemblances between languages that are perhaps not superficially obvious, shorthand devices like rules which, if they are nonformally and non ad hocly stated, may make language learning somewhat easier and pleasanter, by using the abilities a speaker has gained in one language in helping him learn another. But the theorist must first know what to look for, what the possibilities are, where true similarities exist; and only the applied linguist can tell him.

Finally, this dichotomy I have been assuming-here is the applied linguist, out in the real world, he never reads books, he never speculates. Here is the theorist. He only reads books. He is abstruse. No one can understand a word he says, especially him-is in many respects an exaggeration, and becoming less realistic by the day. In the days when it was understood that the theorist studied linguistic “competence”some idealized version of the rules that seldom if ever, actually, existed in the real world of real s p e e c h a n d the practical linguist, if he did anything, was


concerned with “performance”, and never the twain, etc., there was some justification for supposing there were two separate realms. But we have been saying that the theorist’s most recent pressing concern has been with establishing the rules of language use, intention, success and failure in real communication. There- fore, as recent work has tended t o show, there is no basis any more for the performance-competence distinction (cf. G. Lakoff 1973); most of what had been thought of as performance is just as much competence as the passive rule or relativization, let us say. So this hoary argument is no longer of much interest. Rather, the theorist needs t o know- he doesn’t really right now-what sorts of deviations from the ideal “competence model” are found, and how they are related t o the “ideal” grammar of the language. For instance: 1. in second-language learning: what errors are most prevalent? 2. in language pathology-mental disease and aphasia: how is the

grammar affected? Shall we call it grammatical degeneration, or problems in perceiving an encoding real-world context? And what does our answer tell us about preferred means of therapy?

3 . in stylistics: what special idiosyncratic uses of grammar create a “style”? And how does a style create in its readers a specific, generally-agreed on emotional and intellectual reaction? We react differently t o Vanity Fair and to Pride and Prejudice-and altogether differently to Gravity’s Rainbow. Why? Most of the stylistic work done from a linguistic point of view has dealt only with surface syntactic categories-number of articles, length and superficial complexity of sentences, passives. But how is the idiosyncratic world-view of the writer reflected in his work, in its superficial form, or its style? Is this what we are, most deeply, reacting to? How is poetry like, and different from, the pathological language degeneration of the schizo- phrenic?

4. in advertising and propaganda: how d o we “persuade”? How d o we use language to alter people’s perceptions? Is there a distinction we can make on linguistic grounds between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” forms of persuasion?

So we see that the theoretical linguist must deal with problems of the intellect and morality, with reality and sanity. In order to do linguistic theory at all adequately or interestingly, he must come t o grips with the effect of language in the world in which i t is used, with the intent and effect of communication. The applied linguist must concern himself with decisions among


possible theories, universals of grammar, relations among grammatical systems. The differences between the two types of linguists are fast becoming less interesting than their similarities.

REFERENCES

Baker, C. L. and Brame, M. K. 1972. Global rules: A rejoinder. Language

Borkin, A. 1971. Polarity items in questions. In D. Adams, et al. (Eds.), Papers from the Seventh Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.

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