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7 - Change, meaning and acts of identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

William Downes
William Downes
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
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Summary

There is the element of habit, custom, tradition, the element of the past, and the element of innovation, of the moment, in which the future is being born. When you speak you fuse these elements in verbal creation, the outcome of your language and your personality.

Firth (1950)

Variability and change

A language system is always in the process of change. The study of such change is the province of historical linguistics, a separate branch of the study of language (see, for example, Aitchison, 1991). The role of this chapter will be, not to discuss language change in all its complexity, but to examine the role that social factors play in the process of change.

As we have already seen, linguistic theory has approached language in an idealized way. It has been characterized as governed by a homogeneous system of rules. The historical and social dimensions of language, including its use to make utterances in context, are not in general admitted as primary data for a linguistic theory, because the aim of that theory (as we saw with Chomsky) is to specify just those universal psychological principles that define what any natural language is. The regularities looked for are very abstract, and sets of sentences, with variability omitted, will do as the data for such an enterprise.

The idealization is a ‘convenient fiction’ of the sort used in any science.

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Language and Society , pp. 233 - 274
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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