multilingualism, sociolinguistics and theories of linguistic form: some unfinished reflections

Language Sciences 32 (2010) 624–637

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Language Sciences

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Multilingualism, sociolinguistics and theories of linguistic form: someunfinished reflections q

Rajendra SinghUniversité de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords:DistributionalismGenerativismLinguistic formMonolingualismMultilingualismSoicolinguistics

0388-0001/$ - see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Ltddoi:10.1016/j.langsci.2010.08.005

q This is a slightly revised version of the R.N. Srsustaining a dialogue in which I did not always folloan abridged version of this same lecture at the CapeLove and Rajend Mesthrie for their invitation to attethe oral version he saw and for putting up with mproverbially anonymous reviewer for helping me toThe usual disclaimers apply.

E-mail address: [email protected]

In this paper I attempt to make the case that those of us who take multilingualism to be theunmarked case must work towards an alternative theory of linguistic form because if wedon’t what most of us do will continue to be seen as what Dasgupta (2000) refers to as asweeping up operation. I shall argue that it is NOT enough to merely celebrate multilingual-ism or to use its existence to dismiss what cannot be dismissed or to shift attention fromlanguage to language institutions. Our commitment to multilingualism must lead us tocombat the prediliction of the theoretician of form to parade distributional regularitiesas the picture of the undismissable and indispensible native speaker (cf. Coulmas, 1981).Fortunately, natural laboratories called multilingual contexts furnish abundant evidencefor the construction of such a theory. They show that the routine abridgement of our lin-guistic competence is unwarranted but also that they have, as Haugen and others sug-gested in the past, important implications for the construction of monolingualgrammars. The only option we have, I argue, is to refuse to renew the agreement we allsigned almost a century ago and to work towards a new theory of linguistic form.

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1. Introduction

Although general arguments against the validity of monolingually grounded theories of language in a world where mono-lingualism is highly marked have existed for some time and are well-known (for a particularly telling critique of such the-ories in sociolinguistics, see Agnihotri, 2000), they do not, unfortunately, seem to have any bearing on linguistic form. I shallattempt to make the case that EVEN the theory of linguistic form and architecture of grammar, which has so far been left to thelinguist who grounds her work in monolinguality, is better constructed by those of us who see what the contemporary the-oretician of form calls the periphery as the centre of the constitutive rules of our linguistic capacity, which is not the samething as ‘competence’. That no contemporary theory of sociolinguistics can do full justice to the sociolinguistic complexitiesof a multilingual society is already well known.

Despite apparent disagreements between them, the theoretician of linguistic form or grammar, with her idealizationof a homogenous monolingual speech community, and the researcher of multilingualism, with her assumption thatmonolingualism is really the marked case, seem to agree that it is indeed the privilege of the former to postulate the moulds

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ivastava Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Delhi. I am grateful to R.K. Agnihotri forw Grice, and to Probal Dasgupta and Jayant Lele for their willingness to hear. I was supposed to presentTown Conference on the native speaker but was unable to do so. I am, however, very grateful to Nigel

nd that conference. I am also grateful to Umberto Ansaldo for suggesting several very useful changes toy inability/refusal to make some of the changes I know he would have liked me to make, to the

improve the dialogic potential of this paper, and to Otto Ikome for helping me clean up the manuscript.

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R. Singh / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 624–637 625

grammatical knowledge must fit into. They seem, in other words, to agree that it is the former’s privilege to take guessesregarding what Koster (1987) calls the patterns on the wings of butterflies, patterns that seem to resist the heavy hand ofthe nominalist. Although the latter can, of course, add a statistical footnote here and there and explore this or that socialvariable, the algebra, they agree, must be constructed by the former. This state of affairs is quite clearly a consequence ofthe fact that modern linguistics co-emerged with the nation state.

The interest that multilingual contexts inevitably generate in quotidian problems of living can explain why most scholarsfrom such contexts prefer to work on things that seem more concrete and fruitful than pursuing abstract questions of lin-guistic form, but we cannot explain the almost total lack of interest in these questions amongst scholars of multilingualismunless we assume that the division of labour mentioned above is (almost) universally accepted. Except, of course, by thosewho, like Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), seem to believe that some acts of identity can be executed with linguistic con-tent that comes in no particular form – a rather unhelpful position, because it insists on seeing footprints of allegedly non-existent feet, but I shall return to the matter later. I would like to submit that the tacit agreement outlined above needs to berevised. I shall make my case by exposing some of the serious limitations of what seem to be the dominant ways of doinggrammar (=linguistics, narrowly defined) and sociolinguistics.

2. Critique of generative views

Multilingual contexts actually offer crucial evidence even for monolingual grammar or competence, provided, of course,that competence is construed, as it must be, as something that underlies and explains the distributional regularities de-scribed by the theoretician of linguistic form or by her statistically inclined cohort and NOT as the reification of those regu-larities (cf. Harris, 1941, p. 345), as it generally is. The multilingual context routinely presents situations that allow thelinguist to get a glimpse of what Kant (1929) called constitutive rules, rules that tell us what is to count as a P when weare dealing with any ‘if P, then Q’ statement, statements that according to him belong to the category of regulative rules.Only the former can help us go beyond the regulative because in order to apply any if P, then Q statement, we need to knowwhat is to count as P (for a detailed discussion, see Singh, 1996). Unfortunately, it is the regulative rules which typically de-scribe the norm, which get enshrined as competence, and which invariably seems to distort the picture presented by lin-guists who ground their theories of form in monolinguality, sometimes despite their own credentials.

It is easy to illustrate the limitations of the distributionalist accounts presented as grammars (or competences) by suchlinguists. They generally describe phonological competence, for example, in terms of what they call phonological rules (or asvariable phonological rules in the parasitic enterprise known as variationist sociolinguistics in North America, an enterprisewhich, as I have argued in several places, seems to mock man’s linguisticality and ridicule his sociality, cf. Singh, 1996, 1997,in particular) and see the results of what happens in situations of contact, generally illustrated in their own societies by sec-ond-language learning, as derivative extensions of these rules. Guided by the illusion (cf. Hymes, 1983) that her society ismonolingual and by the somewhat dubious argument that so called Universal Grammar or UG is not available to second-lan-guage learners, the monolingually grounded linguist happily ignores this evidence as bits of unreliable ‘external evidence’(cf. Singh, 1988), but anyone who has worked in a multilingual context knows that speakers routinely do things that cannotpossibly be described in those terms because there just are not any relevant rules there to construct derivative extensions of,so that what they do must be included in a proper characterization of their linguistic capacity. Needless to add that the dis-missal of external evidence by most contemporary structuralist models of language, something to which I shall return manytimes, and its treatment under the rather ill-defined rubric ‘sociolinguistics’, are both quite consistent with the terms of thecontract I mentioned above—in fact, they both follow from it.

The phenomena of svarabhakti or epenthesis, which appears everywhere a language has to deal with unacceptable con-sonantal clusters either in contact or in diachrony, and the devoicing of the final voiced stops of the languages that havethem by speakers of languages like Manadarin that do not have even voiceless final stops are perhaps the best known exam-ples of this in phonology. The monolingually grounded distributionalist makes a crucial error here: instead of seeing whatshe calls the phonology of language L as a delimited, almost degenerate, subset of the phonological capacity of speakers of L,she sees processes that provide a glimpse of the constitutive as peripheral things to be explained by dubious extensions ofher abridged theory called competence. This move actually reduces her notion of competence to a reification of what Harris(1941) called ‘the mere scientific arrangement’ of distributional regularities, a reduction tantamount to promoting the reg-ulative as the constitutive.

Although it understandably appears to be a mockery of linguistic capacity to most multilingually grounded linguists, underthe terms of the agreement outlined above, which deprives them of the privilege of constructing an algebra, all that they cando is to run to experts in probability theory for advice. Even the best advice of that sort cannot be of much help because prob-ability theory is known to be of no particular use, as was acknowledged by its architects (cf. Singh, 1996), when probability isclose to 0 or 1, and most linguistic rules, pace Labov, have a probability of 1, at least when they are correctly formulated. Con-sider, for example, Labov’s (1971) and Guy’s (1980) classic variationist treatment of word-final consonant deletion. Labov’swell-known observation that the rule is variably affected by a preceding consonant and a following word-initial vowel followsstraightforwardly from sandhi possibilities, even in a language like English (cf. Singh and Ford, 19891). As for Guy’s ‘refinement’

1 If this strikes the reader as partisan, she may wish to look at the immanent critique of the variable rule enterprise offered by Fasold (1991).

626 R. Singh / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 624–637

consonant > liquid > vowel, all that one needs is the sonority hierarchy, something phonologists have worked with for more thana century. Similar considerations lead one to doubt the explanatory potential of the autonomous social variables Labovians workwith (cf. Dittmar, 1976; Romaine, 1994). Once their appropriate anchoring in political economy and sociology is properly under-stood, their allegedly autonomous variable status seems to disappear (cf. Singh and Lele, 1996).

To turn to the grammatical side, I have extensively argued that formally what needs to be kept track of in presenting whatis called the phonology of a language is the set of conditions that trigger repair (cf. Singh, 1985, 1987, 1990) and that this istrue at the conscious, accessible level only (at the unconscious level the primitives remain), as Stampe (1979) and Doneganand Stampe (1979, 2009) have convincingly argued, the processes and NOT the constraints their interactions give rise to, aninsight that seems to have escaped the proponents of OT, despite the fact that they do give Stampe and my own work (Princeand Smolensky, 1993) some credit for their entirely formalist enterprise. The rules or conditions of so-called phonologicalcompetence do not, indeed cannot, constitute the phonology of the speaker. It is her phonology that gives her the epentheticvowel or the power to change her language, which is precisely what she does when she borrows a word-final voiced stop as avoiceless one because before that her language did not have any.

Notice that this characterization provides a picture of what is generally assumed to be the language without parading it asa picture of its native speaker. The native speaker is, after all, both the carrier and the changer of her language. Whether thechanges she wants to introduce will become the norm of tomorrow or not is, obviously, a matter that falls within the domainof what Chomsky (1986) calls Orwell’s Problem, the study of which reveals precisely how and why freely available informa-tion is often conveniently ignored. Since this option is not available to fractured structuralism of the sort practiced by mostcontemporary phonologists, it is difficult to see what extension of which mechanism would do the trick. What Kant insistedon as the defining characteristic of constitutive rules is just not there in what is called phonology or phonological compe-tence. Whereas most contemporary models of phonology want to characterize the speaker as a derivative extension ofthe empirically deduced distributional regularities of lento speech, the evidence supports the view that the speaker is largerthan what is called the ‘‘phonology” of her language. Whereas contemporary phonology generally describes the distribu-tional regularities of lento speech, treats the mechanisms it deems necessary with varying degrees of reificational awe,and treats everything else, such as fast speech and loan phonology, as derivative extensions of what it calls phonology,one must actually see the phonology of a language as a constrained derivative delimitation of the speaker. This clearly ex-poses the limitations of the notion of ‘competence’, often a site for reificational practices of contemporary structuralism inlinguistics, essentially naming practices used to promote appropriately christened descriptions of problems as their princi-pled explanations.

3. Critique of sociolinguistics

To reject the sociologist’s suspicion of all laws of linguistic form—unable to find any non-linguistic explanation for theconsonantal shift in German, even Marx, it would be recalled, had to admit their existence—is one thing; to promote the reg-ularities of the necessarily skewed distribution of an unnaturally constrained competence as laws of our linguisticality isquite another—the multilingual speaker has several ways of getting even with those who would promote every propertyof the language of Tasmania as a universal,2 particularly if these universals are based on only the lento variety of the elite type!Neither the sociologist’s entirely understandable lack of interest in language (except as a way in to social relations) nor the reifi-cational games played by the monolingually grounded linguist need deter us from finding what Foucault (1969, p. xiii) calls ‘therules to which any language must conform for it to be able to exist’ as a language.

The observation that many Chomskyans are too quick to promote whatever distributional regularities they find in whatthey call ‘language’—often in the name of science—is a valid observation and an entirely justified criticism of the generativeenterprise, but it cannot be used to dismiss Chomsky’s insistence that the major task of the linguist qua linguist is to find thelaws of linguistic form and architecture and that is all she can do as a linguist. It is true that norms do not, as I point out inSingh (2000), cease to be norms when they are internalized by individuals, but it is also true that once they ARE internalized,they become ontologizable and a part of what is now standardly referred to as I-language, guesses and hypotheses regardingthe nature and structure of which constitute, according to Chomsky (1986), our best window on what he calls Plato’s Prob-lem, which can be summarized as the extrapolation of infinite knowledge from limited and perhaps even degenerate data.They cannot, in other words, be internalized except in terms of specific moulds that constitute linguistic knowledge. And it isthe discovery of these specific moulds that is the primary task of the linguist, or – if one must make a distinction – of thegrammarian, the chaser of butterflies.

What is wrong, in my view, with the Chomskyan enterprise is not this insistence on the ontologization of internalizedknowledge of language but the fact that it systematically ignores evidence that is forced upon us in multilingual contexts.Although Chomsky (2000, p. 43), for example, duly notes that given the existence of differences, monolingualism is ‘almostunimaginable’, he seems willing to allow the construction of competence on the basis of evidence available in uniform

2 Given that the aboriginal communities in Tasmania were killed off by the late 19th century, the proverbially anonymous reviewer finds this reference to bepointless. Its proper interpretation requires familiarity with Chomsky and Halle (1968) and not with the history of Tasmania. The fact that most sociolinguistsare not as familiar with The Sound Pattern of English as they are with history and demography is really one of the points I am trying to make. Here is theinterpretive cue from Chomsky and Halle: ‘‘For example, if only inhabitants of Tasmania survive a future war, it might be a property of all then existinglanguages that pitch is not used to differentiate lexical items.” (p. 4). There is, unfortunately, a divide here, and we need to do something about it.


situations (p. 60). Sometimes he also seems to make the somewhat over-simplifying assumption that intra-linguistic diver-sity is in principle no less dramatic than inter-linguistic diversity. Although he is, of course, right in asserting that when dif-ferences are seen as crossing language boundaries is a socio-political matter, there is sufficient empirical evidence to showthat intra-linguistic diversity, for entirely understandable historical reasons, tends to be less dramatic than inter-linguisticdiversity. The greater the diversity, the greater the chances of the appearance of processes that may remain unrealized. It isnot, in other words, a question merely of how many different parallel states the child can effortlessly attain, but what beingin a multilingual context does for the units and processes needed for any of those multiple states, howsoever unified or dif-ferentiated they might actually be. In equating inter-lingual variation with intra-lingual variation, Chomsky may in fact beaccepting the ‘Standard = Universal’ equation, routinely presupposed by most sociolinguists.

To return to the other side of the picture, the Sampson (2005) or Lass (1976) emphasis on the epistemological (rather thanon the ontological) is well taken, but the ontologization of linguistic form cannot be dismissed: speakers have knowledge, thatknowledge is represented, and it IS represented with specific moulds and categories or units and processes. It is so because, asChomsky (2000, p. 64) puts it, the external systems with which language interfaces can ‘only access information presented incertain forms; to be usable, the language must provide information in the appropriate form’. Post-modernist efforts to decon-struct this and that cannot succeed in wishing away those moulds, neither as solid and rich as Chomskyans claim nor asephemeral or negotiable as sociolinguists and sociologists, who, I repeat, exhibit a remarkable lack of interest in the formsof language, would like to have them. For this or that material reason, the grammar one has may be curtailed, but the mouldsthat constitute it are NOT subject to variation, sociolinguistic or any other kind. Biographical contingencies and material cir-cumstances may make it impossible for one to construct a multi-storied house, but even a single-storied house must usethe bricks in the shapes and sizes in which they come. The task is to find and define those shapes and sizes, and multilingualcommunities offer a formidable challenge to definitions and structures that have been thrown up by monolingually groundedtheories of the building blocks of knowledge of language, and, of course, a unique opportunity to learn about these matters.Almost all Paninian constructs such as morphemes and stems in morphology, as we shall see, are in fact examples of that sort.

It is easy, much too easy, in my view, to say that the prevalent theories of linguistic form are inadequate, and quite easy tomove on to a study of literacy or acts of identity and still claim to be involved in linguistics. The challenge lies in finding atheory of linguistic form and architecture that IS up to the challenge of multilingualism. Scholars like Le Page are, of course,free to explore what they want to explore, but in as much as their work says nothing about the nature and structure of pho-nology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, its construal as linguistics is problematic for a majority of linguists: they arestudying language institutions and not language in any meaningful sense. To make matters worse, they too use the catego-ries and outlines provided by the monolingual theoretician for their descriptive purposes, albeit with a pinch of salt, butwhile using the categories furnished by yesterday’s inadequate theory of linguistic form does register the resistance againstthe reificational game played by the theoretician of form, it does not meet the challenge of coming up with a theory of formthat IS adequate for a multilingual world. I agree with them, I repeat, that what needs to be explained is, as Le Page (1997, p.31) puts it, the formation of the concept of a homogenous language and that the meta-language they are asked to use comesfrom a family of inadequate theories of linguistic form, but they have, unfortunately, done little to sketch the outlines of analternative theory of it. Their scepticism, in other words, is justified, but their retreat is not, not if they want their work to beseen as part of linguistics: Le Page (1997, p. 32), after all does speak of ‘units and processes’. Providing a new twist to thewell-known Wittgenstenian metaphor, Le Page says that language is best thought of as a game ‘in which all the speakerscan covertly propose and try out rules, and all the listeners are umpires’, but he seems to forget that the rules the speakerspropose and try out cannot exceed the bounds imposed by the units and processes he does acknowledge and that the um-pires must do their judging on the basis of the units, processes, and rules THEY have.

I honestly do not think that it is possible to argue that the principal task of the linguist is not to find the units, processes,and architecture of the internalized knowledge of language but to study the institutions and material conditions that mayinhibit the acquisition of the entire range of that knowledge, something the ideal native speaker is counterfactually claimedto have. Part of the problem is that the latter task is in fact better accomplished by anthropologists, sociologists, and, as thework of scholars like Brass (1974) and Dasgupta (1970) shows, even by political scientists. These are important matters but itis not clear why the linguist is better equipped to study them (for a quite convincing argument that the linguist may in factnot be well equipped to study them, see Lele’s (2000) review of King (1997). To study the context within which a science isdone is every bit as important as doing that science, perhaps even more so. The point is not that doing physics is better thandoing history, but quite simply that history and sociology are not physics. Thus, to take another Indian example, Gupta andAggarwal (1998), in the introduction to what is generally taken to be a representative collection of contemporary studies inIndian sociolinguistics, rightly note that in contemporary India language has become a symbol of ethnic, caste, regional andother identities, but it is a political fact. Religion is also similarly manipulated by elites in several countries, but that manip-ulation is not appropriately handled in theology.

We could, obviously, make up a new label for what Chomsky does and wants people to focus on, but that will not changeanything. What could and would change things is finding a set of categories and the skeleton within which they could befitted in a way that could naturally accommodate the lessons about human linguistic capacity furnished by multilingual soci-eties, something multilingually grounded critics of the generative enterprise have, unfortunately, NOT tried to do. It is, unfor-tunately, not enough to leave it to what Le Page (1984, p. 115) calls ‘the general internal economy of linguistic systems’, for itis precisely the nature and structure of these systems that has to be the focus of linguistics. As for the well-known Le Pagianclaim that there is no such thing as a language, one has to simply point out that that is exactly what Chomsky says and means


when he argues that E-languages like English, French, and Russian are not possible objects of study. For him, language isquite simply the linguistic knowledge of the individual speaker (cf. Smith, 1999). The difference is that whereas Le Pageand Tabouret-Keller (1985) want to study the projection of the speaker’s inner universe (p. 181) without paying much atten-tion to the nature and structure of the linguistic part of that inner universe, Chomsky wants to concentrate on the moulds inwhich the speaker’s linguistic knowledge, with the help of which she undertakes such projections, is stored in her inner uni-verse. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller seem unwilling to come to terms with the fact that linguistic acts of identity are in factexecutions of what is in the inner universe, guided, of course, by accommodation theory, though that modulation itself maybe restricted by the inner knowledge of the forms of the other’s knowledge (=passive competence). Although their reluctanceis understandable—I too am afraid of Quine—their unwillingness is NOT: just because it is difficult to cope with the cognitive isNOT a sufficient reason to give up on it. There is, in other words, NO way to get around Chomsky’s insistence that the task oflinguistics is to discover the categories and processes with which knowledge of language – not, it is important to underline,knowledge ABOUT language – is represented in the mind. It is not easy, but that is what linguistics HAS to do. Confusing factsabout English, Hindi, or Punjabi with facts of English, Hindi, and Punjabi does not help, I’m afraid. And Le Page (1997, p. 32)does speak of trying out rules—they must have a shape, even if it is ever-modifiable!

They are, of course, right in their critique of Labov’s maladaptation of Chomsky (p. 9, 114, and 199), for example, but thatcritique has nothing to do with Chomsky’s insistence that only I-language can and should be studied in linguistics. The dif-ference is crucial. The work of Le Page and Tabouret-Keller seems to belong to sociology and anthropology, and they seem tobe aware of this. In fact, Le Page (1997, p. 31) himself acknowledges that his ‘acts of identity’ view is at best a linking theory,and in doing so in fact concedes part of Cameron’s (1990) claim that without a theory linking the ‘socio-’ to ‘-linguistic’, weare ‘stranded in an explanatory void’. I shall return later to what sort of ‘socio-’ may be best related to ‘-linguistic’.

I must also point out that whereas Labov’s work CAN be seen as making an arguable claim regarding the knowledge of lan-guage—that it is probabilistic in nature—the work of Le Page and Tabouret-Keller is, as far as the study of the knowledge oflanguage as a system of mental representations is concerned, irrelevant—not unimportant in itself but irrelevant. To put thematter somewhat differently, whereas someone interested in the nature and structure of the mental representation ofknowledge of language can find lots to disagree with in Labov, she would be hard put to find any such thing in the workof Le Page. ‘‘Das ist einmale falsche,” as Pauli would have said, unfortunately. As for Chomsky’s followers, most of them seemto forget that parameter-reading is not linguistics any more than meter-reading is physics. The task, in other words, is tocome up with a calculus poor enough to accommodate the facts of multilinguality and rich enough to provide a hopefullydirect reflection of the fact that no representation of knowledge pertinent for linguistic productions is an island. The problemwith the generative enterprise is, in other words, not its innatism or mentalism but its insistence on what can only be de-scribed as maximalism. The richness of the specification of what Chomsky calls the language faculty seems directly propor-tional to the amount of evidence ignored, including, of course, the rich evidence from multilingual contexts. When we takeevidence that goes beyond elite lento speech, particularly the evidence from language-contact, into account, it becomes clearthat the language faculty is very minimally hard-wired indeed, and it certainly does not seem to contain any hard-wiring forthe names of the problems the generative enterprise has consistently promoted as principles of UG.

It should be obvious that how the calculus in question or its intended product is taught or not taught are important mat-ters, but they cannot be construed as parts of it. It should be equally obvious that the I/E dichotomy postulated by Chomskydoes not solve problems of the sort that the work of Le Page and his followers have brought to our attention. We certainlyneed to work on how linguistic knowledge of languages is internalized in multilingual settings and under what ethnographicconditions its putative compartmentalization is suspended, but, hopefully, without abandoning the search for what is in theinner universe of the speakers in such contexts. Contemporary models of simultaneous activation, such as Muysken (1997),for example, suggest that it may in fact not be necessary to throw out the baby with the bathwater. What I am suggesting,then, is that we interpret Chomsky’s claim that there is only one language to mean that linguistic knowledge has discernableshape and appreciable architecture and proceed with the task of demonstrating that evidence from multilingual contextsshows that shape and that architecture to be somewhat different from what they have been depicted as by generativists.The bricks with which the house of the knowledge of phonology and morphology is built do not, in other words, seem tolook anything like the bricks generativists have been using.

4. Lessons from phonology

To return to empirical matters, the appearance of the epenthetic vowel to adapt loan words or to break up unparsable orunpronounceable consonantal clusters both in synchrony and diachrony also shows that epenthesis is not a rule of Punjabi,Hindi, English, or Vulgar Latin but that it is a constitutively available to all humans. To talk about it as a rule of this or thatlanguage is to impose a monolingual view on the multilingual potential of human speakers. And its use in loan adaptation iscertainly NOT an extension of the rule of epenthesis of a given language. Speaker phonologies are certainly much bigger thanwhat we have been trained to call phonologies or phonological comptences.

Since it is possible to suggest that the contrast ‘phonology’/‘speaker-phonology’ or ‘competence’/capacity can be accountedfor by invoking Universal Phonology (or the phonological part of what is now generally referred to as UG), it is necessary toexamine that suggestion in some detail. The suggestion is that ‘speaker phonology’ is larger than ‘phonology’ because the for-mer is obtained by adding Universal Phonology (UP) to ‘phonology’. There are three problems with this defense of contem-


porary structuralism: (i) Universal Phonology or UP is generally arrived at by factoring out what seems to be common to ‘pho-nologies’; (ii) it is not clear precisely what really motivates UP; and (iii) it is not clear how UP can guarantee the accessibility ofword-final devoicing, for example, to a speaker whose phonology does not exhibit alternations or phonologically relevant pat-terns from which it could be legitimately extracted as a global phonological redundancy. Even if the question of the essentiallyempiricist nature of the methodology used by modern fractured structuralism of the sort exemplified by most contemporarygenerative approaches to phonology is ignored, the resolution of these problems is far from obvious.

Multilingual contexts provide ample evidence for the position, extensively argued for by Donegan and Stampe (1979),that the child is endowed with a universal set of processes, and that learning a phonology is learning to delimit her phono-logical capacity. The related question of the availability of evidence from loan phonology, so very important for contempo-rary structuralism, becomes irrelevant because what the learner needs evidence for is suppression and not for learning. Thatwhich need not be suppressed comes without evidence. All that is needed is the lack of negative evidence. Under this sort ofaccount, UP cannot be merely what is common in all (the little) phonologies of the world.

Notice that we can now make sense of statements like the one by Paradis and Prunet (1990, p. 4), for example, only underthe sort of approach I am arguing for. Their assertion ‘Indeed, spontaneous or test-induced errors committed in normal oraphasic speech often use processes which are not part of the phonology of the language’ naturally inspires the question:‘What, then, are they a part of?’ The paradox they produce can be resolved only under the assumption that what is calledthe phonology of a language is in fact a rather degenerate subset of what is perhaps better called ‘speaker phonology’, some-thing that manifests itself routinely in multilingual contexts. Or as Donegan and Stampe (1979, p. 172) put it, ‘‘The obser-vable constraints and alternations of English, or any other language, are a subset of the regular substitutions its speakerswould impose on unpronounceable words from other languages”.

The examination of the relationship between phonology and loan phonology (cf. Hyman (1970) for some early classic dis-cussions) quite clearly reveals the limitations of any theory of phonology grounded in monolinguality. The standard assump-tion in the literature, as I have pointed out, seems to be that systematic aspects of loan-phonology are to be accounted for interms of derivative extensions of mechanisms available in phonology. Thus, Broselow (1983), Pulleyblank (1988) and Wein-berger (1990), for example, explain epenthetic vowels in loan-words in Iraqi and Egyptian Arabic, Yoruba, and Spanish with aderivative extension of the rule of epenthesis in the phonologies of these languages, but things seem to be the other wayaround: the rules of so called phonologies are a degenerate subset of phonological processes.

It should have been obvious to scholars working in multilingual contexts that the Naturalist assumption that the acqui-sition of phonology was not the acquisition of what contemporary structuralists call rules or constraints but the suppressionof processes every human child is endowed with was the appropriate assumption for them. If they had worked with thisidea, they might have discovered how insightfully a process-based account can characterize multilingual competence.Although that account cannot be a simple one for the obvious reason that phonology must take representation, production,and perception into account, the basic dichotomy of activation/suppression (of processes) can be used to construct aninsightful account of what happens in multilingual contexts. Activation means that you are allowed to make a substitution,and suppression or limitation means you are not allowed to. (But you might substitute anyway, if you have not got the skillto produce the input.) In multilingual contexts, apparently one keeps almost all of the processes alive and active, at least theones whose suppression is not required by any of the languages in the relevant linguistic universe.

They might have also discovered how processes are differentially suppressed in what Le Page and others refer to as fo-cussed and diffuse societies, if indeed they are differentially suppressed. What, for example, could happen to the processof final devoicing in a bilingual context where the focussed norms of one of the languages required its suppression but thoseof the other did not (English and German, for example)? Or, what happens to it when the norms are diffuse? Unfortunately,scholars working in these contexts chose, for entirely understandable reasons, to work with what I would call non-naturalistmodels of phonology. The sociologically inclined amongst them took refuge in the quantitative model furnished by Labov.Predictably, they found that what they were working with was not adequate, but they have to accept part of the blamefor they, perhaps blinded by what they understandably saw as success, did not look far enough. It must have been the inad-equacy of the calculus furnished by Chomskyans that led some Indian linguists, Pandharipande for example, to go to the ex-tent of claiming that the phenomena of variability of both language structure and language use is a natural process (1986).One wonders, though, what that means: does it mean that structures that show up in language-use vary according to somestandard list of social variables or does it mean that speakers have different units, processes and architectures associatedwith their linguistic knowledge? There is hardly any evidence for the latter interpretation, but I shall return to the matterlater. It is also important to point out that the sociolinguist’s refusal to engage with the architecture of grammar seemsto be guided by the belief, for which there is little evidence, that socially-driven revisions can strike anywhere and NOTby the (entirely different) belief that its units and architecture are the products of the instrumental needs of pedagogy(cf. Bhartrihari: 7th century A.D. and, for some coherent contemporary articulations, Linell, 1998; Singh, 2002).

5. The morphology-lexicon question

In the domain of morphology, what is needed is a theory capable of capturing the fact that the business of language bor-rowing is conducted chiefly with words, an insight quite consistent with the fact that no social or cognitive scientist exceptthe linguist seems to need anything smaller than the word.


I shall present that theory now and then proceed to show that putative cases of the borrowing of affixes can be easilyshown to involve the borrowing of whole words, some of which come with the affixes contemporary structuralists of allstripes claim have been borrowed from the donor languages.

According to the theory of morphology developed by Ford and me (Ford and Singh, 1991; Ford et al., 1997), all that needsto be said about word structure in any language (of any type whatsoever) can and must be said by instantiations of the sche-ma in (1) below. We refer to these instantiations as W(ord) F(ormation) S(trategies) because as generalizations drawn fromknown particular facts, they can be activated in the production and understanding of new words. WFS’s must be formulatedas generally as possible, but, and this is crucial, only as generally as the facts of the matter permit.

1. /X/a M /X0/bwherea. /X/a and /X0/b are words and X and X0 are abbreviations of the forms of classes of words belonging to categories a and

b (with which specific words belonging to the right category can be unified or on to which they can be mapped).b. 0 represents (all the) form-related differences between /X/ and /X0/.c. a and b are categories that may be represented as feature-bundles.d. The M represents a bidirectional implication (if X, then X0 and if X0, then X).e. X0 is a semantic function of X.f. 0 can be null if a =/= b.

It should be obvious that we do not think that either intra-linguistic (inflections vs. derivation, affixation vs. compound-ing, etc.) or inter-linguistic (flectional, isolating, etc.) morphological diversity can affect (1) in any fundamental way. It offersa unified account of what have sometimes been seen as different types of morphologies. The diversity that exists can be readoff the system of strategies that instantiate (1) above, but it does not need to be expressed as a difference in type: a differencein content does not constitute a difference in form (of rules or strategies). (1) also denies any theoretical status to neo-Pani-nian descriptive labels such as ‘‘concatenative”, ‘‘non-concatenative”, ‘‘affixal”, and ‘‘non-affixal”. Again, multiplicity is super-ficial, and resides in descriptive, pedagogical paraphrases of instantiations of (1).

As all morphological relationships can be expressed by strategies instantiating (1), morphology has little or no architec-ture and, to change the metaphor, no traffic rules (such as krt before taddhita). Although there may well be constraints onwhat sorts of things can be morphologized, i.e. constitute categories relevant for a morphological description, there are noconstraints on particular instances of (1), though all manifestations of (1) must, obviously, relate whole words with wholewords.

Representations of the speaker’s knowledge of the patterns of morphological relatedness in her language, morphologicalor word formation strategies (=instantiations of (1)) are invoked only in moments of crisis, i.e., when the speaker needs toanalyze or fashion a word she needs for the purpose at hand, often to meet a syntactically enforced requirement. Theirexploitation, of course, helps her to bridge the gap between the actual words she happens to know and the possible wordsshe can be said to know—actually their existence makes the known merely a subset of the knowable. When they ARE invokedto produce what will become words, their ‘‘outputs” are seamless wholes, with no brackets, boundaries or acyclic graph frag-ments in them. They are not there to be deleted; they are just not there. WFSs cannot supply these things because they do nothave them. And neither the strategies nor their ‘‘outputs” have any syntactic constituency relationships marked in them inany fashion whatsoever. In both the active and the passive mode, they license the words a speaker has or may come up with(in the ‘‘on line” mode).

If the rules of morphology have the shape I have argued they do, it is legitimate to ask how we can make sense of theenormous body of literature that talks about the borrowing of affixes, obviously with the help of notions and concepts bor-rowed from the Paninian tradition and its neo-Paninian avatars. It is in this context that I want to use the term ‘‘second lex-icon”, which, as Vennemann (1974) tells us, refers to the warehouse where neo-Paninians believe affixes are stored. The‘‘second lexicon” attributes some measure of independent reality to affixes, and in what follows I shall first argue that lan-guage-contact provides no evidence for such an attribution and then proceed to reanalyze some cases that have been mis-takenly presented in the literature as cases of affix borrowing. My thesis is that affixes cannot be borrowed for the rathersimple reason that they do not exist outside the WFSs in which they figure (cf. Ford and Singh, 1992). As language-contactprovides no compelling evidence for their independent existence and their isolatability, the analyses that assume that inde-pendence and isolatability must, in other words, be reinterpreted to make sense of the data they contain.

Although I would like to show precisely how the theory sketched out above accounts for what the distributionalist callssynchronic morphology, I must focus on how it captures the fact that language-traffic in multilingual contexts is conductedwith words and not with morphemes. I shall show, initially by summarizing Singh (2001), how it allows us to understandwhat the linguist working on multilingual contexts has done with the tools she has been provided with by the monolinguallygrounded theoretician of form. To begin with a simple example, it really makes little sense to say that -ity has been borrowedinto English from French: only words ending in -ity were borrowed from French. An affix known to be etymologically ‘‘for-eign” which appears only with words known to have been taken from the same or some other foreign language does notprovide any evidence for this type of borrowing or for the second lexicon. The fact that German ‘‘attaches” -ieren to shampoois, if anything, evidence for the fact that it takes English verbs and makes infinitives out of them with the same strategy withwhich it forms infinitives from Romance verbs. What must have happened historically can be briefly summarized as follows:


it borrowed some verbs from Romance, subjected them to the morphological rule it had for forming infinitives, split thatstrategy into two, one of them introducing the constant -ieren, and then its elite speakers gave rise to the equally elite prac-tice of subjecting all foreign verbs to the newly isolated WFS. At no point can it legitimately be said that German borrowed -ieren from anywhere or even that -ieren exists anywhere in German (cf. Singh and Kully, 1982). I must also point out that Iuse the word ‘‘elite” advisedly because cases of cross-over—from the native stock—are not unknown in German or other lan-guages. These cases cast a shadow of doubt on features such as +native, +Perso-Arabic, and +Chinese, but I cannot pursue thematter here. I shall simply add that the postulation of such features strikes me as a guarantee of the fact that non-elite naïvespeakers were not consulted.

Cases involving pervasive cross-over, such as Papiamentu -do (found in warda-do (from Spanish warda) as well as in na-tive items, seem subject to a similar analysis: you borrow few words, set up a they demand, and then begin subjecting wordsthat used to be subject to another rule to this new rule. A bigger portion of the lexical pie is what all WFSs want: that is how -z ended up as the default plural marker in English (and soon will in German too, if it has not sone so already). Nothing to dowith what neo-Paninians see as the ‘‘second lexicon”, the store-house where neo-Paninians keep their affixes.

Actually, as Muysken (1992) points out, there is contact evidence against the second lexicon. He examines some Aymaraverbal suffixes that can be said to have been borrowed into Southern Peruvian and Bolivian Quechua and finds that, unlikeQuechua verbal affixes, they must occur adjacent to the stem, as if, he adds, they were lexical extensions. Apparently, whathas happened is that Quechua has borrowed some words from Aymara, leading to the postulation of wfss that can be said tointroduce constants like -naga ‘try and’ right next to what neo-Paninians call the stem. Precisely because these WFSs do notcontain any material between the variable and the constant, constants like -naga, despite their productivity in Quechua,must appear where they do. You can, in other words, take almost any Quechua verb and add -naga to it, but you mustadd it before you add anything else. Trivial really. No suffix seems to have been borrowed from anywhere, perhaps becauseit really did not exist anywhere as a suffix.

Muysken, however, believes that the behaviour of Bolivian Quechua -ita, -itu, and situ shows that these have been bor-rowed as suffixes from Spanish. What leads him to say this is the fact that whereas in Peninsular Spanish the form of thediminutive is determined primarily by the gender of the word and secondarily by the phonological shape of the word, inBolivian Quechua it is determined exclusively by phonological shape for there is no gender in Quechua. He sees this as evi-dence for the second lexicon because he believes that the selectional restrictions developed by -ita, -itu, and -situ in Quechuado not correspond either to those of the donor language or to those of the recepient language. But clearly the phonologicalrestrictions are Quechua restrictions, and it is surprising that Muysken sees complete nativization as evidence for the secondlexicon: it is actually evidence for the fact that once WFSs are postulated to account for words that come in from an aliensource, they become the WFSs of the recepient language. In the case at hand, the suffixes in question do not follow the selec-tional restrictions of their counterparts in Spanish because they are not Spanish suffixes any more—they are constants thatappear in Quechua. Apparently, Muysken thinks that these things have been borrowed as affixes because the change in selec-tional restrictions they exhibit shows their liftability and transportability as affixes, but there is no reason why they cannotbe said to have developed them AFTER their occurrence becomes a constitutive part of some Quechua. Actually, it is a case thatcasts doubt on the very notion of selectional restrictions in morphology. Their postulation follows from the postulation ofaffix-like elements. The way I see things, they are actually constitutive of, which are invariably very locally grounded (fora detailed empirical demonstration of this local grounding of WFSs and of the consequences of ignoring it, see Dubeet al., forthcoming).

Notice that what I am saying is what Weinreich (1974, p. 31) implied when he pointed out that the English diminutive -ette has been extracted by speakers of English from such word pairs as statue/statuette and cigar/cigarette and cannot be con-sidered to be a direct transfer of an affix from French. I must, however, point out that one of the factors that Weinreich seemsnot to take fully into account is the nativization of foreign words. He also seems to ignore the possibility that foreign wordsthat can be said to have brought in this or that affix may actually disappear from a language after the diffusion of the allegedaffix, leaving the impression that in fact it was the morpheme in question that was borrowed. And even when that can beargued not to be the case, what happens should be described as plugging in a word from one lexicon into one of the WFSsassociated with the other lexicon, producing examples of what is, following Haugen, 1950, best described as nonce-morphol-ogy. I am sure that if Weinreich had thought about morphology in terms of word-formation and not in terms of affixes andmorphemes, he would not have pressed his case against Sapir as hard as he seems to. At any rate, it seems that scholarsworking enthusiastically on convergence in multilingual contexts have not come up with compelling cases of the sort of bor-rowing they seem to unreflectively take for granted.

Obviously, I cannot rule out the possibility that there is some case somewhere that shows that affixes can be borrowed,the reanalysis of one of the most serious efforts to find contact evidence for the second lexicon I have presented above leadsme to say that it is unlikely that such cases could be found without the presence of many socio-historical factors, including,of course, language shift.3 It should be obvious that people talk about morphological borrowing because they think morphologyis about affixes, the warehouse one keeps them in, and the contexts they require for their insertion once taken out of that ware-house. It is actually about differences that are systematically exploited in a language to enrich its lexical stock (cf. Neuvel and

3 I am grateful to the reviewer of this paper for helping me put this matter more accurately than I had managed to before. Whereas Singh and Parkinson(1995) attempts to explain the well-known Czech-Russian case of this sort, there are, apparently, some other cases too (cf. Thomason, 2001; Gardani, 2008) thatneed to be carefully (re)-examined.


Singh, 2002). All that exists in morphology are WFSs and these cannot be borrowed for in order to borrow any one of them onewould have to know all the words that gave birth to each one of them in the first place.4

It is misleading to say that this or that affix or this or that bit of the morphology of language X has been borrowed bylanguage Y. These things cannot be borrowed because they do not exist outside of the words with which they come. In itself,morphology does not seem borrowable. To make a case for morphological borrowing, one would have to produce examplesof WFSs having been borrowed WITHOUT the borrowing of the words that could lead to those WFSs. Only words are taken, and themorphology is constructed anew by speakers of L2. That construction may certainly end up looking like what it did look likein its older habitat, but that does not allow us to speak of morphological borrowing as a process by which morphologicalconvergence is achieved. Convergence, pace Annamalai, is not a linguistic process but the result of the process of lexical bor-rowing, at least in the domain of morphology. If we do not pay enough attention to how it may come about, we are not likelyto understand it.

The conclusion that so-called affixal borrowing and convergence must be accounted for purely in terms of the borrowingof whole words and without invoking either morphemes or the borrowing of affixes is, in my view, not unrelated to Staro-sta’s (1999) conclusion that historical reconstruction also needs to proceed with whole words rather than with neo-Paninianobjects of wonder. It is not unrelated to that claim for the rather simple reason that only words, as everyone other than lin-guists knows, have histories. It is also instructive in this context to recall Krishnamurti’s (1999) demonstration that, paceLabov, regular sound change can and does result from lexical diffusion and Starosta’s demonstration that, pace Lightfoot,syntactic change is also executed through lexical diffusion.

It is also interesting to note that the history of Bangala provides interesting evidence against savant-neologisms based onPaninian morphological analysis proposed by the Bangala Academy, or, equivalently, for the survival of only those neolo-gisms that are word-based and actually grounded in fully motivated WFSs of Bangala. Ravanam (2002) confirms the predic-tion that savant-neologisms, which could be understood only if one were to dissect them into Paninian parts, are not likely tobecome part of the general lexical currency of Bangala and will continue to be seen as still-born creations by non-elite speak-ers. Thus, porimaapok ‘surveyor’ survives but shamaahartaa ‘collector’ does not despite the committee-imagined relation be-tween shamaahaar ‘collection’ and shamaahartaa.

I should add that perhaps it is only work such as Myerhoff (2000) and Ravanam that are appropriately called sociolinguis-tic, particularly if ‘sociolinguistics’ is interpreted as ‘psycholinguistics’ generally is. Myerhoff deals with questions like (i)How developments in a contact language can inform the inquiry into the structure of language and (ii) How they can helpus to better understand the nature of language change and the processes of grammaticisation. Using data from everyday con-versations in Bislama (the national language of Vanuatu), her book focuses on one variable, the alternation between overtpronominal and phonetically null subjects. It shows how an emergent system of subject–verb agreement in Bislama interactswith functional constraints on the interpretability of a subject. This interaction, she claims, accounts for much of the alter-nation between the two forms of subject. The rich array of social functions that Bislama serves in the communities studied isexamined in detail, and yet it is shown that as Bislama becomes increasingly elaborate morphosyntactically, this kind ofstructural innovation takes place largely independently of social factors. By adopting the methods of sociolinguisticsgrounded in participant observation, and being grounded in theoretical treatments of subject agreement, her book attemptsto build very useful bridges across different subfields of linguistics.

Ravanam’s work, as I have already indicated, shows what language-planners have difficulties with when they want tochange the moulds in which people are naturally inclined to ‘store’ their linguistic knowledge. Her findings are also con-firmed by work such as Khalid (2000), which shows that whereas Arabic-speaking elites in the Maghareb, like Bright andRamanujan’s (1964) Brahamins, use the strategy of going back to Classical Arabic, the ordinary naïve speaker in this regionis quite happy to simply Arabicize English or French words. In the more familiar Indo-European context, it would be animportant sociolinguistic finding if one could show that speakers familiar with Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit operate with unitsother than words, but, apparently, work of this kind is not done, or, when it is, is taken, for reasons I do not understand, to bework in psycholinguistics. Interestingly, such evidence as there is suggests that familiarity with classical languages like Latinand Greek does not influence the nature and architecture of internalized morphological knowledge of speakers of English.

As things stand now, what is generally called sociolinguistics not infrequently seems to be a mixture of naïve sociologyand older linguistics. Perhaps we need to use another label for the kind of work exemplified by Myerhoff and Ravanam. TheChomskyan linguist has nothing to say about what is generally seen as sociolinguistics and the sociolinguist seems to havenothing to say about grammar (=the architecture of I-language), the ontologizable representation, in specific forms, of

4 It is interesting to note that examples of the alleged borrowing of affixes in India, a region well-known for language-contact, yield similar results. The casespresented by Abbi (1998), Israel (1997, 126 ff), Mizokami (1987, 86 ff), Pandharipande (1986), Sridhar (1972, 03ff), amongst others, can and must be analyzedas NOT involving the borrowing of morphemes or affixes. These sensitive researchers are understandably interested in language loss, shift, and death, but whenthey take up grammatical matters, they exhibit a somewhat cavalier attitude. It is instructive to note in this context that Israel even cites the good old IA word-pair kana /kani in his list of examples that allegedly show that Kuvi has borrowed the affixes -a and -i from Oriya. There is, pace Sridhar, a distinction betweensaying that the Gondi infinitive marker -ne is of Hindi origin and saying that Gondi borrowed the Hindi infinitive marker -ne. Although Sridhar may be right insaying that ‘the employment of prefixation as a productive word-formation device in Dravidian must be attributed to the Indo-Aryan impact’ (p. 203), I wouldbe, unlike him, reluctant to say that Kannada and Telugu have borrowed the Hindi–Urdu prefixes be- and gair- or, worse, that they have borrowed the rules ofHindi–Urdu morphology that introduce these constants in some Hindi–Urdu words. I would also request researchers to refrain from making statements of thesort that Pandharipande (1981), for example, seems to make rather freely, unless, of course, they have knock-down-drag-out evidence to show that the markersof morphological function they want to talk about did indeed come in on their own.


knowledge of language. Within the confines of contemporary usage, particularly with regard to ‘linguistics’, I am, however,perfectly willing to go to the extent of saying that most of contemporary sociolinguistics is, when it is not vulgar correlation-ism of the sort promoted by Labovians, just well-informed journalism, containing rather weak-kneed political sociology oflanguage-institutions (of the sort done and promoted by thousands of bleeding-heart liberals in the Academy) or simply re-actionary politics (of the sort promoted by American interactionists,5 who seem to have only recently discovered discourseand interference and who, apparently, have a lot to teach—though nothing to learn from—minority workers such as Pakistanicafetria workers and Filipino doctors and nurses) disguised as sociolinguistic analysis, obviously with autonomist sociolinguisticpretensions6 (cf. Singh et al., 1988). It is not clear if this sort of work amounts to anything other than enlightened journalism,something which examines, as it ought to, Orwell’s Problem in contemporary societies. Interesting indeed, but hardly meriting alabel such as ‘sociolinguistics’ because such labels normally require a theory or a set of theories. The relevant ones here alreadyexist in sociology, political science, and economics. I am not indulging in a terminological quibble or fighting a turf-war. I amsimply pointing out that sociolinguistics is, still awaiting adulthood because it has not yet articulated a set of well-defined ques-tions for itself. The more serious problem for autonomist sociolinguistics may be, in other words, NOT what might be calledChomsky’s Problem but Gramasci’s Problem. ‘Every time the question of language surfaces, in one way or another, it means,Gramasci (1985, pp. 183–184) points out, that series of other problems are coming to the fore: the formation and enlargementof the governing class, the need to establish more intimate and secure relationships between the governing groups and the na-tional popular mass, in other words to reorganize the cultural hegemony. ‘As autonomist sociolinguistics generally does not at-tempt to come to terms with Gramasci’s Problem, one could actually argue that enlightened journalism such as Crawford, 2000is, for example, a more substantial and insightful account of the American war with linguistic diversity than most of contem-porary sociolinguistic writings on the subject—Crawford, it would be recalled, was the editor of Education Week. The fact thatthere are no Crawfords in this or that country is no reason to take what passes for sociolinguistics in or of these countriesseriously.

6. A recapitulation

Given the goals of this paper, there is perhaps a need to summarize things once again. The implications of what I haveargued above should be obvious: the morphological systems of speakers both in highly focussed monolingual and diffuseplurilingual societies are word-based and relate words to other words. The morphological system of a speaker who knowsa few thousand words of Hindi, Punjabi, and English may in parts look like the morphological systems used in monolingualHindi, Punjabi, and English communities, but it is her morphological system, presumably shared with other speakers, and itis built with the same bricks as any other morphological system and, of course, has the same architecture, albeit a minimalone, as any other morphological system. There is no need here to fix her morphological competence in one of these threelanguages and to talk about her having borrowed this or that bit of morphology from the other two languages.

The point is that just as solutions to Plato’s Problem that ignore the evidence that monolingual contexts cannot in prin-ciple provide are bound to be maximalist—Chomsky’s formalist minimalism notwithstanding—sociolinguistic explorationsthat ignore Plato’s Problem cannot, unfortunately, be taken seriously. It is true that the Chomskian programme has no cleararticulation of the connection between use and knowledge of language (cf. Martohardjono, 2001), but it is also true thatthose who concentrate on use generally have no idea of the shape or form of knowledge of language, surely an importantingredient in the use of language.

Before taking up sociolinguistics again, let me conclude the discussion of matters morphological. First, a citation fromSaussure (I shall leave the pleasure of finding the page number for this entirely to the reader): ‘‘The old school divided wordsinto roots, themes, suffixes, etc. and attached an absolute value to these distinctions. . . . Unless there is some justification forsetting up these categories, why bother?” I have argued that contact, convergence, and diversity do not provide any suchjustification and that scholars working on these matters have merely assumed them, obviously without much justification.If we take Saussure’s admonition seriously, we might still get to what he said was the only analysis that mattered. We can getto that analysis, and hence to a proper understanding of what is involved, only if we do not allow our discourses to short-change the nitya-nutan creation of morphology. It is true that the morphology extracted from borrowed words can and doeschange the morphology of the host language—it now has new strategies at its disposal—but it is not true that it borrows thatmorphology by borrowing affixes and morphemes. The change is entirely system-internal. If affixes could be borrowed, weshould have cases not only of ‘affixes’ without the words in which they appear but also cases involving reanalyses of words

5 This might strike some readers as unfair to the work of Gumperz who discusses a variety of South Asian English in Gumperz (1982). All I can do here is toinvite such readers to look at Singh and Martohardjono (1985 and Singh, Lele, and Martohardjono 1988) and Dittmar (1976). Gumperz prefers to concentrate onessentially the problem of ‘interference’ at the level of discourse, where HIS strategies must be observed if one is to avoid causing breakdowns incommunication, something for which the minority speakers are invarialy held responsible.

6 This follows straightforwardly from the consensus view of the matter, according to which a discipline is just a tentative carving out of a hopefullypermanent space from what is generally understood to be philosophy, set up to explore a set of putatively well-defined questions to which those proposingsuch a carving out hope to be able to provide answers from well within the theory of what they say should be construed as a novel discipline. The crucialrequirement in this view would seem to be that fields of inquiry constitute themselves on the basis of clearly defined metatheoretical principles which put theirstudies on a principled basis, allowing the achievement of the highest level of adequacy, explanatory adequacy. Although ‘once a discipline, always a discipline’seems to be the rule in the Academy, it is in principle possible to define a discipline out of existence (cf. the fate of philology, particularly in North-America,where Area Studies have met a similar fate).


according to the perceived patterns of a non-native morphology, but such cases do not seem to exist. We can, it seems, speakonly of lexical borrowing resulting in morphological change for neither the rules of morphology nor the pieces they some-times introduce to mark morphological functions are transportable. And that is what Sapir must have meant when he saidthat morphological ‘‘interinfluencings” were only superficial.

It should be clear that the difficulties encountered by Abbi, Annamalai, Broselow, Israel, Paradis, Prunet, Sridhar and theothers whose work I have counterpointed against the background of what the multilingual context seems to make availableare a direct result of their operating with categories and operations supplied by the neo-Paninian enterprise, which is deeplyrooted in monolinguality and etymology (cf. Dasgupta et al., 2002). The multilingual context would suggest that we have infact been over-analyzing things. Again, what turns out to be wrong with the structuralist or the generative enterprise is notthe idea that morphological knowledge is internalized but the heavy machinery employed to describe the shape of thatknowledge. And again, evidence from multilingual contexts shows that that knowledge can and must be represented in trulyminimalist terms. It is almost ironic that although Chomsky (1995) repeatedly cites Jespersen’s (1924) famous statementthat no one ever dreamed of doing universal morphology, his followers have almost universally constructed over-articulatedmodels of morphology that completely ignore Jespersen’s advice (for a detailed critique of some of these models, see Singh,2001). Evidence from multilingual contexts eloquently pleads for an austere theory of morphology, the sort we have offered.

Notice that the view of morphology presented above is fully compatible not only with facts of language-contact but alsowith the facts of what the Paninian distributionalist calls synchronic morphology. I would like to submit that this is a highlydesirable convergence because a synchronic theory that cannot explain what happens out there is only a formal game andshould not be taken seriously. The view in question invokes no units other than the word and sees morphology as quintes-sentially relational in nature, relating whole words with other whole words, and not as a combinatorics of what the theo-retician of form calls morphemes, things of which reasonable characterizations seem impossible to provide. Notice alsothat the view of phonology I have attempted to defend also provides a natural account of the multilingual potentiality ofall human speakers, something that under rather unusual circumstances gets restricted in ways that call for sociologicalanalyses of certain societies rather than for a formalist abridgement of our linguisticality.

I believe my demonstration above squarely meets what is sometimes called the necessity argument. That argument saysthat in order to show necessity rather than just possibility one must show that the domain of linguistic theory is not naturalif it includes only data from primary languages found in monolingual contexts and excludes data from multilingual contextsand that linguistic theory based on data from only primary languages from monolingual contexts is reducible to some moregeneral theory that includes as its domain primary and secondary language data. I take it that I have in fact shown that atleast in phonology and morphology the domain of the currently popular theories is in fact unnatural and that that theory isin fact reducible to more general theories, such as Natural Phonology and WHOLE-WORD relational Morphology, which yieldbetter results.

Notice that my argument against the neo-Paninian habit of overanalyzing facts of morphology cannot offer any solace to LePagians. It is fine to say that languages and lects used by communities that have focussed norms are relatively resistant tostructural influences, but one does not, unfortunately, know what that means because the structural elements are definedin a calculus that should perhaps be thrown out. Consider, for example, the following statement by Sebba (1999, p. 87):‘‘We might hypothesize that in a language community with sufficiently diffuse norms, borrowing can proceed with relativefreedom in the absence of pre-existing focussed norms. Speakers will be able to borrow at the lexical, morphological, or syn-tactic level without suffering any sanction.” Yes, but one must ask the question: What is meant by morphological borrowing? Ifone attempts to answer it, one finds that statements like this do not really tell us much, at least not about the form of morphol-ogy. The contrast between this Le Pagian position and mine is very clear, even dramatic. What I am saying is that diffuse, re-laxed, focussed, or tense, what is borrowed are words and not morphology, never. The relevant conclusion to draw from diffusesocieties, in other words, is that morphology does not have the shape that structuralists and Chomskians claim and Le Pagiansassume it does. The Le Pagian assumption is consistent with the terms of the contract I have been examining, but, it seems, notquite right, ironically an important lesson to be drawn from so-called diffuse societies, their speciality, they claim.7

Needless to add that despite my less than charitable assessment of quantitative sociolinguistics à la Labov and of weak-kneed political sociology disguised as autonomist sociolinguistics, multilingualism provides particularly rich contexts forexploring some of the issues that may in fact belong to a properly defined sociolinguistics. As everything thrown up by suchcontexts does not, though it is often assumed that it does, necessarily belong to sociolinguistics, one must be careful. Con-sider, for example, code-mixing. For speakers that can be shown to use and control two unmixed and one mixed code, onemust separate what belongs to and has implications for the theory of linguistic form and architecture from what can be saidto belong to sociolinguistics (for a remarkably successful attempt at the separation in question in the domain of what is gen-erally referred to as ‘language death’, see Dressler, 1996). As for other characterizations of sociolinguistics, I have already

7 The references to India throughout this paper also allows me to draw attention to another rather important fact. Le Pagians are very fond of saying thatinstitutionalized schooling and literacy favour focussed norms, linguistic analysis, and impermeable language boundaries. They most certainly do, but given thefact that Panini was perhaps the last native speaker of Sanskrit, it is hard to see how alphabetization can be taken as a necessary pre-condition for these things.They are obviously related to the belief Goody (1987), Havelock (1982), and Olson (1994) try to justify. India is the perfect counter-example to such claims: wedeveloped a sophisticated, though not necessarily right, linguistic caluclus and very highly focussed norms much before Brahmi, generally dated around 3 B.C.(cf. Dasgupta, 1959; Parpola, 1994). In the context of ancient India, it is in fact possible to argue that the Indian writing system is a RESULT of focussed normsand fine, even clever, linguistic analyses, which, pace Faber (1990), included the phoneme.


suggested that perhaps ‘sociolinguistics’ can be interpreted as ‘psycholinguistics’ is, and that on that construal sociolinguis-tics can be an investigation of linguistic form and architecture under rather special social conditions routinely created andavailable in multilingual contexts. They also provide possibilities, which may not be available in monolingual contexts, forother construals of sociolinguistics, and there are plenty, including the one offered by Agnihotri (2000) and by Critical Dis-course Analysis (CDA). They do so because, as Agnihotri (2000) points out, multilingual societies put a variety of linguisticprocesses in sharp relief (for some remarkable studies that make use of such possibilities and offer valuable insights intoboth linguistics and sociolinguistics, see Parakrama (1995) and Annamalai (2001), for example). Their ability to do so is whatmakes them what Pandit (1969) called ‘special frames’ for the observation of a variety of processes that remain opaque, hid-den, or simply unavailable in monolingual situations.

On the sociolinguistic side, I must underline the fact that although sociolinguistics seems to have flourished since themid-20th century, its characterization, from Currie (1952) to Coulmas (1997) and beyond, has always been somewhat prob-lematic. The promotion of the mere inclusion of (some) social factors as a sufficient condition, unfortunately, leaves, as I ar-gued in Singh (2001), a lot to be desired. The lack of progress in sociolinguistics seems related, in other words, to our inabilityto find a proper characterization of it, perhaps because none is really possible.

The major problems with standard construals of sociolinguistics seem to be (1) the peripheral status assigned to externalevidence by the contract that both sociolinguists and practitioners of fractured structuralism (of the sort examplified by gen-erativism) accept and (2) a lack of appreciation of what I shall refer to as Gramasci’s Problem (cf. Gramasci’s celebratedobservation that whenever questions of language are raised, language is NOT involved). The former produces a mixed bag,from which a lot needs to be taken out and put back in linguistics; the latter generally produces weak-kneed political soci-ology disguised as autonomist sociolinguistics. Just as we need to separate those ‘external’ matters that have a bearing onlinguistic theory from those that do not, we need to separate that which is better explained by economics and history fromthat which cannot be explained by them (for an illuminating demonstration of how to do that, see Dressler, 1996).

Matters are, unfortunately, not helped by the sociolinguist’s belief, for which she rarely provides any evidence, that so-cially-driven revisions can strike anywhere. Nor are they helped much by a Gumperzian adaptation of the Sapir–Whorfhypothesis, at least not in the contemporary, predominantly multi-ethnic, multilingual world. Then there is the possible con-tradiction, something Whorf was aware of (cf. Whorf, 1956 (1941), p. 156), between the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and thefunctionalist view espoused by most sociolinguists that the units, processes, and architecture of language is determinedby cultural, functional needs. And they are certainly not helped by the assumption, made by very many sociolinguists, thatthe Standard is the Universal. It is this assumption that underwrites the assignment of creoles, for example, to sociolinguis-tics for creolization processes are, as Hymes pointed out long time ago, not unknown in non-creole contexts (incidentally, italso seems to underlie Chomsky’s (2000) dismissal of intra-lingual variation as nothing very different from inter-lingual var-iation). Despite its liberal overtures to the autonomy of substandard varieties, a slightly modified version of this assumption,a version under which differences are assumed to be only variations, also seems to underlie quantitative variationist socio-linguistics, which seems to ignore the laws of the algebras it parasitically exploits in setting up the unexplained correlationsit likes to set up.

The characterization that seems to fair somewhat better, without ruling out other perhaps equally fruitful characteriza-tions, requires that ‘sociolinguistics’ be interpreted as ‘psycholinguistics’ generally is (i.e. as psychological evidence forchoosing between competing theories of linguistic form). Under that construal, sociolinguistics becomes the study of theform of grammar under somewhat unusual social conditions. I shall provide some evidence to show that such a character-ization is worth pursuing, and if it indeed is, the ‘linguistics’ in ‘sociolinguistics’ may, after all, turn out to be important.Needless to say that this construal allows sociolinguistics to not only (in)validate the units and architecture postulated bythe linguist but also to supplement the units and rearticulate the architecture when sufficient evidence to do so is unearthed.One must, however, be aware of the fact that units such as Turn Construction Units (TCUs) are, as pointed out by Dressler(p.c.), vaguer and more fluid than the units used by the linguist, and their continual use only in sociolinguistics seems only tounderline the tacit acceptance of the contract that was signed almost a century ago, a contract according to which the alge-bras according to which language is to be described are to be constructed only by (asocial) linguists or grammarians. It is theacceptance of this contract that allows the latter to see the work of the sociolinguist as merely a sweeping up operation. Thesmall triumphs of early American work such as Brown and Gilman showing that variations and patterns not accounted for bygrammars were socially patterned did not and do not change the situation very much because the context of familiar andrespectful forms of pronouns or address is so restricted as to be quasi-formulaic.

Be that as it may. The challenge for the 21st century is to come up with some fruitful characterizations of sociolinguisticsso that some well-defined set of domain-specific questions can be formulated and, hopefully, vigorously investigated. In thispaper, I offer only some preliminary considerations that may lead us to an appropriate characterization of sociolinguistics.8

On the grammatical side, natural laboratories called multilingual contexts furnish abundant evidence for the constructionof the sort of theory those who claim that multilingualism is really the unmarked linguistic condition must work towards.Such a theory will not only show that the routine abridgement of our linguistic capacity presented as competence is unwar-

8 It is indeed very legitimate to ask if a similar question does not arise when the study of language is construed as a sub-field of psychology, or cognitivescience. Although much of the maximalist lustre of Royaumont (cf. Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980) has now admittedly disappeared, even now there is, it seems tome, a qualitative difference between the evidence in favour of an autonomist linguistics and the evidence in favour of an autonomist sociolinguistics. Shouldfuture careful work require the abandonment of the autonomist assumptions of contemporary linguistics, they would, of course, have to be given up.


ranted but also has, as Haugen (1950) and others have suggested, important implications for the construction of monolingualgrammars. It may not be enough any more to insist that monolingually grounded theories be tested against the facts fur-nished by these huge laboratories for they have consistently failed to meet their challenge. The only option left seems tobe to work towards a new theory of linguistic form, building on the insights of linguists like Haugen and Stampe who havealways refused to abridge the linguistic capacity of the monolingual in order to accommodate her inevitably limited andskewed experience or to seek refuge in statistical measures.

7. Conclusion

Can we afford to renew the agreement we signed almost a century ago? If not, we must come up with new algebras thathelp rather than hinder the description of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the unmarked case and can accommo-date the marked abridgement fashionably called linguistic theory in North America (and perhaps elsewhere too), just in casethere is a need somewhere to talk about the abridged linguisticality of the monolingual speaker. Such algebras are quitewithin our reach.

Let me conclude by saying that it is not accidental in my view that a substantive and sustainable and, hopefully, validtheory of linguistic form, a conceptually minimalist theory of linguistic form, emerges from looking at matters of form inmultilingual contexts. It is rich enough to accommodate the Chomskyan insight that language IS a unique window on Plato’sProblem and poor enough to let the butterflies flutter away as and when they please, appearing to display the rich patternsOUR gardens, our looking glasses project on to their wings, which do contain the patterns in which these rich patterns find areflection. What IS etched on their wings are archi-patterns, which are like mirrors in which the ill-understood fact that nolanguage is an island finds a reflection (cf. Singh, 1996). I am delighted to conclude that the discovery of these archi-patternsseems to me to depend crucially on our ability and willingness to chase butterflies in multi-lingual gardens, not the sort thathave been cultivated by Panini, Sibawahi, or Chomsky.

Only an attempt to construct a new theory of language form and architecture can do justice to the contribution multilin-gualism can potentially make to our understanding of language. If we do not want our work to be seen as what Dasgupta(2000) rightly refers to as a sweeping up operation, we must cultivate these gardens with care and watch the patterns onthe wings of butterflies as they flutter across them. If we do not do this, we will never be able to revise the contract weall signed almost a century ago.

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