LANGUAGE AND DIALECT: SOME TENTATIVE POSTULATES
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In the introduction of a 1967 article of the writer's entitled "Stress in Four Romance Languages", it was suggested that "a finite set of deep structures ... may serve to delimit a language; that one finite set of derived surface structures (as against another) may delimit a dialect; but that along this line it is neither efficient nor profitable to attempt to delimit an idiolect." An idiolect is as individual as a person: there seems no point in further pursuing this limiting case in the present article, concerned as it is exclusively with differentiating between the two higher levels of abstraction termed 'dialects' on the one hand and 'languages' on the other. The attempt to so differentiate — in other words to develop the position briefly adumbrated by the present writer in 1967 — is here made by means of a tentative set of postulates for delimiting one 'language' as against another. The point of departure is strictly synchronic, although I believe it will be appropriate to point toward a diachronic implication at the end. The position taken remains essentially simple, though it is to be hoped not simplistic and no longer what may have appeared to some readers as vague. It involves, as already implied, the acceptance of some notion of 'deep and surface structure'. There are still "adherents of the old ... commander" who deny any validity to deep or underlying structure. Nevertheless what is here proposed must stand or fail on the acceptance of SOMETHING — at the phonological level call it morphophoneme, call it underlying phonological unit or systematic phoneme; at the grammatical level call it kernel sentence or phrase structure or base component — it is fundamentally a question of SOMETHING versus NOTHING. Some hold that the SOMETHING is not actually 'in the system', but is merely a recourse of the linguist in his description of the system. The postulates about to be proposed depart from the assumption that the
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