Sociolinguistics and Transformational Grammar

Abstract

The success of transformational ·grammar owes a great deal to its high degree of idealization. By assuming an unrealistic ideal speaker/ hearer in a homogeneous linguistic community, and by proposing the explication of this speaker's linguistic ability to be its ultimate goal, transformational grammar devised a system of grammar which has even become one of the standard notions of the discipline today. Sociolinguistics, on the other band, is a discipline that has developed itself with a methodology which diametrically opposes that of transformational grammar. Its ·remarkable progress in recent years has led Dell Hymes, William Labov, and M.A.K. Halliday to assert that sociolinguistics is linguistics, and hence the prefix "socio-·" is redundant and unnecessary (Halliday,1974:81). The recent rise of sociolinguistics is not unrelated to inherent problems in the transformational approach. In fact, Labovian sociolinguistics has developed by challenging the methodology utilized in transformational grammar. In this paper I want to attempt an .analysis of reasons behind this rise of sociolinguistics, focusing particularly on those .aspects of transformational grammar which ate questioned by sociolinguists and others.