Dialectology and Linguistic Theory

Abstract

Since the late 1950s linguistic theory and dialectology have gone their separate ways. Chomsky's distinction between competence and led to a devotion to underlying linguistic ability, and many disciples came to worship at the shrine of innate ideas. Much attention was given to explicating the rules underlying linguistic competence, while very little attention was given to its potential or actual variations. As Chomsky said in 1965, Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors ... in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance (Aspects, p. 3). In this way, dialectology and linguistic theory became almost antithetical, for linguistic theory, as defined by Chomsky, left little or no possibility for variation within the idealized speaker-hearer. Actual language use, with which most dialectologists are concerned, was relegated to the peripheral area of performance, which, by definition, could not advance beyond a mere, or in the pejorative vernacular of the day, trivial collection of isolated data, which are uninteresting in themselves because they are collected and analyzed without an attendant linguistic theory. In fact, the study of language as it is actually used could not proceed until the rules of a more basic lingustic ability had been more fully elaborated. Chomsky remarks that there seems to be little reason to question the traditional view that investigation of will proceed only so far as understanding of underlying competence permits (Aspects, p. 10).