of neuropsychological, neuroimaging and genetic investigations of three
generations of one family with severe speech and language disorders
(Gopnik 1990; Vargha-Khadem and Liégeois 2007).^2
So while the primary focus in this study is American English, the
language phenomena discussed here are relevant to every language
community and every human being.^3 To understand these bigger issues,
you will need to be familiar with some of those basic universal facts about
the structure and function of human language. These are things you do not
know, unless you’ve studied linguistics, in the same way you do not know
how your brain causes your hand to turn the page of this book unless
you’ve studied anatomy, physiology and neurology.
Some of the things you read here may seem at first counter-intuitive or
just plain wrong, and in fact there are some obstacles to laying out these
ideas.
Linguists^4 do not form a homogenous club. Like any other group of
scholars divided by a common subject matter, there are great rivalries,
ancient quarrels, picky arguments, and plain differences of opinion. It
could hardly be otherwise in a discipline diverse enough to include topics
such as neurological structures and linguistic capacity, grammaticalized
strategies for encoding social information in systems of address, and
creolization. Thus it should be no surprise that those who study the rules
which generate the ordering of words into sentences (syntacticians and
cognitive grammarians, for example) are often openly disdainful of each
other’s approach, on theoretical grounds, and of the study of the social life
of language, more generally. Linguists concerned with the relationship
between structured variation in language and social identity
(sociolinguists, variationists, some anthropological linguists) chide both
syntacticians and cognitive grammarians for what they see as
unreasonable abstractions and lack of reproducible results; phoneticians
go about their business of understanding and theorizing the way humans
produce and perceive sound – the architects and engineers of linguistics –
and wonder what all the noise is about; historical linguists concern