The Consequences of Variability

Abstract

In the last chapter we discussed our reasons for believing that language is inextricable from the accumulated and categorised experience of language users. A consequence of this view is that any theoretical work in linguistics based on idealising away from language users must lack both congruence with the object of enquiry and relevance to the puzzles and mysteries of language in use. The real difficulty here is not with accepting the importance of language users and their knowledge, beliefs and expectations to an understanding of language functioning: it lies rather in defining an investigatable domain once these are accepted as central.

Speech is the only window through which the physiologist can view the cerebral life … and the problems raised by the organisation of language seem to be characteristic of almost all other cerebral activity.

Karl Lashley