Sociolinguistics and the theory of grammar

by Richard Hudson

last changed 1 April 2007

Bibliographical information

Published in Linguistics 24, 1053-1078, 1986

Abstract

Sociolinguists have discovered a great deal about the social distribution of particular expressions, and the question arises as to what, if anything, structural linguists should do with these findings. I argue that we should be trying to develop a theory of language structure in which the findings can be accommodated, though sociolinguistic observations of speech will be reflected only indirectly in the structural linguist's grammar of competence. I suggest that facts about social distribution are similar to facts about word meaning and can be described most satisfactorily in terms of participant relations such as 'actor' and a hierarchy of process types. On the other hand, social distribution cannot be taken as a part of semantics, because the objects under analysis are not meanings but the linguistic expressions themselves. This seems to point to a theory of language structure in which boundaries between components are relatively unimportant, such as word grammar.