Angol filológiai tanulmányok XIII. [antikvár]

SÁNDOR ROT (Budapest) THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH AND ITS SOCIOLINGUISTIC PROBLEMS Recent years have seen vigorous attempts in linguistics to rectify the errors of relativists, starting with the descriptionists, who went to extremes by attributing absolute values to language patterns, specific in each language, and extending all the way to neo-Humboldtians and ethnolinguists, who overstated the individual peculiarities of the internal forms of each language. New linguistic trends are being called to life amidst heated discussions accompanied by howhng cynics who divide the students of language into mutually exclusive classes: 'God's truth' linguists and 'hocus pocus' linguists and speak about a continued crisis in the science of language. But there is no reason to cry craven because as H. Schuchardt says- "Krise in der Sprachwissenschaft. Das ist ein gutes Wort".^ And really the controversies in linguistics have shown that the multilateral wars waged between 'God's truth' neogrammarians yielding to the 'hocus pocus' structuralistic Dadaists, vanquished by new 'God's truth' transformational prescriptivists and these in turn reconciled by an even higher 'God's truth' of adherents of variationists,^ though sometimes superficial and fleeting, contribute to the development of the science of language. The root of their controversies lies in the very fact that language, being a rather complicated cybernetic system in which extreme phenomena of orderliness and variability make up different dynamic hierarcliical structures, can be described and analysed in different ways, producing several models of language. Tired of the extremes of empiricism and mentalism, wliich were given fair trials, the ideas of isomorpliism are welcome,the seeds of which lay dormant in the works by M. Ampere and which also helped N. Wiener to rectify the errors of the ever narrower specialization in all branches of science, to widen their horizons, and to create the theory of cybernetics. The theory of isomorphism suggests the necessity of including deduction and induction; universality and change; intuition and proven fact; individual motivation and social meaning, essence and accidents, competence and performance, abstract hypothesis and low-level analysis^, phenomena of the language centre and its periphery in linguist science. To do tliis satisfactorily is far from being an easy task. The recognition of the importance of isomorphism's rôle resulted in the search for common features of languages, for the inference with regard to discernible universals, for the research into Imguistic change (development,