<br><h2>CHAPTER 1</h2><p><b>INTRODUCTION</b></p><br><p>To say that a language is "an infinite set of well-formed sentences" is alittle like saying that a human being consists of water, carbon, salt, andtrace elements. That is, there are certain restricted contexts in whichsuch statements make sense, even though there are many other intellectualpoints of view from which they are irrelevant and misleading. Whenwe are engrossed in our formalistic charts and diagrams, writing ourrules and playing with our arrows and brackets, it is easy to forget thatwe are approaching that magnificent infinite object, Language, in muchthe same way as the blind men in the fable approached the elephant.</p><p>In particular, most linguists have been operating on the heuristic assumptionthat the speakers of a language are some kind of beautifullyprogrammed automata, sentence-generating machines capable of producinga limitless number of grammatical utterances that conform in allrespects to a fixed set of rules—the grammar of one's native language—thathas been internalized in early childhood. This point of view, aseveryone knows, has opened up some brilliantly successful lines of investigation.But now it is time to move on from the elephant's cerebralcortex to his primitive brain stem, his heart, his gonads, or wherever elsethe seat of his emotions may be located.</p><p>The work of William Labov and his students has undercut the overlyrigid Chomskyan dichotomy between "competence" and "performance"to the point where it is no longer clear in what sense we can speak ofa "rule of grammar" at all. Variability is now understood by many tobe as basic to linguistic structure as the countertendency toward orderand organization. We can easily construct "an infinite set of sentences"in any language as to the grammaticality of which native speakers willviolently disagree, each citing his own sacred intuitions as evidence oneway or the other. It is precisely this variability that lies at the heart oflinguistic creativity.</p><p>Language is the frail bridge that we fling across the chasm of the inexpressibleand the incommunicable.</p><p>Anyone who has ever tried to get any thoughts down on paper knowshow hard it is to "say what you mean." How much more difficult this isunder the time pressure of ordinary rapid conversation! When we write,we have the leisure to go back and cross things out, add a word hereor permute some words there, recast a sentence completely if we havegotten ourselves into a desperate syntactic bind. When we speak, ourinterlocutors will lose patience with us if we say, "Just a minute—I usedthe perfect tense in that last sentence, but the action referred to reallydidn't have enough present relevance for that, so I retract it and willuse the simple past instead. Also, I'd like to put that adverb at the endof the sentence instead of at the beginning—I don't know why, it justsounds better." At this point our listener would be likely to say, "Go tothe devil with your adverbs and your present relevance!" or,if he is a Yiddishspeaker, <i>Gey tsum tayvl mit dayne adverbn un ítstike sháyekhdikkayttsuzamen!</i></p><p>Under the pressure to communicate rapidly, the edges of the grammarare constantly being bent and deformed, expanded and retracted.My daughter's report card this morning carried the teacher's scrawledcomment, <i>She shuns away from the math area.</i> How can we be so arrogantas to stigmatize this as a "performance error"? We might succeedin demonstrating that <i>shuns away from</i> derives analogically from <i>shiesaway from</i> in some historical sense. But it is not a "mistake," for God'ssake. It's a rather nice new creation, in fact, and had doubtless alreadyoccurred independently in the speech of millions of people of all socialclasses and degrees of linguistic virtuosity. It already sounds grammaticalto me, better and better each time I say it over to myself. The newgrammar is constantly being created on top of the willing and yieldingruins of the old. To worry about where "one" grammar ends and the"next" grammar begins is a totally meaningless and futile pursuit. Innovationsin language are welcomed at least as much as they are resisted.</p><p>Everybody knows (but linguists have usually forgotten) that the realcommunication that goes on during interpersonal exchanges often hasvery little to do with the actual words that are spoken. We can be talkingabout the damn cat when all we want to do is go to bed with each other.We can be trading polite commiserations about the weather even as weare thinking how we hate each other, and how gladly we would bathein the other's blood. From early childhood on, we learn to look for "the<i>real</i&ggt; meaning behind the words." That is, we look for paralinguistic...