The linguistic facts of life

One of the most important linguistic insights of the last century was quite simple: this species-wide, universal phenomenon could not be coincidental. Noam Chomsky proposed what now seems obvious: The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this. What linguists believe about standards matters very little; what non-linguists believe constitutes precisely that cognitive reality which needs to be described in a responsible sociolinguistics – one which takes speech-community attitudes and perception (as well as performance) into account. All language changes over time, in all linguistic subsystems: sounds (phonetics, phonology); the structure of words (morphology, lexicon), the way sentences are put together (syntax), and meaning (semantics). The rules violated were not linguistic in nature; the objections rose out of socially constructed concepts of proper English and good language.

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