[Lingtyp] Traditional view of language and grammar in indigenous societies

[Christian Lehmann]

In principle, we may distinguish two types of deviation from the norm in 
a text:

 1. utterances containing slips of the tongue/pen
 2. utterances which follow a pattern which is not part of the norm.

(And here the specific status of the 'norm'  does not seem to be 
relevant: it may be a prescriptive norm that not everybody observes, or 
may be the system which has been traditional for a relevant portion of 
the speech community.)

In theory, the difference between #1 and #2 is clear. Moreover, many of 
us have an interest to make it in our analysis of corpora. Deviations of 
type #1 are of interest for psycholinguistics, but generally not for 
grammatical analysis. Deviations of type #2 may cast some light on what 
is currently going on in the language.

Given this, it is an interesting methodological problem in our empirical 
work with corpora to make the distinction in practical cases. Sometimes 
it has helped me to ask the speaker: 'Is that what you intended to say?' 
This kind of question will help to purge the text from occurrences of #1 
(if one wants this [I do]). However, it would not seem to be excluded 
that some speakers who are conscious of a norm would react to such a 
question by additionally changing utterances of type #2.

I would be interested to learn whether you have other methods to make 
the above distinction.
-- 

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Rudolfstr. 4
99092 Erfurt
Deutschland

Tel.: 	+49/361/2113417
E-Post: 	christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
Web: 	https://www.christianlehmann.eu
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