Sociolinguistics vs. Linguistics

It was once customary for such scholars interested in language and society to defend their scholarly pursuits in the face of more hegemonic approaches in linguistics

Hegemonic approaches in linguistics

Chomskyans

sought to define the essence of language in mentalistic grammars of so abstract and broad a nature that they could capture the entire human capacity for language

other scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

have gone about their business of describing concrete language use rooted in peoples’ actual experiences, needs, and exchanges

human competence of I-language (internally represented in mind)

E- or external language, real language

gains in these fields have been impressive since the second half of the twentieth century (1960s)

the Chomskyan revolution that we have learned an impressive amount about how humans acquire language, store it in the mind, and process it.

the theory of parameters

drew on work that opened up the way for related studies of dialects within a language

languages varied in their syntax

langue vs. parol (Saussure)

competence vs. performance (chomsky)

Langue encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of a signifying system; it is independent of, and pre-exists, the individual user. It involves the principles of language without which no meaningful utterance

Parole refers to the concrete instances of the use of langue, including texts which provide the ordinary research material for linguistics

competence as an idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property or function

performance as the production of actual utterances

competence involves “knowing” the language

performance involves “doing” something with the language

Mesthrie, Rajend. 2011. The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics: Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Page 1 - 2

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linguistics

taking account of the structure of language

the exclusion of the social contexts in which it is learned and used

the task: to work out 'the rules of language X'

transformational-generative linguistics