One example of this difference can be found in the less/fewer distinction. Prescriptively, less should be used with non‐count nouns, such as water, rice, or money; fewer is used with count nouns (or noun phrases) such as drops of water, grains of rice, or pesos. So something may be worth less money, but it costs fewer pesos. Descriptively, however, this distinction does not hold; less is often used with count nouns. For example, it is common in the US to see signs in grocery stores indicating that certain cashier lines are for patrons with ‘ten items or less,’ although ‘item’ is clearly a count noun. Chances are you will also hear people saying things like there were less students present today than yesterday. While some speakers do still adhere to the less/fewer distinction, it is being lost in some varieties.
Linguistics are aware of prescriptive rules of language as dictated in reference grammars, and they are not irrelevant in sociolinguistics; as we will discuss below, language ideologies are also an important part of how language functions in society. However, in the study of language, linguists focus on descriptive grammar, that is, the rules inside the heads of language users which constitute their knowledge of how to use the language. This knowledge includes underlying rules and principles which allow us to produce new utterances, to know both what it is possible to say and what it is not possible to say. Most language users can’t articulate these rules, but know how to apply them. It is this shared knowledge that becomes the abstraction of a language, which is often seen as something which exists independent of language users. How this knowledge is used by language users is the core of sociolinguistics. In the following sections, we will explore the ways in which sociolinguists and linguist anthropologists have conceptualized language and its users.
Competence and performance
Confronted with the task of trying to describe the grammar of a language like English, many linguists follow the approach associated with Chomsky, who distinguishes between what he has called competence and performance. He claims that it is the linguist’s task to characterize what language users know about their language, that is, their competence, not what they do with their language, that is, their performance. The best‐known characterization of this distinction comes from Chomsky himself (1965, 3–4) in words which have been extensively quoted:
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. This seems to me to have been the position of the founders of modern general linguistics, and no cogent reason for modifying it has been offered. To study actual linguistic performance, we must consider the interaction of a variety of factors, of which the underlying competence of the speaker–hearer is only one. In this respect, study of language is no different from empirical investigation of other complex phenomena.
However, it is exactly the interaction of social and linguistics factors that interests Labov, arguably the most influential figure in sociolinguistics in the last sixty or so years. He maintains (2006, 380) that ‘the linguistic behavior of individuals cannot be understood without knowledge of the communities that they belong to.’ This is the focus of sociolinguistics, and what makes it different from Chomskyan linguistics. We are primarily concerned with real language in use (what Chomsky calls performance), not the language of some ideal language user (i.e., an idealized competence). This distinction is reflected in methodological differences; syntacticians such as Chomsky will often use grammatical judgments to get at competence, while sociolinguists tend to use actual language production (see Part II for discussions of sociolinguistic methodologies).
Further, the knowledge which underlies language production, or performance, is more than just knowledge of grammar; language users must also know social norms for how to use a language – when it is appropriate to speak or to be silent, what topics are acceptable, what form of a question is appropriate to use with a friend versus your boss. There is thus another kind of competence, sometimes called communicative competence. This means knowing social rules for communication. These rules are often linked to language, but are also community‐specific. Communicative competence can be independent of grammatical competence; that is, someone may understand the form of the questions ‘What’s up?’ but not understand that this is a greeting, showing grammatical competence but a gap in communicative competence. The reverse may also be true; for instance a second language learner might use a polite form as dictated by the norms of a community, but not use prescriptively correct word order.
Exploration 1.1 Grammatical Judgments
Here are a number of statements that can be ‘tagged’ to make them into questions. Add a tag question to each with the tag you would be most likely to use and also add any other tags you might also use or think others might use. If you wouldn’t use a tag question in this context, is there some other means for seeking confirmation, such as the use of right? or okay? which sounds more natural to you?
See (1) for an example of a potential answer. Indicate for each example which tag you believe to be the prescriptively ‘correct’ tag, or if you might associate certain tags only with certain types of speakers. Compare your results with those of others who do this task. If there are differences in your answers, how can you explain them? Do such differences challenge the idea of a shared communicative competence?
1 He’s ready, isn’t he?Other possible tags: ‘innit,’ ‘ain’t he.’Prescriptively ‘correct’ tag: ‘isn’t he.’
2 I might see you next week, … ?
3 No one goes there any more, … ?
4 Either John or Mary did it, … ?
5 Few people know that, … ?
6 You don’t want to come with us, … ?
7 I have a penny in my purse, … ?
8 I’m going right now, … ?
9 The baby cried, … ?
10 The girl saw no one, … ?
Variation
The competence–performance distinction just mentioned is one that holds intriguing possibilities for work in linguistics, but it is one that has also proved to be quite troublesome, because the performance of different language users, and the same person in different contexts, can vary quite a lot. For instance speakers in some areas of the Midwestern United States might utter sentences such as ‘The car needs washed’ while others would say ‘The car needs to be washed’ or ‘The car needs washing.’ Further, an individual speaker might use all three of these constructions at different times. (These different structures for expressing the same meaning are called variants; we will explain this term and how it is used in more detail below.) For sociolinguists, this linguistic variation is a central topic, and a core belief is that variation in language is socially meaningful. There is variation across language users, that is, reflections of different ways that people use a language in different regions or social groups, but also variation within the language use of a single person. No one uses language the same way all the time, and people constantly exploit variation within the languages they know for a wide variety of purposes. The consequence is a kind of paradox: while many linguists would like to view any language as a homogeneous entity, so that they can make the strongest possible theoretical generalizations, in actual fact that language will exhibit considerable internal variation. One claim we will be making throughout this book is that variation is an inherent characteristic of all languages at all times, and the patterns exhibited in this variation carry social meanings. (See the link to a website which provides an overview