The axiom of categoricity is a term coined by
J. K. Chambers in 1995 to refer to the once-widespread tenet of
linguistic theory
Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics which, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to theory of language, or the branch of linguistics which inquires into the n ...
that in order to properly study language, linguistic data should be removed or abstracted from all real-world context so as to be free of any inconsistencies or variability. This principle was, for different theorists and schools of thought, taken as a prerequisite for linguistic theory, or as a self-evident falsehood to be rejected.
[Such as Bakhtin (1986)] It remains an influential idea in linguistics.
History
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure (; ; 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is wide ...
divided language into two categories, ''
langue'' (the abstract grammatical system a language uses) and ''parole'' (language as it is used in real-life circumstances). Historically, the range of language study had been limited to ''langue'', since the data could easily be found in the linguist's own intuitions about language and there was no need to look at the often inconsistent and chaotic language patterns found in everyday
society
A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Soc ...
.
In the 20th century, scholars began to further embrace the assumption that linguistic data should be removed from its social, real-life context.
Martin Joos
Martin Joos (1907–1978) was an American linguist and professor of German. He spent most of his career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and also served at the University of Toronto and as a visiting scholar at the University of Alber ...
stated the axiom this way in 1950:
"We must make our 'linguistics' a kind of mathematics within which inconsistency is by definition impossible." (Joos 1950: 701-2)
In 1965,
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...
offered a more substantial definition, incorporating his concepts of
linguistic competence and
linguistic performance, terms that closely parallel Saussure's ''langue'' and ''parole''.
"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance." (Chomsky 1965: 3)
Around this time, several linguistic studies began to acknowledge not only the presence, but importance of variability found in speaker data. Instead of dismissing this variability on the grounds that the variants either belonged to different coexisting linguistic systems or demonstrated unpredictable
free variation
In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers.
Sociolinguists argue that describing such ...
as had been done before, they recognized that it might be influenced by the speaker's circumstances. Sociologist John L. Fischer conducted one of the first systematic studies of language variation in 1958 to address variation in the speech of New England schoolchildren. Finding free variation to be an unsatisfactory explanation, he wrote:
"...Another sort of explanation is possible in terms of current factors which lead a given child in given circumstances to produce one of the variants rather than another." (Fischer 1958: 47-8)
Fischer eventually discovered a correlation between the linguistic variants and independent social
variables such as
class
Class or The Class may refer to:
Common uses not otherwise categorized
* Class (biology), a taxonomic rank
* Class (knowledge representation), a collection of individuals or objects
* Class (philosophy), an analytical concept used differently ...
and
sex. By gathering variable data and analyzing it, he proved that the inconsistencies were indeed manageable, resisting the axiom of categoricity's premise that the data be abstracted from social contexts in order to make it coherent and manageable. By invalidating this premise, it proved that acceptance of the Axiom of categoricity is not a requirement but rather an idealistic option that may or may not be useful to a study. Fischer's work created the basis for sociolinguistic analysis in the coming years, notably
William Labov's studies in
Martha's Vineyard
Martha's Vineyard, often simply called the Vineyard, is an island in the Northeastern United States, located south of Cape Cod in Dukes County, Massachusetts, known for being a popular, affluent summer colony. Martha's Vineyard includes the ...
and New York City during the 1960s.
Acceptance in modern theory
Despite its rejection by sociolinguists, the Axiom of categoricity is still an influential postulate in some schools of linguistics. Chambers claims that all the linguistic progress that was made when the axiom was the law remains successful and indisputable. (Chambers 1995: 12-29)
See also
*
Variable rules analysis
References
Bibliography
* Bakhtin, M. (1986), The Problem of Speech Genres (Проблема речевых жанров), in: ''Speech genres and other late essays'', Austin: University of Texas Press. Translation: Vern W. McGee.
* Chambers, J.K. (1995), ''Sociolinguistic Theory'', Oxford, England: Blackwell.
* Chomsky, Noam (1965), ''Aspects of the Theory of Syntax'', Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
* Fischer, John L. (1958), Social Influences on the Choice of a Linguistic Variant, ''Word'' 14: 47-56.
* Joos, Martin (1950), Description of Language Design. ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'', 22(6): 701-708.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Axiom Of Categoricity
Sociolinguistics