What Is Language For Sociolinguists? The Variationist, Ethnographic, and Conversation-Analytic Ontolo-Gies of Language
What Is Language For Sociolinguists? The Variationist, Ethnographic, and Conversation-Analytic Ontolo-Gies of Language
What Is Language For Sociolinguists? The Variationist, Ethnographic, and Conversation-Analytic Ontolo-Gies of Language
Abstract
The present investigation explores the language definitions (i. e. the language ontologies) that
have emerged in the field of sociolinguistics. In general, it examines three types of sociolin-
guistic studies: Labovian sociolinguistics (Labov 1972), the Ethnography of Communication
(Gumperz/Hymes 1964) and Conversation Analysis (Sacks 1992). Firstly, it offers an account
on the ontology of language developed by Chomskyian linguistics (1986) which is used as a
starting point to contrast the three sociolinguistics’ language ontologies. Then, the paper pre-
sents Labov’s ontology of language (Labov 1977), the criticism that it has faced and examines
proposals that aim to integrate social facts and linguistic structure. With regard to the Ethnog-
raphy of Communication, accounts about its ontology of language (Hymes 1974, 1986) and
its ontology of culture (Sapir 1921; Hymes 1972) are presented and a possible explanation
about the relationship between language and culture is offered. With respect to Conversation
Analysis, its ontology of language is presented (Ochs et al. 1996) as well as its analytic in-
sight and an account about grammar as an interactional resource is given. The final section
proposes that, for these three types of sociolinguistics, “language” is a social, functional and
behavioural entity which is socially and behaviourally structured. “Language” transmits social
meanings, reflects the social order and expresses the identity of its speakers.
1 Introduction
In his book A Realist Theory of Science Bhaskar (1975: 16) formulates what he calls the “ep-
istemic fallacy”: “statements about being can always be transposed into statements about our
knowledge of being”. For example, what we know about language (i. e. its epistemology) is
what language is (i. e. its ontology), and nothing more. So, language is reduced to what we
know about it. Bhaskar also argues that the being of a given entity (e. g. language) is inde-
pendent of the knowledge we have of the entity. For example, there may be linguistic patterns
of human language that exist even though they have not been discovered yet, and these un-
known linguistic patterns are significant for the ontology of language, i. e. for what language
is.
* I would like to thank to Xoán Paulo Rodríguez Yáñez for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Special thanks to Verónica Villafaña Rojas and to the reviewers of Linguistik Online for their useful observa-
tions. Any errors remain my own.
Linguistik online 83, 4/17 http://dx.doi.org/10.13092/lo.83.3788
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116 Linguistik online 83, 4/17
In this paper, I examine three types of sociolinguistic paradigms in order to identify how they
define language. I examine Labovian sociolinguistics that is designed particularly in the social
structure perspective, top-left of the figure, and when Labovian sociolinguistics studies se-
lected formal “features” as aspects of language behaviour it reaches the social behaviour cor-
ner of the figure. The Ethnography of Communication and Conversation Analysis, which are
the other two paradigms examined in the paper, are designed in the social action perspective.
Conversation Analysis is particularly situated in the Praxis theory.
I chose Labovian sociolinguistics and the Ethnography of Communication because not only
do they embody two foundational paradigms in the field of sociolinguistics, but also, as I
show, they formulate an important opposition to the ontology of language generated by the
so-called Chomskyan revolution of linguistics. I selected Conversation Analysis because alt-
hough its methodology “does not privilege language use [...] [it] may do as much, if not more,
than any other to illuminate it” (Clift 2016), hence I consider its ontology of language worth
discussing. Furthermore, it is a discipline that has boosted its global institutionalisation in the
past two decades, or as Coupland (2001: 12) asserts: Conversation Analysis is “alive and well
within modern sociolinguistics”.
It is important to mention that the present notes aim at describing and revising three sociolin-
guistic ontologies of language to show some insights of the discipline. I do not intend to for-
mulate or look for the sociolinguistic ontology of language nor to offer a deep philosophical
discussion or to debate the ontologies, rather, I attempt to recapitulate and discuss some onto-
logical conceptions of language and look at their differences and similarities so as to contrib-
ute to the observation and understanding of one of the discipline’s principles: its language
ontology(ies).
I begin the analysis with a discussion on the ontology of language of the formalist paradigm,
that is, Chomsky’s ontology of language. I begin with this because the paper also addresses
the relationship between Chomsky’s language ontology and the language ontology of the
three sociolinguistics types to be discussed.
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doctrines. So save your concern for certain philosophers; come to their aid and defend them. As
to science, it can only improve
(Galilei 1967 [1632]: 37–83)
Linguistics, before Chomsky, was in Searle’s (1974: 3) words, “a sort of verbal botany” in the
sense that linguists would design methods to classify the linguistic elements of a given cor-
pus. The purpose of structural linguistics was either to find regularities in a corpus in order to
catalogue the phonemes, morphemes, words and phrases of a particular language and to be
able to make predictions in that language as a whole; or to gather sufficient information and
be able to produce utterances just like a native speaker of the language would (Harris 1951:
365). With this scientific approach, the study of language was framed within scientific empir-
icism (or logical positivism) since the source of knowledge about languages was derived from
empirical evidence (i. e. a corpus of a given language). This implied that, unobservable facts
such as mental faculties were completely ignored.
In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky (1957) suggested that the methods used by structural lin-
guists for the analysis of sentences were rather inadequate; because in contrast to phonemes,
morphemes, and even words, the number of sentences of a language is infinite. In other
words, it is not possible to make a catalogue of all the sentences that can occur in a language.
He argued as well that the methods of structural linguistics were incompetent at explaining
ambiguity in sentences when the ambiguity was caused by the structure of the sentence and
not by the words of the sentence. For example, the sentence I like her cooking can mean ‘I
like what she cooks’; ‘I like the way she cooks’; ‘I like the fact that she cooks’; ‘I like the fact
that she is being [sic] cooking’; etc. (Searle 1974: 5).
Consequently, Chomsky proposed a new methodology and as a result a new ontology of lan-
guage namely:
Chomsky argued that the aim of linguistics should be to create a theory that could explain the
endless number of sentences in a natural language (i. e. human language). This theory would
be used to describe the grammar structure of the strings of words which form sentences in a
natural language. Chomsky termed this theory “generative grammar” since the goal of lin-
guists was to seek an apparatus that could generate the sentences of a language. In other
words, linguists, instead of finding methods to accomplish the taxonomy of a language from a
corpus of utterances, would have to seek the mechanisms in the mind of the native speaker
that generate language. Linguists should study the knowledge that the native speakers have
about their language by means of their intuitions. So, by having a native speaker judging what
sounds grammatical or not in their language, the linguist aims to establish the grammatical
rules needed for the construction of sentences in natural languages.
This new epistemology for the study of language required a different ontological conception
of language. Thus, Chomsky introduced two ontological positions: (1) Language is a cogni-
tive system and (2) Language is the reflection of an innate language faculty (Borsley 2008).
This view left an internalised property as the new object of study of linguistics, which he
called the I-language (Internalised language or linguistic competence). Along with the I-
language, Chomsky (1986: 22) introduced the concept E-language (Externalised language or
linguistic performance). He defined the I-language as “some element of the mind of the per-
son who knows the language, acquired by the learner, and used by the speaker-hearer”, and he
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defined the E-language as the set of speech events the speaker can perform; the “collection (or
system) of actions or behaviours of some sort”, presumably in conjunction “with some ac-
count of their context of use or semantic content”, and whose main property is grammar
which enumerates its elements. Chomsky (1986: 20–22) also mentioned that the E-language
should be “understood independently of the properties of the mind/brain”. Chomsky set the
E-language apart from the focus of linguistics since linguistic data of this kind (i. e. a record
of natural speech), he argued, “show[s] numerous false starts, deviations from rules, changes
of plan in mid-course, and so on”; this constitutes “data fairly degenerated in quality” (Chom-
sky 1965: 31) because it is not a pure instance of the I-language. Chomsky claims that a pure
instance of the I-language is found in a hypothesised homogenous speech community where
the speakers’ speech does not have any influence of any kind (e. g. from social factors).
In sum, Chomsky’s ideas situated linguistics within psychology since the object of study is
the individual’s I-language. The non-empiric methodology of linguistics and the mental-
faculty ontology of language situated linguistics within scientific realism because Chomsky’s
linguistics is concerned with the structures and mechanisms that underline and explain lan-
guage (Borsley 2008). In other words, the methodology and ontology of linguistics proposed
by Chomsky are based on the study of the mechanic procedures of an unobservable entity: the
I-Language. This methodology of linguistics, however, cannot offer any accounts or explana-
tions for the E-language. It is believed that the E-language is a secondary concept whose ex-
planation does not correspond to linguistics.
In the following sections I discuss some of the implications that Chomsky’s ideas brought to
the study of language from scholars in the social sciences. Namely, in section 2, I present
some of the criticism that Labov’s ontology of language has encountered, and two theoretical
attempts that have tried to conciliate his ontology with Chomsky’s. In section 3, I discuss the
ethnographic approach to the study of language which attempts to explain how both culture
and language are internal entities of the individual. Section 4 is dedicated to conversation ana-
lytic studies which is a quite recent approach to the study of language in social interaction.
2 Labovian sociolinguistics
A salient characteristic of Chomsky’s linguistics is that natural languages are studied in isola-
tion and centred in the individual. This means that the interactions and the relationship among
speakers, as well as the social context where language takes place, are not taken into account
by the linguists. This implication generated some reactions from sociologists who argued that
natural languages constituted a social entity so that it is a “fruitless and unrewarding task”
(Labov 1977: 124) to construct grammars of natural languages regardless of the speakers
and/or society where a given natural language exists. William Labov argued that “the aim of
linguistic analysis is to describe the regular patterns of the speech, rather than the idiosyncra-
sies of any given individual” (Labov 1977: 95). This linguistic approach suggests a different
ontology of language. Echoing Saussure’s conception of langue, Labovian sociolinguistics
regards language as a social fact (Figueroa 1994) in the sense that language is a shared prop-
erty of the community. Labovian sociolinguistics conceives regular patterns as social-
linguistic facts which represent a correlation between linguistic features and social factors
(Pateman 1987: 59–63).
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Coupland (2001: 10) argues that Labovian sociolinguistics treats language as a “socially con-
ditioned distributional pattering”. To describe this pattering Labov (1977) introduced the var-
iable rule which is a linguistic feature present in a community whose variation is the result of
social factors (e. g. race, social class, age, sex, etc.); he argues that variable rules are part of
the speaker knowledge of the language. Labov uses the methodological tool of variable rule to
make statistical claims of the correlation of linguistic features and the social factors so as to
find regular patterns in the speech of a community. Consequently, by analysing regular pat-
terns in speech, the linguist is constructing the grammar of the speech community rather than
the grammar of the individual’s I-language. Furthermore, according to Weinreich et al. (1968)
the language of the community is a made up of a variety of a coexisting parallel grammars.
Pateman (1987: 60) mentions that Labov’s methodology is “to collect speech data from indi-
viduals, subject variation in the data (e. g. phonetic realization of a phoneme, most
famously, /r/) to statistical analysis to establish” linguistic and social correlations of the varia-
tion “and then write variable rules which will generate the appropriate variant for any linguis-
tic or social context”. This epistemology of language involves the study of the use of language
in context rather than the study of the isolated I-language of the individual. Figueroa (1994)
describes Labovian sociolinguistics as sociolinguistic realism in that it is focused on how lan-
guage is used in the real world and on what language use can reveal about the linguistic struc-
ture that exists independently of our knowledge of it.
The criticism of Labov’s language ontology, as explained by Botha (1992: 208), is made on
the grounds of two arguments: (1) variable rules are “summaries [...] of the speech behaviour
of the speech community”, that is, variable rules make accounts about the language of a
group. It is unclear, however, how the information entailed in variable rules is acquired by
children when learning the language. For example, how children acquire the rule: “In envi-
ronment X, I use variant Y Z % of the time” (Bickerton 1971). For Botha (1992: 209–210), it
is unclear as well how the variable rule operates in the mind of the speakers so as “to keep the
individual speech behaviour within the statistical limits set in the rule(s) of the group”. There-
fore, (2) variable rules “do not represent quantitative relations that exist as part of a social
linguistic reality [...] [they] are rather [...] artefacts of Labov’s methodology” or as
Wardhaugh (2006: 187) explains: they are statistical generalisations of language use which
indicate the linguistic norms of a given community. These remarks suggest that Labov’s view
of linguistics is unable of making accounts about I-language and only capable of describing
its use.
However, Hudson’s (1996) discussion on the implications of quantitative sociolinguistic re-
search on the theory of language structure presents a reasonable theory that can be used to
make accounts and predictions on the internal mental link between social facts and the struc-
ture of the I-language. Hudson argues that there are two mental variables that influence the
speaker when choosing a sociolinguistics variable, these are: (1) the speaker’s judgement
(or distinctiveness view) on how strong is the link between the social factor and the linguistic
variant (or social distinctiveness). That is, the speaker’s personal beliefs about the relationship
between the social factor and the linguistic variant become relevant. In this case the speaker
relays on his or her own experience, so the more similar the experience between speakers is,
the more similar their judgements and believes will be. And (2) the social-type allegiance
which Hudson defines as the speaker’s degree of allegiance to the social type (e. g. social
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class) which is linked to a linguistic variable. In contrast to Labov’s view, Hudson argues that
grammars and social constrains (i. e. linguistic variables due to social class) are part of the
individual speaker and not of the community, which means that grammars are part of the in-
dividual. Hudson’s theory could be considered to be an attempt to explain sociolinguistics
data within the frame of Chomsky’s ontology of language in the sense that language is con-
sidered as something individual. However, this is just one mean to face a small part of the
criticism that Labovian sociolinguistics has faced.
Bender (2007: 13–14) also presents a proposal that could integrate social factors and language
structure. Her ontology and epistemology are rather closer to those of Chomsky’s. Bender
argues that a theory that could integrate sociolinguistic and competence (I-Language) theories
would provide “superior models of language” and would be able to explain “a broader range
of data”; this theory would be considered to be social and cognitivist. Bender suggests that in
order to integrate both theories, a model of grammar should include the following three no-
tions: (1) Social meanings, which are the social categories that the speakers’ linguistic ac-
tions indicate. For example, Bender (2005) demonstrates how African-American listeners
judge, in a personality scale, the use of copula presence (as reliable/likable/well educated) and
copula absence (as less educated etc.) by African American Vernacular English speakers. (2)
Overspecified types or “prefabricated ‘chunks’ of linguistic structure” (Bender 2005: 13),
which suggest that there are fixed phrases stored (in our minds) whose linguistic unites are
eligible for variation. For instance, she exposes Bybee and Scheibman’s (1999) study on the
variation of don’t in fixed phrases such as I dont know or why don’t you. (3) Linguistic prob-
ability, which is the speakers’ knowledge of probabilistic information which is used to modu-
late the grammatical context. As an example of this Bender mentions Gahl and Garnsey’s
(2004) experiment which shows how when speakers read the same sequence of words in dif-
ferent syntactic contexts, their pronunciation of the words varies according to the probability
of the verbs appearing in a given syntactic context.
Hudson’s (1996) and Bender’s (2007) are examples of attempts to conciliate the view of lan-
guage as a property of a speech community with Chomsky’s language ontology: language as
internalised knowledge of the individual. However, they do not address their main criticism
which has to do with the mental processes that reveal the relationship between social factors
and linguistic features. For example, Labovian sociolinguistics is unable to explain aspects of
the acquisition of language or propose universals of language use. In a broad sense, Labovian
sociolinguistics focuses on the statistical description of linguistic patterns in a speech com-
munity which enables the linguist to identify variation and change in language (cf. Chambers
et al. 2002).
Labovian sociolinguistics follows the modern linguistics’ language ontology (i. e. the Chom-
skyian language ontology): “language [is] bounded, nameable and countable unit, often re-
duce to grammatical structures and vocabulary and called by names such as [varieties of]
‘English’, [varieties of] ‘French’ and so on” (Blommaert 2010: 4). However, Labovian socio-
linguistics does not locate language in the individual, as Chomskyian linguistics does, but in
the community. One could suggests that Labovian sociolinguistics regards language as “a
future of the rational expression of the individual expressing a social identity” (Williams
1992: 92). Furthermore, although this approach regards language as a social entity, there are
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social aspects that this type of sociolinguistics does not consider. For instance, aspects con-
cerning the interactional or cultural side of language.
In the following sections, I discuss two interactional approaches to the study of language
which are adherent to Sapir’s (1929: 214) ontology of language: “Language is primarily a
cultural or social product”.
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language. This new approach needed to generate an ontology of culture that could co-exist or
complement the I-language of Chomsky. With this purpose, Hymes (1972) conceives culture
as knowledge, i. e. as an internalised property of human beings. Emulating the terminology
used by Chomsky to refer to the I-Language, Hymes terms this knowledge as communicative
competence. He mentions that speakers’ abilities and judgments are linked to sociocultural
features. He argues:
a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropri-
ate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about
with whom, when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a reper-
toire of speech acts, to take part in events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others. The
competence, moreover, is integral with attitudes, values, and motivations concerning language,
its features and uses, and integral with competence for, and attitudes toward, the interrelation of
language with the other code of communicative conduct
(Hymes 1972: 277; emphasis not in the original)
Hymes postulates that a theory of language use is also a theory of competence not a separate
theory (of performance) as Chomsky suggested. His main argument to support this view is
that competence depends on knowledge and use; and performance remains the externalisation
of competence. This explanation relates language and culture intrinsically and highlights the
idea that performance is the realisation of linguistic and cultural abilities and judgments.
Hymes proposes four points of convergence between linguistic and communicative systems:
in a formal (broad) system, (1) something can be grammatical, cultural and communicative
but it can also be ungrammatical, uncultural and uncommunicative. (2) Something can be
grammatical, cultural and communicative but not feasible, i. e. something that is difficult to
process will not occur; for example; the classic sentence “The mouse the cat the dog chased
ate had a white tail” is grammatically correct but is difficult to be processed by the human
brain. (3) Something can be appropriate or not depending on the social context. And (4)
something may be possible, feasible, and appropriate but it may not occur; this refers to the
notion that speakers have the knowledge of probabilities (i. e. options speakers have) in lan-
guage use which they apply depending on the social context.
Hymes does not go further to explain in detail how the linguistic and cultural systems relate
with each other in the minds of the speakers; i. e. he does not provide an account on the inter-
nal link in our minds between language and culture. A link that we witness when observing
performance. The Ethnography of Communication only suggests that language is the expres-
sion of culture, an expression that shows the world’s view of the individual (Williams 1992:
202). To propose a possible explanation of the link between language and culture, I refer to
Hudson’s (1996) account on the relationship between language, thought, and culture which I
construct in a diagram in figure 2.
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THOUGHT
LANGUAGE CULTURE
Mental
Knowledge shared by a community
activity
Linguistic Knowledge and acquired socially (i.e. ‘cultural
(i.e. linguistic items) e. g. knowledge’)
Memory Inference
Concepts
e.g. ‘oil’, ‘water’, ‘float’
&
Propositions
e.g. ‘Oil floats on water’
Linguistically
Communication relevant social
categories
Hudson asserts that cultural knowledge plays a major role in communication. He explains that
language and culture are knowledge: Linguistic knowledge consists of linguistic items
(i. e. lexical, phonological, and syntactic items), and cultural knowledge is socially acquired
and is shared by a community. Linguistic and cultural knowledge converge in thought
through memory and inference whose objects are concepts and propositions. Most words
are concepts, for instance words like oil, water, or float. In a similar way, most sentences ex-
press propositions, for example Oil floats on water. So, speakers use linguistic items to ana-
lyse and report their experience of the world through a combination of phonological, syntac-
tic, and semantic elements. Cultural concepts and propositions are learned from people around
us through the process of socialization. For example, the concept ‘church’ involves the propo-
sition People are silent at church which leads to the inference of the type of behaviour that is
required when a speaker visits a church. The meaning of linguistic and cultural knowledge is
stored in our memory. The meaning of linguistic items and cultural concepts and propositions
mark their relationship with the world. Now, communication (i. e. understanding and using
of speech) requires the use of linguistic and cultural knowledge. To construct segments of
speech we resort to linguistic items but also we need pragmatic knowledge which derives
from cultural knowledge. Pragmatic knowledge consists of inferences: “the hearer infers what
the speaker intends, and the speaker infers the best way to express the message. Inference is
like a mental calculation – if A, B and C are true, what follows?” (Hudson 1996: 81). Speak-
ers assign linguistically relevant social categories to the different communicative events and
create concepts; for example, talking with a friend may be categorised as an “informal” com-
municative event whereas giving a lecture may be categorised as a “formal” event. So speak-
ers infer and accommodate their language to cultural contingencies.
Hudson’s analysis of the relationship between language, thought, and culture systematically
explains how linguistic and cultural knowledge are related. It complements Hymes’ notion of
communicative competence (i. e. cultural knowledge) by indicating how the former is related
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to linguistic knowledge (i. e. the I-language). With Hymes and Hudson’s ideas one could con-
ceive an “updated” version of Sapir’s ontological conception of language; that is, language is
a cultural product. This updated version regards language as the intersection between linguis-
tic and cultural knowledge. The Ethnography of Communication applies this ontology of lan-
guage to the study of cultural aspects of language use; it investigates linguistic accounts of an
internal property, i. e. culture. For Hymes (1974), to assess the place of language in culture
and society, the frame of reference should come from communication not language itself and
from ethnography not linguistics. This sociolinguistic approach highlights the fact that the
solely study of the I-language cannot represent a holistic approach to the study of language
because language and culture are both individual and internal aspects which are intrinsically
related.
In the following section I show the third ontological conception of language which regards
language as an instrument to conduct social actions in interaction.
4 Conversation Analysis
The sociolinguistic approach that regards language as a resource for social actions in interac-
tions has its philosophical roots on the later Wittgensteinian ontology of language: language is
“a bewildering variety of complex human activities, undertaken with multifarious purposes”
(Edwards 1967: 395; emphasis not in the original). In other words, humans use language not
only to describe the world but to do actions. Wittgenstein (1958) argues for example that the
meaning of words should be found in its use in language.
In the sixties Harvey Sacks developed a research programme, known later as Conversation
Analysis, to discover the order of linguistic human activities, i. e. conversations. His work
was influenced by the sociology of Erving Goffman (1963) and the ethnomethodology of
Harold Garfinkel (1972). In a way similar to Chomsky’s linguistics, Sacks’ research was con-
cerned with the rules that governed language: Sacks was interested in exposing the rules of
language use, i. e. the rules that speakers attend to when interacting with each other (Silver-
man 1998). In other words, Sacks was not interested in internal properties of the mind, he
instead focused on the structure of language use.
Williams (1992: 161) suggests that, in contrast to Chomskyan linguistics where the semantic
meaning of utterances is based on the rules of syntax, for Conversation Analysis, the semantic
meaning goes further than that: rules of syntax are “interpretative aids as opposed to being
causal agents. It is the account rather than the sentence which is the basic unit of analysis”.
Other interactional elements, apart from language per se, become important in the construc-
tion of meaning, such as pauses, in-breaths, physical movements, gestures, laughter, etc. Wil-
liams argues that for Chomskyan linguistics the study of native intuition is about studying
syntactic rules, whereas for Conversation Analysis it is about interpretative procedures. In
fact, Sacks (1992: 226) established an ontology of culture based on these interpretative proce-
dures which the analyst has to identify: “a culture is an apparatus for generating recognizable
actions”.
Sacks observed that the organisation of conversations depends on the speakers’ understanding
of interactional elements. The research paradigm established by Sacks has two recognisable
principles: the first one has to do with the premise that in human interactions “there is order at
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all points” (Sacks 1984: 22). He refers to the fact that interactions are methodically produced
by co-participants who, turn by turn, display their mutual understanding of each other (Scheg-
loff/Sacks 1973). The second principle of the paradigm has to do with the sequential accom-
plishment of activities in interaction. That is, Sacks argues that, by means of the methodical
production of interaction, co-participants carry out activities that consist of recognisable se-
quences of actions (Sacks 1992). A clear example of the application of these two principles is
found in the groundbreaking paper and founder of the discipline: A simplest systematic for the
organization of turn-taking for conversation by Sacks et al. (1974).
Coupland asserts that for Conversation Analysis:
The outcomes of talk are largely unforeseeable [,] [...] talk or conversation develops its own
momentum, and [...] meanings are therefore contingent (they depend on other meanings around
them) and emergent (they surface progressively and incrementally from the flow of talk).
Agency tends to be constructed as shared between participants, so meanings and talk itself are
said to be co-constructed, or else, more radically, agency is attributed to the process of social
interaction itself
(Coupland 2011: 11–12; emphasis in the original)
Thus, Conversation Analysis is an expression of relativism and realism in sociolinguistic
studies. In general, the aim of conversation-analytic studies is to uncover the structural organ-
isation of talk and the systematicity of activities carried out in human interactions or talk-in-
interactions as the later are known in the field. To do that, analysts examine video or audio
recordings of naturally occurring interactions which are transcribed “captur[ing] in fine detail
the temporal production of talk” (Clift et al. 2006: 5; emphasis in the original).
One main epistemological difference between the previous Labovian sociolinguistics and the
Ethnography of Communication, and Conversation Analysis is that the first two use inform-
ants; i. e. they report on the results of tasks that the informants perform (e. g. reading lists of
words) or on informants’ responses to questions. Labov’s linguistics for instance consists of
reporting statistical accounts of language use in relation to social factors. Similarly, the Eth-
nography of Communication reports on observations of cultural and communicative patterns
of the speech community. In contrast, Conversation Analysis reports on the sequential struc-
ture of what speakers do with language in naturally occurring situations.
In general, for Conversation Analysis language is one of the instruments used in social inter-
action, in particular, grammar is treated as part of a range of resources that intervene in the
organisation of social life, i. e. Conversation Analysis regards grammar as one of the organi-
sational practices of human conduct (e. g. Ochs et al. 1996a). Ochs et al. (1996b: 34) argue
that “grammars are abstract mental structures that organize linguistic elements within utter-
ances that in turn comprise social interactional work”. In other words, speakers use the gram-
matical resources which their language provides to accomplish actions in interaction. Ochs
et al. also mention that social interaction can influence the organisation of grammar since the
former “is the universally commonplace medium of language acquisition, language mainte-
nance, and language change”; this means that grammar is contingent to social interaction. In
general, Ochs et al. (1996: 38) allude to Sapir’s ontology of language and suggest that
“grammar is part of the essence of interaction itself [...] [it] is inherently interactional. This
claim, in fact, coincides with Chomsky’s notion that grammar is the main property of the E-
language which is a collection or system of behaviours.
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the lines of social and interactional behaviour. The three types of sociolinguistics have formu-
lated three different language ontlologies that I summarise in table 1.
Paradigm Language ontology
Language is a shared property of the community, a correla-
Labovian sociolinguistics
tion of linguistic and social factors.
Ethnography of Communica- Language and culture are internal properties of the speaker
tion and are intrinsically related.
Language is one of the resources used to accomplished social
Conversation Analysis
actions in interaction.
Table 1: The language ontologies of three types of sociolinguistic paradigms
It is clear that these three variants of sociolinguistics share the general language ontology of
the Functionalist paradigm, I consider, however, that it is possible to highlight some ontologi-
cal characteristics particular to the three types of sociolinguistic studies discussed.
Definitions of language vary in introduction to sociolinguistics books for example Wardhaugh
(2006: 1) defines language as “what members of a particular society speak” whereas Hudson
(1996: 1) refers to language as “a body of knowledge and rules”. Trudgill (2000: 2) asserts
that language is not only a mean of communication but also something that establishes social
relationships and conveys information about the speakers. Perhaps due to its introductory
character, these books do not offer an elaborated account on the general ontological concep-
tion of language that the discipline is ascribed to nor to the epistemological nature of the field.
Both aspects are left to be inferred by the reader from the contents of the books. Similarly, in
works dedicated particularly to the philosophy of sociolinguistics (e. g. Figueroa 1994; Wil-
liams 1992) the authors do not provide a detailed sociolinguistic ontology of language, alt-
hough they do review the discipline’s philosophical research insights.
By looking at the similarities and differences between the three ontologies it is clear that for
these sociolinguistic paradigms language is a social and behavioural entity which is socially
and behaviourally structured. Language conveys social meaning, reflects social order and
expresses identities, and by studying it using these sociolinguistic methodologies, one can
discover relevant aspects of society and social behaviour. Some suggest that by studying lan-
guage within the functional paradigm, linguists are indeed studying an internal entity of the
speaker’s mind. For example, Williams (1992: 231) argues that “language is a manifestation
of the thinking subject who consciously employs it in interaction in order to establish under-
standing”. Furthermore, Enfield (2013: xviii) mentions that “when we study human interac-
tion, we are studying the mind, in the real sense of that word: an interpretive system that is
distributed through and across people, places, and times”.
These sociolinguistic paradigms seek to explain the link between the internal or individual
mechanisms of language with social, cultural and interactional contingencies. That is, by
studying language with sociolinguistic methodologies one is able to obtain systematic ac-
counts on the linguistic and social behaviour of speakers. Sociolinguistic studies have demon-
strated that what is considered to be imperfect or unaccounted for grammarians may be “artful
accomplishment of a social act” (Hymes 1972: 272, agreeing with Garfinkel 1972) or in Hud-
son’s (1996: 19) words “sociolinguistics flourish where [formalist] linguistics founder”. The
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Ariel Vázquez Carranza: What is language for sociolinguists? 129
present study has reiterated a truism in the scientific scene, namely that sociolinguistic studies
are fundamental for a complete understanding of what language is. However, I consider im-
portant to re-examine the field periodically to understand the foundational studies, future re-
search could focus on how they have shaped the current practices in the field and our current
understanding of the focus of study.
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