Language in daily life

[Susanna Cumming]

Bralich says,

"if linguists limit themselves to what occurs in very daily life, we would
(and do) have very primitive linguistics."

We may have a very primitive linguistics -- I hope so, because that would
imply we're going to know a lot more someday -- but that would certainly
not be because we know about language that occurs in daily life. Indeed,
this is precisely the kind of language we know least about, because it is
only very recently that linguists have had the tools they needed to look
at it seriously. As Aske has pointed out, if you take everyday,
interactional, spoken language seriously on its own terms -- that is,
without editing it first into something that resembles written language --
you have to start by abandoning or at least fundamentally re-examining
many of the basic concepts that underlie "traditional" linguistics, for
instance "sentence". This is why some of us feel strongly that no matter
what tools the linguist has in their tool-bag -- and sure, I agree that
the more we have the better -- one of them is in fact a sine qua non:
access to natural, interactional, spoken discourse. Experience shows that
such data tends to lead to radically different conclusions at the levels
both of description and of explanation.

As far as the impact of linguistics on the outside world is concerned,
surely it is by knowing something about what people really do with
language that is going to have practical applications that will impress
non-linguists. A computational linguist in particular should appreciate
this -- effective interfaces which use natural language need to be able to
deal with actual speaker-hearers, not idealized ones, and they need to be
able to take into account the dynamics of interaction, as much exciting
work in computational linguistics is doing these days.

Susanna