Roy
Harris
Online
Integrationism: a very brief introduction:
Languages and rules
6. Languages and rules.
6a. Traditional European education also inculcated the doctrine that every language has its own ‘rules of grammar’ which must not be infringed. (‘Never use the pronoun we after a preposition’, ‘Plural verbs must have plural subjects’, etc.) These alleged ‘rules’, along with the alleged ‘parts of speech’ on which they were based, were the inventions of grammarians, whose main aim in formulating them was to simplify morphology and syntax for the benefit of learners. The ‘rules’ supposedly governed the ‘correct’ forms of speech, i.e. the forms approved by the ‘best’ speakers (usually educated members of the upper class).
6b. In modern linguistics, these traditional ‘rules’ have been taken over by linguistic theorists, partially renamed and greatly complicated. However, they are now passed off as ‘describing’ or ‘underlying’ the actual linguistic practice of the majority of speakers of the language, or at least of speakers of the ‘standard language’. This is another invention of theorists, aided and abetted by governments wishing to impose uniformity on the linguistic usage of the populations under their control. Since the Renaissance, speaking ‘standard English’, ‘standard French’, etc. has been promoted as a kind of badge of national identity. Apologists for standard languages commonly appeal to the necessity for distinguishing between ‘descriptive’ and ‘prescriptive’ grammar, but without apparently realizing that ‘standard’ and ‘standardization’ are inherently prescriptive notions.
6c. From an integrational perspective, there are no ‘rules of grammar’ and there are no ‘standard languages’. These notions are pedagogic fictions, maintained chiefly for educational and political reasons, and serving to disguise the endless variety of integrational patterns that are to be found in everyday human interaction. Linguistic usage is subject to constant innovation and experiment (new words, new constructions, new applications), as intelligent observers can notice for themselves almost from day to day, if they keep their eyes and ears open.
6d. What particular language (or variety of a language) individuals regard themselves or others as speaking is a question open to empirical research. This is research into the popular use of language-names and descriptions (such as English, Glaswegian, Cockney, slang, etc.). The answer will vary in different cases. It cannot be answered in advance by postulating that every such designation corresponds to some specific system of linguistic ‘rules’, of which the speakers themselves may be only dimly or unconsciously aware. That is neither a ‘scientific’ nor even a plausible assumption.
6e. In brief, the way the term rule is used in contemporary linguistics is another example of conceptual confusion perpetrated in the name of linguistic theory. Rules do not describe anything, either in language or any other sphere of human activity: rules lay down prescriptions in the name of some authority. The Highway Code does not describe how motorists actually behave on the road, but prescribes how they have to behave in order to keep within the law. To imagine that rules are just descriptive generalizations of some kind (e.g. of linguistic usage, or of postulated brain processes, or of a corpus of texts) is to confuse rules with regularities.
