The Creation of Linguistic Structure

Abstract

Recent sociolinguistic work on variation and the permeability of speech community boundaries (Gumperz 1971, 1982; Labov 1972) makes comprehensible what earlier generations of linguists regarded as error deviating from clearly delineated structures. Proper contemporary use of texts elicited earlier--and in many cases, such texts are the only records of languages no longer spoken--require a hermeneutic attempt to recover the intents of linguists and informants in the original context,2 as well as the problematic(s) motivating the work and the theories through which data were filtered (and dictations heard). The kinds of cautions needed to use work based on classical elicitation procedures can be clarified by considering what was typical in the best elicitation-based fieldwork, viz., that of Fang-Kuei Li. Two fundamental lessons from the first generation of sociolinguists that context matters to the patterns of language use, and that the world is not split into hermetically sealed units call into question the empirical status of linguistic structures reported from classic elicitation from a single informant. 1. Before the advent of portable soundrecording equipment, linguists necessarily slowed down their informants' speech to a pace requi ing careful pronunciation, providing informants opportunities to reflect on how they should speak (in contrast to how they usually spoke unself-consciously). At a pace somewhere between a morpheme at a time and truncated clauses, distinctions not usually made may be made (Samarin 1967:54; Blom and Gumperz 1972:415), and syntax and phonology may be cleaned up because extraordinary attention is being paid to how the informant is speaking (see the systematic differences found by Labov [1972]). 2. As the codifier of American structuralist