"Constance et variation": Some Observations and a Possible Alternative

"Constance et variation": Some Observations and a Possible AlternativeAuthor(s): Dave RobertsSource: La Linguistique, Vol. 18, Fasc. 2 (1982), pp. 115-126Published by: Presses Universitaires de FranceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30248444 .

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NOTES ET DISCUSSIONS

<< Constance et variation > : some observations

and a possible alternative' Dave ROBERTS

University of St. Andrews, Ecosse.

RASUMA

Nous contribuons ici au debat sur << Constance et Variationz lanc6 par l'Ecole de Lausanne, en essayant d'6tablir et de d6limiter les fondements scienti- fiques et 6pist6mologiques de la linguistique fonctionnelle. Nous montrons que les observations de l'Ecole de Lausanne peuvent certainement 6tre int6gr6es dans le cadre 61argi de la linguistique fonctionnelle pure : les faits sociaux s'expliquent par la ref6rence A plusieurs systbmes entre lesquels se manifestent des interf6rences, alors les hesitations individuelles r6sultent des interf6rences de plusieurs Syst6mes chez l'individu meme. Les r6sultats des experiences menses par les membres de l'Ecole de Lausanne nous paraissent corroborer nos hypo- th6es et r6futer celles qu'ils exposent.

In what follows I wish to consider certain of the points raised in a recent issue of La Linguistique (Vol. 16/I) in a series of articles written by members of the Lausanne School. Being in sympathy with their data-orientated, experimental techniques, I hope that my comments will be seen as a contribution to the debate rather than as an enumeration of faults. Thus the following observations are concerned with the School as a whole and are not to be taken as directed at the person responsible for expounding the fundamentals of the approach and who thus laid the foundations for these comments, namely Morteza Mah- moudian. The position adopted here is that certain points need to be clarified and that there is a less radical alternative than the one which the school proposes which may prove to be equally adequate, as we shall see. As a matter of principle, minimal modifications should be made to an existing theory, lest "the baby be thrown out with the bath-water".

We can start by considering what is meant by saying that a discipline is a "science" or "scientific". Most would agree that this involves establishing regu-

I. I wish to thank the following for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this paper, Sandor Hervey, Jan Mulder and Muhammad Suleiman and in particular Laurence Bon who made several suggestions to make the paper more readable for the French speaking reader.

La Linguistique, vol. 18, fasc. 2/1982



116 Dave Roberts

larities in the flux of events being described, and further that these regularities should be such as to the scholar's understanding or knowledge of the phenomena. The crucial notion, perhaps generally unacknowledged, in "being scientific", is a simple matter of correlation: that is, the set of phenomena xi-''"n is recognised as being significant to the extent that it correlates with some other phenomenon or property, and individual phenomena are grouped into sets on the basis of correlation with some common property. We recognise a regularity if we can establish a class not in terms of an extension, a list of its members, but if we can establish that the class has an intension, a defining property, this defining property being a correlation between that class and another entity.

Certain linguists translate this notion of regularity and hence of class identification by the term "function". Thus, in the flux of events, Functionalists will

recognise as significant only those events which can be correlated with having a function in a linguistic system (see Martinet: "Function is the criterion of

linguistic reality.")2. Further, events will be classed as instances of "the same event" because they have the "same function". Hence phonetically distinct

segments may be grouped together, in terms of the notion "phoneme", because

they have the same function. Identification of the function of phonetic segments and hence of class membership in terms of the "same" function is in terms of a set of relations between all those segments which could have appeared in that

particular context and the segment to be described. Thus crucial in this procedure is the notion of system which characterises the set of entities between which there is potential for "choice", alternatively between which there is opposition.

Two points follow from this exposition. Firstly, statistics must be ancillary, in that the notion of correlation is lacking in statistical analysis. Such an analysis may lead to the recognition of a potential class or of a set of interesting phenomena in that it recognises the notion of "statistical" significance, but that class only becomes scientifically or linguistically significant, a descriptively relevant class embodying a regularity, if the scientist (i.e. linguist) takes the potential class and tries to establish its correlation with some other class or property. Statistics is of use in identifying potentially fruitful areas of research: it provides part of the data but not part of the description.

Secondly, the scientist describes phenomena in terms of classes, but these classes and the discrete elements and properties used in their description are not necessarily perfect reflections of the "structure of reality". The scientist in his "laboratory" finds it easier to manipulate discrete elements and, provided that his manipulations enable him to reach conclusions which are not falsified by subsequent observations, he is entitled to continue to operate with such elements. Even Mathematics, as Mahmoudian observes3, operates with idealisations, with

approximations to the "real" value. More needs to be said, however, of the notion of idealisation. One can take

one of two approaches to this notion. Firstly, one can say that the idealisation or the "model" corresponds to something in the real world: that is the structure of the idealisation exactly mirrors the structure of reality. Thus discreteness in the

2. MARTINET, Elements of General Linguistics, London, Faber, 1962, p. 5- 3. M. MAHMOUDIAN, Structure Linguistique : problmes de la constance et des

variations, in La Linguistique, vol. 16, I, p. 26-28.



Constance et variation I 17

description would be said to mirror discreteness in the real world. Although this latter discreteness may not be immediately apparent, it is the role of the linguist using his process of idealisation to discover it among the flux of phenomena. Thus one has a strict realist view and problems may then arise when someone notes that there is not a perfect parallel between descriptive discreteness and the rather fuzzy state of affairs in the "real world" purportedly described by the

descriptive discreteness. This observation would appear to have been the starting- point for the Lausanne School. However, they do not appear to have considered the possibility that the "discreteness" approach may be extended to account for "fuzziness": this is what we shall briefly outline below.

An alternative approach to idealisation would involve being aware that

descriptive discreteness does not perfectly mirror the "real world", but that

regularity, systematicity and discreteness are principles of method of description and not necessarily of the object described. The scientist (i.e. linguist) assumes that there are discrete classes because this means that his research will be systematic, a matter of trying to establish all possible classes and hence correlations between classes and properties. In this sense, discreteness becomes a matter of exhaustiveness of description: the process of describing stops at the point at which one can no longer establish significant classes. It is, perhaps, easier to see this in terms of a concrete example: the Neogrammarian claim that all sound

change is regular was taken to task as being false and refuting cases were provided. However, as a principle, as opposed to a claim about the world, it was and still is invaluable. Basically it says that the linguist should always search for the

regularity: it is not enough to state an irregularity, or a set of exceptions to a sound change-the linguist must go on to establish the regularity which governs the exceptions. Once this regularity is established, any exceptions to it must themselves be analysed in order to identify any sub-regularity within that group and so on until no further significant correlation can be established and we have only accident. An extreme position, then, would be that "accident" is the cut-off point for the scientist, since here no correlations can be established and all that we have left is frequency of occurrence: in this sense, perhaps, statistics takes over when correlation (science) finishes.

The notion of "class" must also be further analysed, as this will enable us to deal with the problem raised by Mahmoudian in connection with this notion4. We have said that the scientist is interested in establishing classes in terms of intensions, that is, each class should have a definition such that each member of that class can be recognised. What, then, should be an intension or a definition?

Again, we have a choice: we can either state that an intension of a class should be identified with one property or with a set of properties. However, the second is really a variant of the first. If a scientist were to claim that all members of class X had properties, m, n, o, then he would be making four claims, firstly that Class X1 had property m, secondly that Class X, had property n and thirdly that Class X3 had property o and finally that there was complete overlap in the

membership of classes X1, X2 and X3. Thus every class can be defined in terms of one property.

Also involved in the notion of class is the opposition between sub-categoris- ation and cross-classification. One discussion of this is to be found in Chomsky's

4. M. MAHMOUDIAN, Op. cit., 33.



I u8 Dave Roberts

justification of cross-classification as providing a simpler grammar5. Thus, take, for example, Mahmoudian's example of classifying verbs: one can establish a distinction between the class of intransitive verbs and the class of transitive verbs. In terms of the opposition between the property of "taking an indirect object" and the property of "not taking an indirect object", we could sub-categorise or sub-classify transitive verbs. Alternatively we could refuse to rank classes with respect to each other and simply cross-classify them as members of one or more classes. In this approach we would talk of transitive verbs not allowing an indirect object as the intersection of the class of transitive verbs and of the class of verbs not allowing an indirect object. In this way we could make a distinction between "Major" classes, those having only one defining property, and "Derived" classes, those resulting from the intersection of Major classes, and hence having more than one defining property. That certain Derived classes may have only one member or at least a very restricted set of members (Mahmoudian cites Gross on this matter)6 should come as no surprise and, in fact, is surely something to be devoutly wished for in linguistics, in that the ultimate elements must surely be classes with one member, since we hope to describe each element in an unambiguous fashion and this must mean that it is described as the intersection of a set of classes. After all, each phoneme in a Functionalist description is a class of one member in this sense: for example, the phoneme /p/ in the description of English can be described as the bundle of distinctive features labial, occlusive and unvoiced and hence as the intersection of the set of labial, occlusive and unvoiced elements.

Having seen that the scientist (linguist) describes phenomena by means of classes established by virtue of significant correlations, we can now look at the relationship between the phenomena and the entity described. This question covers two areas: firstly a matter of the scope of the description as regards including and excluding phenomena from the protocols and secondly a matter of the ontological status of the resulting description and its relationship to the phenomena described. For present purposes, we shall adopt the Hjelmslevian distinction between "System" and "process"7 (note that we shall use "System" for the Hjelmslevian notion and "system" for the notion of the class of commutants used in identifying the function of an entity: thus a System will consist of a series of systems). Hjelmslev makes the claim that "for every process there is a corresponding System"8 and the task of the scientist is to establish the System for each process which he decides to describe. Given that in Linguistics the processes are what in everyday terminology are called "languages", then the linguist is concerned with establishing the System behind every language (although we must look closely at the relation between System and "language", as this is where scope of the description comes into the matter). Alternatively one could start from the point of view that the scientist establishes classes and intensions of classes, so that his resulting description will be a set of intensions, a set of definitions. From this it follows that the description will be the intension of the set of phenomena described.

5. N. CHOMSKY, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1965. 6. M. MAHMOUDIAN, Op. Cit., 33 ; M. GROss, Mithodes en syntaxe, Paris, Herman, 1975- 7. L. HJELMSLEV, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, University of Wisconsin Press,

ig61, p. 9. 8. L. HJELMSLEV, op. cit., p. 9.



Constance et variation 119

The relationship between the description and the phenomena is more delicate, involving matters of principle which are too complex to be fully considered here. Basically there are two systems of classifying descriptions: the description may be either a realist or an instrumentalist description, realist in the sense that the classes set up in the description are isomorphic with classes inherent in the data, instrumentalist in that the classes are useful and convenient tools in the description and manipulation of phenomena. Mapped onto this distinction is the opposition between describing behaviour, i.e. that which is immediately observable or describing something beyond immediately observable behaviour, namely mental reality or social conventions which underly that behaviour. Bloomfield would be an example of the first position, while Chomsky and Saussure would exemplify the two sides of the second position. However, when it comes to the hard practicalities of the world, it is quite feasible that one should carry out a description in a rigorous, systematic fashion, without paying particular attention to any claims about realism, or instrumentalism, behav- iourism, mentalism or social psychologism. For example, the principles and methods of Functionalism are neutral between all these positions, and any claims for mental or social reality must count as post-scripts to a Functionalist description, since they would be irrelevant to the adequation of the hypotheses contained in the description. Taking a Hjelmslevian position, then, one could say that the setting up of the System behind the process is prior to any "tran- scendental" claims. Once one has an adequate description of the System, then one can begin to look at the psychological and social manifestations of the System, or alternatively one can begin to look for significant correlations between linguistic classes and psychological or social phenomena. This is close to the attitude adopted by Martinet in a discussion of the relation between Function- alist linguistics and mentalism:

"Does this mean that a recourse to the feelings of the natives should be the decisive test of the excellence of phonological methods and solutions? Certainly not ... For the phonologists there is one criterion and one only, and that is the linguistic functions of the elements he studies'9.

The scope of the description receives a simple solution. We have seen that establishing classes is a matter of correlations, a question of establishing function within a system. This method involves the notion of a set of commutants with respect to a particular environment. Thus the scope of the description will be the full set of environments established for the process and the sets of commutants with respect to each of those environments. If a particular entity is neither part of an environment nor a possible commutant, then it is not descriptively relevant and falls outside the scope of the description. The linguist will set up these environments and commutants on the basis of speech phenomena exhibited by a restricted number of speakers who he assumes to be manifesting the "same" System. But note that it is only a hypothesis that he is dealing with only one System common to all these speakers.

Assume that we are describing the "French language" or what Mahmoudian calls "la francophonie"'0. Once we have set up a System for the speech of a certain set of speakers, we may hypothesise that this is the System underlying

9. A. MARTINET, Phonology as Functional Phonetics, London, O.U.P., I949, p. 5. 10. M. MAHMOUDIAN, Op. cit., p. 14-15.



120 Dave Roberts

the "French language". Imagine that in the description we have as a set of commutants the phonemes /m/, /n/ and /j1/, but once one starts to test the

hypothesis that these are phonemes of the "French language", then one finds that certain speakers, claiming to be speakers of the "French language" do have /ji/ as a possible commutant. Two reactions are possible at this point: the natural reaction would be to consider what we mean by System, namely a

description of the set of all environments and commutant-classes established for those environments. This would lead to the recognition of two distinct

Systems, since one would have the commutant-class containing /m/ and /n/ where the other has /m/, /n/ and /p/. The alternative position would involve

modifying all that we have built up so far as a characterisation of Functionalism and it seems that such an approach might be conditioned by a wish to describe the "French language" or the Lausanne School's "la francophonie", but this

object is not what Saussure termed "langue" and we have termed "System" which is the natural object described in Functionalist linguistics. Note that we have rejected Saussure's term partly because of the ambiguity caused in French, in that "langue" is both a technical term in opposition to "parole" and an everyday term in la "langue frangaise" and unless the two uses are kept distinct, then it is

easy to confuse the object described by functionalists namely "'langue" with the

thing which most of them speak, namely "la langue frangaise". What, then, is the relationship between the "French language" ("la langue

frangaise") and "System" as we have established it? We have suggested that there are two Systems, one containing /p/, the other lacking it, but we note that speakers of both Systems say that they speak the "French language". Our research would lead us ultimately to recognise that there are, in fact, several Systems which vary to a greater or lesser extent and all of them underly processes which are labelled the "French language". This label, then, is itself potentially ambiguous: firstly it is used as a non-technical term in everyday language to label a cultural, political, national entity, but we can also use it in a more technical sense, as part of Linguistics proper, to label a particular bundle of Systems which we recognise as "related". Before continuing with our consider- ation of our action in face of this view of the "French language", we must consider the reaction of the Lausanne School.

This School does two things, although both are related. Firstly they make a distinction between a "central zone" and a "marginal zone", in that the "French

language" has a certain "core" area and other variable sub-systems which can be added onto this in its various manifestations. Secondly, they bring in statistics. We must now consider these two courses of action. A distinction between a

marginal and central zone is of doubtful status. Thus the two Systems we have

recognised, one with a phoneme /j/ and one lacking such a phoneme, but the Lausanne School would collapse these into one System having the phonemes /m/ and /n/ in the central zone and /j1/ in the marginal. This crucially involves

being able to equate the two instances of /m/ and also of /n/ in the two Systems. However, such an equation is clearly invalid in a truly Functionalist approach. Similarity of symbols does not entail identity of entities. The /m/ of one system is the label for that entity which is either /n/ nor /j1, in the other it is the label for the entity which is not /n/. At the level of distinctive features, both instances of /m/ may have the feature of labial, but at this level it is much clearer that labial does not mean the same in both Systems. In one System labial is synony-



Constance et variation 12 I

mous with "neither apical nor palatal" in the other with "not apical". One can also note that any attempt to equate the two instances of Im/ is a result of what one might term the "Once a phoneme always a phoneme"-fallacy of American

linguistics. Inherent in Functionalism is the principle that the results of com- mutation in one context cannot be transferred wholesale to another context. However, this is precisely what the Lausanne School does, in that they equate the results of commutations in one context i.e. in terms of one System, one set of speakers and say that these are the same as those results from another context.

The use of statistics must also be queried. We have seen that statistics come in at the point at which the scientist is dealing with accident, in the sense that there are no more significant correlations to be made. Translated into the linguistic example, then, we have the claim that there is no significant correlation between the System having /p/ and the System lacking it and any other

set(s) of phenomena. Thus the claim is that the variation between the two

Systems is purely accidental and in no way correlates with non-linguistic factors such as the age, geographical location or origin or social status of the speakers. It is presented here as a claim, but it is feasible that the Lausanne School would believe such a claim to be irrelevant in any case, in that they are not concerned with dialectology, but with the central and marginal zones of the "French

language'. But surely part of the essential property of the "French language" is that its speakers come from different locations in France, different social groups and different age groups. The question that needs to be asked is whether such differences need to be filtered out of the protocols, whether they should be accounted for in some rigorous fashion-the position adopted here-or whether they should be left unanalysed and thus be built wholesale into the description.

Given that a linguist who remains true to the spirit and principles of Func- tionalism will not try to conflate two distinct Systems, and that he wishes to establish significant correlations between phenomena, then once he has established two Systems, he will, if concerned by this, search for correlations for such Systems and this will lead in one of two directions: firstly into dialectology, in that this can be defined in terms of a language System and a social or geographical group or secondly to diachronic linguistics, in that there may be an

age-correlation for each System, with one spoken by young and the other by older speakers. In this case we would have a clear instance of what we call "language change" in that one System will be replaced by the other as the former's speakers die out (on this matter see the work of Labov)'1. The point is that once one brings in such correlations, one is no longer dealing with a Saus- surean "langue", but with dialectology or linguistic change or "la synchronie dyna- mique". On this point it might be helpful if the Lausanne School clarified exactly what object they are describing, in terms of the "langue"-"parole" distinction, or some fusion of the two. It might also be helpful if they clarified the full scope of "la francophonie". Mahmoudian12 himself appears to be uncertain on this matter:

Ii. W. LABOV, The Social Motivation of a Sound Change, in Word, 1963, vol. 19, p. 273-3o09, and On the Mechanisms of Linguistic Change, in Georgetown University Mono- graphs on Languages and Linguistics, 1965, vol. 18, p. 91-114, et U. WEINRICH, W. LABOV et M. HERZOG, Empirical Foundations for a theory of Language Change, in W. LEH- MANN Ct Y. MALKIEL (eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1968.

12. M. MAHMOUDIAN, op. cit., p. 15.



I22 Dave Roberts

"On ne saurait dire si l'Afrique du Nord fait partie de la francophonie." What is the status of people who speak French as a second language? It might be of interest to study the speech of such people in terms of whether they learn the central zone of the "French language" before the marginal. However, clearly the validity of any results from the methods of the Lausanne School must be viewed in the light of an absence of definition of scope of the description.

Turning to the linguist seeking his correlations, we can note that once he has established that the variation between two Systems is significant in its correlation with some regional, social or age factor, he will concern himself with whether two "similar" items in distinct Systems can be related. Notice, that, while we have asserted that in the example of the two Systems of nasal phonemes in French the two instances of /m/ cannot be equated, this does not mean that they cannot be put in relation to each other. At one level, they can be related in terms of overlap in realisation, that is both labial nasal phonemes will have a similar set of phonetic realisations and comparisons can be made in this way. However, once the linguist realises that he is taking a Structuralist approach to dialectology he will turn to Weinreich's work on this question and find that there is an extensive literature on "structural dialectology" and that it has been proposed that distinct Systems may be relatable in terms of the notion "diasystem".13 It is unnecessary, then, to talk of central and marginal zones and the observation of variation in the social dimension does not necessarily need any new methodology nor does it require us to set up Systems which are not rigorous and systematic as Mahmoudian suggests is necessary as a corollary of marginal and central zones4.

We can now turn to variation within the psychological dimension, having shown that we do not need to modify our principles in the light of facts which are basically dialectal and diachronic in nature. Let us consider how Mahmou- dian introduces variation in the mental dimension, with leads to the hierarchy in terms of "certainty-hesitation". We have two examples, one from phonology the other from grammar"6. Faced with the question of the identity or difference of the sequences [penje] and [pejpe], it is claimed, the Parisian speaker is likely to hesitate, contradict himself by giving more than one answer, state that he is unable to decide on the matter or exhibit uncertainty in some other manner. Uncertainty on the grammatical level is exemplified by the speaker's supposed uncertainty about the distinction between an active and passive sentence. But here it may be a reflection of the linguist's methodology. The distinction between "travaillait" and "travaillera" used by Mahmoudian to exemplify certainty is clear and independent of context: one might say that it is a matter of propositional structure of the utterance, in that the messages conveyed by the two forms are always distinct. The distinction between active and passive, however, is not a matter of propositional structure but rather of discourse structure, i.e. the topic, and in this case the context is of greater importance since most speakers will be able to identify which of the two is preferable by looking at whether the context selects the agent or the patient as the topic.

13. U. WEINREICH, Is a Structural Dialectology Possible ?, in Word, 1954, vol. Io, p. 388-400.

14. M. MAHMOUDIAN, op. cit., p. 25. 15. M. MAHMOUDIAN, OF. Cit., p. 13.




However, let us assume that, on certain questions, speakers do exhibit the types of uncertainty suggested by Mahmoudian, what is the linguist's response? Mahmoudian suggests that one can either get around the variation by establishing new techniques or build this hesitation into one's description of the "language" by establishing a psychological dimension and placing facts in a hierarchical manner along it. However, there is a third possibility which involves using a simple but powerful procedure, one which appears to be consistently overlooked by the Lausanne School, namely one asks the question "Why?". Thus, why do speakers exhibit uncertainty at this point? Instead of taking such uncertainty as a "brute" fact to be built into the description, one considers what factors could give rise to that uncertainty and hence one tries to establish whether it needs to be accounted for in a description of the language or in some statements about the use of the language by the speaker, how he interacts with the System itself. This matter of asking the question "Why?" is another means of looking for correlations. It is a question of whether the uncertainty correlates with any linguistic property which might account for it. Clearly, we must consider whether it has any linguistic function, this being the criteria of relevance to the description. Given that the uncertainty is not functional in terms of having a role to play in and contributing to human communication, then it is not relevant to Linguistics and we must look elsewhere for an explanation and treatment of uncertainty.

A speaker's uncertainty may have various sources. One cannot rule out simple performance errors, lapses in concentration, mistakes and a major factor must be the sheer idiocy which overcomes many linguistically-naive speakers when asked to act as informants. Thus we need some means whereby we can process all instances of uncertainty in order to establish that which is relevant to the goals of the researcher. It is also perhaps worth making a point that is nowhere considered fully in the literature available from the Lausanne School: the questionnaire situation may, in fact, lead to the concealment of uncertainty, in that the speaker may give as his answer what he feels to be correct rather than the form which he actually uses, because he gives the form which he imagines the "model", socially preferred speaker would use. However, there will remain a hard core of hesitations which need to be explained and not to be taken as "brute" facts which are to be embedded in a psychological hierarchy unanalysed.

How are we to explain such hesitations? The major explanation will probably involve treating the speaker as "bilingual", in the sense that he controls two dialects or what we have called Systems. Hesitation, then, may arise from the speaker's uncertainty as to which of the Systems he should actually manifest in his reply or from interference between the Systems. A speaker's contradicting himself may arise from his using different Systems at different times, and in this case the scientist must look for some correlation between the System mani- fested and the context of the inquiry, for example is one System used in a minimal pairs test while the other is used in a less formal reading of a text.

Consider two examples taken from the "language" which I speak. I would certainly exhibit uncertainty and contradiction when it comes to realisations of what we may represent as "are you?" as part of a question. Presumably under the Lausanne School approach this would be built into a hierarchical description of the "English language" with the forms [a.juwr, [a.jo], and given some statistical ranking. However, study would reveal that there are specific contexts in which



1 24 Dave Roberts

each form would be used, that is, we do not have simple variation but significant correlations. The first form would be used in formal situations, including lectures, and the other two forms would be excluded from such contexts. In informal contexts, the second form would be the more common, the unmarked, but I would be likely to use the first form for special effects, e.g. when expressing doubt about my interlocutor's statement "Are you sure?", when trying to hurry people to come for coffee "Are you coming yet?", all situations in which heavy stress is used. The third form would be excluded from all these situations, being restricted to "home" environments: this is because it is a form from the dialect of my home town and I would use it with my parents, school friends and also with my wife and children since they "know" something of my home dialect and are "passive" speakers of it. With my wife, I would use this third form in

just those contexts in which I would use the first form in non-"home" informal contexts. Thus there is a fairly consistent pattern in my use of the three forms which should be built into a full description of the "English language" and not

ignored in some statistical hierarchy. As an example from the grammatical level, consider the uses of the form "while" to be found in my use of English. Generally my use of this is fairly standard, in keeping with general English usage, but the following is non-standard, "He waited while 8 o'clock", in which "while" is used with the meaning of "until". In fact this was a usage which I more or less consciously adopted from the Yorkshire dialect with which I came into contact in my undergraduate days. Clearly, I am bilingual in this respect insofar as I control two distinct Systems containing different signs "while".

The Lausanne School go on to consider the relationship between the social dimension and the individual or psychological dimension and put forward the

hypothesis that

"Les classements des faits linguistiques selon l'aspect social et selon l'aspect individuel sont identiques"'.

One might expect there to be some analysis of the consequence of this

hypothesis and some justification of why one might expect there to be such a close relationship. For example, if the hypothesis is corroborated, what conclusions should the linguist draw, what has he learnt? If the hypothesis is falsified, how should the linguist proceed? How would such a falsification affect the Lausanne School's approach? Which of the two hierarchies is the more "relevant" to linguistics? Perhaps one could look at an example of the testing of this hypothesis carried out by Mahmoudian and Spengler17. They find that certain para- phrases of the pluri-pronominal constructions "verify" the hypothesis (we can

ignore the fact that no hypothesis can ever be verified, but only corroborated or

refuted)is, while others falsify the hypothesis. However, there is no attempt to

analyse this situation or to draw the consequences from the fact that the hypothesis is both falsified and corroborated by selecting different sets of results from one and the same experimental situation. Clearly, from the scientific point of view this is a very dubious position. Essentially they are reporting the results of

I6. R. JOLIVET, Aspects de l'experimentation dans une recherche linguistique, in La Linguistique, 1980, vol. I6, I, p. 37-49-

I7. M. MAHMOUDIAN et N. de SPENGLER, Constructions pluri-pronominales dans les syntagmes verbaux complexes, in La Linguistique, I980, vol. 16, I, p. 51-75-

18. K. POPPER, Objective Knowledge, London, O.U.P., I963-




an experiment, a testing of the hypothesis, which provides no information on the hypothesis at all, since something clearly went wrong with the experiment (or possibly with the hypothesis, a point we consider below) that it did not

provide an unambiguous response. What needs to be done before anything scientifically useful can result from this situation is that the results need to be further analysed to see what factors are involved in certain pluri-pronominal constructions being comprehended in a consistent fashion across the speakers while elsewhere we have variation. Put in our terms, the experimenters need to look for the significant correlations common to the set of refuting examples and those common to the corroborating examples.

We can now consider the correlation claimed between the social and individual dimensions in terms of the more traditionally Functionalist approach outlined here. Imagine, then, situation in which we can identify in our terms three groups of speakers, the first speaks System A, the second System B and the third consists of a set of bilinguals who speak both System A and System B.

Taking groups A and B alone, there will be no significant correlation between the individual dimension and the social dimension, since the members of each

group, knowing only one System, will exhibit no hesitation about their answers nor any contradiction, but there will be "dissension" between the two groups. Hence the hypothesis that there is a correlation between the individual and social dimensions would be refuted. However, in terms of group C only there will be a correlation between the two dimensions, in that it is quite likely that members of this group will exhibit uncertainty caused by the interference between the two Systems which they know: there will be a correlation between their hesitations and the differences between the two Systems which are their causes. Thus in the case of bilinguals, the study of individual variation is the

study of social variation. There is one interesting, and perhaps ironic, consequence of this examination

of the individual and social dimensions cast in the framework of a Functionalist

dialectology, namely that our approach actually predicts that the hypothesised correlation between the social and individual dimensions will be both refuted and corroborated; we predict that some instances of hesitation will correlate with instances of dissension while there will be no correlation in other instances and further we provide an explanation for this situation. Insofar as certain results of the Lausanne School's experiments exhibit the situation which we

predict, then these results provide significant support for the position adopted in this paper, while undermining the hypothesis put forward by the experimenters.

With respect to the "intrinsic dimension" established by the Lausanne School little needs to be said. One might note that there is confusion between Saussurean

"parole" and "langue" in that the dimension relates frequency of manifestation

(i.e. "parole") with integration within the System ("langue"). However, the observation that irregular items, i.e. those belonging to small classes, are generally very frequent in occurrence, while regular items, i.e. those belonging to

large classes, are less frequent is certainly valid and the consequences of this correlation can be easily seen when one looks at language change in French or

any other language in which Analogy is at work regularising alternations. The correlation is probably related to ease of learning, either by constant repetition or by learning a rule. However, Mahmoudian is clearly mistaken when he



126 Dave Roberts

claims"9 that the hypothesis of a correlation between frequency and integration is original: the correlation is a basic, although perhaps not frequently articulated, principle in Diachronic Linguistics, particularly in discussions of Analogical Change. Linguists usually first come across it in lectures and textbooks on Historical Linguistics.

In conclusion, one can note that the observations made by the Lausanne School cannot be faulted, language is, in an important sense, a social and a psychological phenomenon in its manifestations, but this does not mean that we cannot make abstraction of these when we describe a certain System underlying the realisations. Their work can be faulted insofar as they reject the search for regularity and correlations between classes and other classes or properties. That is, they ignore the basic principle behind Functionalism and indeed science itself. Every scientist is faced with variation, and must make some selection among the variants as to what is relevant to his goals, and then select those variants which can be classed together. The Functionalist principle tells us what variation is relevant to our goals as Linguists. Faced with individual and social variation, the Lausanne School must establish a principle similar to the Func- tionalist principle which will enable them to determine which variations are significant and in this way delimit the scope of the approach. However, we have tried to show in this paper that it is feasible that the observations and goals of the Lausanne Group can be accommodated in a standard Functionalist approach, an approach which receives support from their own data.

19. M. MAHMOUDIAN, op. cit., p. 35.



"Constance et variation": Some Observations and a Possible Alternative

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