Abstract
No abstract.
Highlights
Linguistics, for the better part of this century, has had a propensity for thinking in terms of dichotomies; and whereas some of these, such as ‘signifiant’ - ‘signifié’ or ‘paradigm’ - ‘syntagm’, serve purely descriptive purposes, many others have come to acquire the status of shibboleths: surely, real linguists work with ‘synchronie’ rather than ‘diachronie’, with ‘form’ rather than ‘substance’, or with ‘competence’ rather than ‘performance’
That in their wholesale rejection of normative attitudes to language, members of the linguistic profession have turned their backs to an important fact about language communities
For since people will mark their personal identities and define their group allegiances through any behavioural means available, and since all languages are used by differing groups of people, it follows that all languages, even the smallest, will be heterogeneous and variable systems
Summary
Linguistics, for the better part of this century, has had a propensity for thinking in terms of dichotomies; and whereas some of these, such as ‘signifiant’ - ‘signifié’ or ‘paradigm’ - ‘syntagm’, serve purely descriptive purposes, many others have come to acquire the status of shibboleths: surely, real linguists work with ‘synchronie’ rather than ‘diachronie’, with ‘form’ rather than ‘substance’, or with ‘competence’ rather than ‘performance’.
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