English Usage and Modern Linguistic Theory

T HE PRODUCTION OF BOOKS and articles on language usage approaches the dimensions of a major industry in our modern society. Some studies of usage employ the best available techniques of data sampling, verification, and documentation; others handle the problems in a subjective and whimsical (sometimes even ludicrous) fashion. What is striking about most such studies is the disconnected random approach to the data. The handling of one item provides little or no insight that may be applied to an understanding of some other item. What is needed is a general field theory that can bring order into the chaotic presentation of the miscellaneous elements in the field of usage. This article hardly purports to provide such a field theory, but it does seek to show the advantage of a theory-based-rather than a databased-approach to the problems of usage. The items in one major grouping traditionally handled as discrete and unrelated problems are clearly interrelated, namely, those which represent alternative variations (or manifesting marks) of the same function, as in the English verb forms dared versus durst, dived versus dove, lighted versus lit, showed versus shown, and speeded versus sped. We deal first with the diachronic problem of providing historical perspective and then with the synchronic problem of accounting in a structured way for the relative acceptability of newly evolving forms and for their integration into the system. In our recent monograph Parametric Linguistics,' we presented a general typology of linguistic systems and the kinds of pressure which cause change in language. We attempted to demonstrate that, of the five fundamental systems described, only one-that which utilizes a single mark to signify a single function-is stable, whereas the other four-all representing some imbalance in the function-to-manifesting-mark correlation-are unstable and therefore evolve by way of specific solutions toward what we characterized as the Type 1 stable system. One particular subtype, namely, that in which more than one mark correlates with a single function, holds particular relevance for the entire category of usage problems referred to above and permits some differentiation to be made within that category. On the basis

Linguistics · Sociology · Theoretical linguistics · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · History · Philosophy