Language and Dialect: Some Tentative Postulates

Syntactic variation and dialect divergence

“…It has been a widely held assumption, at least among theoretical linguists and some traditional dialectologists, that the intuitive notion 'dialects of the same language' can be given an explicit structural definition. Underlying identity manifests itself at the syntactic level as a shared body of phrase-structure rules and at the phonological level as a shared body of lexical representations (see for example Agard, 1971;Bailey, 1973). Wolff, 1964;Berdan, 1977), mutual intelligibility between speakers of different varieties is considered to confirm the existence of a common grammatical 'core' underlying all dialects of a single language.…”

“…The conventional generative wisdom is that dialects of the same language share the same set of underlying representations and differ only in the organization of low-level rules. Underlying identity manifests itself at the syntactic level as a shared body of phrase-structure rules and at the phonological level as a shared body of lexical representations (see for example Agard, 1971;Bailey, 1973). Dialect divergence manifests itself in the selective addition, loss, simplification, reordering, or other modification of late transformational or phonological rules (see King, 1969: ch.…”

“…1 Some of the well-known difficulties stem from attempts to extend to the syntactic level quantitative techniques which were originally developed to handle phonological variation. Agard, 1971). Lavandera, 1978;Romaine, 1981).…”

“…According to what we might call the PANLECTAL IDENTITY HYPOTHESIS, dialects of a single language are considered to share a common grammatical'core' and differ only in matters of low-level realization (e.g. Agard, 1971). Variation arising out of interface between dialects that are allegedly related in this way is thus describable in terms of variable rules which operate at low levels of realization.…”

Dialect, language, and ‘synecdoche’

“…Voegelin and Harris (1951) propose mutual intelligibility criteria for the placing of dialects within the same or separate languages. Agard (1971) argues that this approach is wrong, that classificatory criteria are to be sought not in speakers' comprehension, but in careful structural analysis and comparision of the dialects involved. Ferguson and Gumperz (1960: 5) attempt a synthesis of structural considerations with speaker intelligibility.…”