Differences Between the Way Sociolinguists View Language - Case Study Example

What are the fundamental differences between the way that sociolinguists such as William Labov and theoritical linguists such as Noam Chomsky view language? The development of studies of speech and language, particularly of the quantitative dimension to linguistic research, coincided that of sociolinguistics, which for most of linguists whose main interest is the structure of language, the development is a most relevant contribution to the field. Noam Chomsky and William Labov - the former, following theoretical linguistic argument while the latter, the sociolinguistic school – are two of the most important scholars in the field and they represent two opposing positions in the study of language. Their debate will give us a better understanding of what the issue is. This paper, hence, will outline the fundamental differences between Chomsky and Labov in the way they view language. Introduction William Labov and Noah Chomsky are the main advocates of the two contrasted positions. It is, first, imperative to outline their commonalities in order to fully understand their perspectives in regard to how they see language and in the process provide a background for their fundamental differences. Richard Hudson (1996) cited the areas of agreement: 1. They are both linguists, so their main interest is in the nature of language; 2. Both see language as a complex system (with a grammar and a lexicon whose structures can be investigated; and, 3. Both believe that linguistics is a search for theoretical explanations rather than mere facts, and that both expect theories to be sufficiently general to apply to all languages. (p. 145) Chomskian Paradigm Chomsky is very influential in the development of data-driven sociolinguistics. Labov (1972), himself, stated that he [Chomsky] “insists that the data of linguistics is not the utterance by the individual to be studied, but his intuition about language – primarily his judgments as to which sentences are grammatical and which are not – and also judgments on the relatedness of sentences – which sentences mean the same.” (p. 186) Chomsky’s understanding of the objectives as well as the resources of the linguistic science is anchored on the idea that linguistics must speak to certain observational facts that concern language and its use. The concepts called the “poverty of the stimulus” and “creative aspect of language use,” allowed Chomsky to assume that much of the human language is innately fixed, in order to hold a basic goal of linguistics is to explain how any child can acquire any natural language readily on the basis of a rather thin set of data, to provide generative theories that deal with infinite sets of sentences, to avoid dealing with the ways in which people use language. Chomsky, himself said: Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous 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 (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance. (p. 3) Chomsky added that to study actual linguistics performance, one must consider the interactions of a horde of factors, of which the underlying competence of the speaker-beater. (p. 3) Labovian Perspective Labov’s orientation towards linguistics are not fundamentally different from those normal linguistics such as the nature of linguistic rules, the nature of sound change, but that the method of work, and the findings, differ sharply. Rather than inquire about all the numerous and varied characteristics of an informant accent, for instance, Labov restricted his investigation to a small number of linguistic variables. Labov is credited to be the first to devise a procedure for building up a picture of linguistic variability throughout a given speech community by interviewing a statistically selected sample of the whole population of the locality. (Wells 1982, p. 37) The idea is that if the informants constitute a genuine representative sample selected in accordance with accepted statistical methods, then statements applying the whole population of a locality can be validly made. Methodology Chomsky and Labov both base their investigations on methodologies that can be classified as partial autonomy thesis. But the commonality in regard to methods ends there. Chomsky’s approach underscores that the system is explicitly autonomous primarily with respect to the use of language. For Labov, on the other hand, language is implicitly autonomous with respect to speakers. An analysis of Chomsky’s investigations would tell us that in the language system, the individual is merely the passive repository of an innate and invariant system. Here, the supra-individual or the external existence of language as being of relevance to linguistic theory is not recognized. Chomsky (2005) argued that from the fact that an individual has an internalized grammar, it does not follow that there exists a shared language. (p. 118) In regard to Labov’s method, the speaker is given importance but only to the extent that they produce the utterances or tokens of linguistic variables such as the physical realizations of language, which are analyzed as if they had a transcendent existence and locus in the society or in a group grammars apart from individuals. (Singh, p. 101) Observers found Labov’s approach to linguistics as one model that yields an autonomous sociolinguistics, which is in contrast to those who think about autonomous methodologies and theories as asocial. This is how Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1990) sums up Labov’s method: As a theoretical framework within which the patterns of variation could be stated, Labov postulated for the whole community a single phonological system characterized by a certain number of variable units. Each segment of the phonological system, which was found to be subject to variant realizations, was considered to form a phonological variable and its different realizations were made the object of inquiry. (p. 184- 185) So as one could see, the most obvious difference between Labov and Chomsky is in regard to their methods. In regard to the question: What kind of data should be used as evidence and what kind of patterns should we pay attention to. In their investigations, Labov and Chomsky agree that for most purposes we cant trust native speakers’ judgments and in regard to the case of non-native speaker, the arguments change as well. Chomsky has not really answered this dilemma but that Labov has specifically answered this. His answer is that we should use as many different methods as possible, preferring outcomes which are supported by them. In the so-called Labov’s paradigm, “the data are examples of ordinary speech produced (as far as possible) under ordinary conditions, and the patterns studied include quantitative patterns – i.e. how various linguistic forms are used.” (Hudson, p. 146) Grammar Confronted with the task to describe grammar of a language like English, Chomsky argued on most occasions that, in order to make meaningful discoveries about language, linguists must try to distinguish between what is important and what is not about language and linguistic behavior. The important matters, sometimes referred to as language universals, concern the learnability of all languages, the characteristics they share, and the rules and principles that speakers apparently follow in constructing and interpreting sentences; the less important matters have to do with how individual speakers use specific sounds or utterances in a variety of ways as they find themselves in this situation or that. (Wardhaugh, p. 2) The work of Labov and those scholars who follow his school of thought, pay allegiance to the generative transformational grammar of Chomsky. Glyn Williams (1992) stressed that in this respect the source of the origin of the work in linguistics is explicit whereas we find little reference to the theoretical input from sociology. (p. 67) The theoretical positions of Labov are based on the earlier theories of Chomsky. However, he has infused his own perspective on the subject and turned it around to oppose the some of the ideas espoused by Chomsky. Labov’s achievement is that he forcefully and convincingly refocused our attention to the problems and paradoxes that are inherent in the assumption of linguistic homogeneity and in the attempt to study language in isolation from communication. Labov was also able to present evidence of his so-called “orderly heterogeneity” in language and skillfully demonstrated ‘the use of the present to explain the past; Labov was also responsible for the argument that no study of language is viable except in its social context; that the basic data for any form of general linguistics would be language as it is used by the native speakers communicating with each other in everyday life. (Alatis 1992, p. 82-83) On Homogeneity Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argued that the linguistic tree on the Chomsky model still begins at point S and proceeds by dichotomy… Our criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract, but on the contrary that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic context of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field. (p. 7) Indeed, Chomsky asks only that one carves from his aggregate a homogeneous or standard system as a basis for abstraction or idealization, making possible a scientific study of principles. Here, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, Chomsky is pretending to believe that he is asserting his interest in the variable features of language and Labov is situating himself into a de facto pragmatics external to linguistics. (p. 103) However, Labov has other ambitions. He brought to lights lines of inherent variations and that he does not simply see them as “free variants” pertaining to pronunciation, style, or nonpertinent features that is manifested outside the system and leave the homogeneity of the system intact. In his works, Labov made it a point to let everybody know that he refuses the alternative linguistics set up for itself, that of assigning variants to different systems, or relegating them to a place outside the structure. “Labov sees variation as a de jure component affecting each system from within, sending it cascading or leaping on its own power and forbidding one to close it off, to make it homogeneous in principle.” (Deleuze and Guattari, p. 103) Conclusion In summary, this paper have established that Chomsky posited what came to be known as the language acquisition device (LAD), the possessor of the tacit or implicit knowledge that was supposed to manifest itself in the near-universal ready acquisition of human languages by small children in their first two years of life. However, the idea that an individual can possess a range of knowledge or mental skill that cannot be characterized, discussed, or articulated becomes a dilemma. Labov, rather than letting nonempirical linguistic theorizing about the nature of LAD and how it is combined, usually problematically, with our intuitions about speakers, moved the social aspects of linguistic theorizing to the fore. Going back to the areas of agreement between Labov and Chomsky, one finds that it is quite possible to see Chomsky and Labov’s arguments as complementary instead of contradictory. One is reminded, for instance, that Labov’s main interest is how languages change such as historical linguistics, which, for its part, is marginal to Chomsky inquiries on nature of language systems, particularly those parts that never change because they are supposedly universal. Richard Hudson stressed that the interest in historical linguistics does not keep Labov entirely out of the same territory as Chomsky, because one of his main claims is that we cannot understand how languages change unless we have an accurate view of what language systems are like; so most of his works has actually been devoted to the study of living languages, and especially to the study of the ordinary colloquial English. (p. 145-146) As Manfred Görlach (2002) pointed out, there are certainly differences particularly in abstraction between Comsky and Labov, but none of the linguistics schools can claim to use authentic language as a purist might wish to define it. (p. 47) Therefore, what we can do, and should do, is recognize and respect the divergence between real languages and the texts we use for analysis, or at least to keep the warning in mind that such a distance or gap exists. Bibliography Alatis, James. Language, Communication, and Social Meaning: Language, Communications, and Social Meaning. Georgetown University Press, 1992. Chomsky, Noam. Rules and Representations. Columbia University Press, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. Gorlach, Manfred. Still More Englishes. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002. Hudson, Richard. Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Labov, W. Sociolinguistic Patterns. University Of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. The Violence of Language. London: Routledge, 1990. Singh, Rajendra. Towards a critical sociolinguistics. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1996. Wardhaugh, Ronald. An introduction to sociolinguistics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. Wells, John Christopher. Accents of English: An introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1982. Williams, Glynn. Sociolinguistics: a sociological critique. Taylor & Francis, 1992. Read More