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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 34
rule as the adult community norms, and foots, which does not follow the same
rule as the adult community norms. In linguistic terms, though, both show the
application of the rule, because the rule is the observation that a particular
piece of behaviour is taking place. To say that something is a rule is not to pass
judgement on the social effect of the behaviour that is described by the rule in
any way at all.
Another way to formulate this is to say that modern linguistic rules are descriptive
and not prescriptive: they describe a situation, but do not tell you what ought
to be done (see section 4). Of course, it is perfectly possible to have prescriptive
statements about language, but modern linguists do not call these rules.
In fact, linguistic rules usually give you only a small part of the information
that you need to understand a particular piece of behaviour: they tell you what
happens in structural linguistic terms, but do not tell you what group of speakers
this particular structural equivalence is valid for. Consider, for example, a
statement of a diachronic change whereby /r/ becomes pronounced [z]. We
need to know what language this change occurs in, or what dialect(s) of that
particular language are affected. We need to know at what period the change
took place. We might need to know what social group the change affected, or
whether the change is observed only in child language, only in pathological
speech, only in the speech of a particular individual, and so on. The particular
change I have in mind is one which affected the popular French of Paris in the
sixteenth century, having been found in other varieties of French since before
the fourteenth century (von Wartburg 1967: 156). Similar changes seem to have
affected other languages at other periods (consider the alternation between
and in Latin honos / honorem and in English was / were). The rule
itself would not tell us which of these (or other similar) changes was involved,
only that a particular change is observed. In order to understand the rule fully,
the reader has to be able to put it into its appropriate context. It would normally
be expected that this context can be deduced from the text accompanying the
statement of the rule.
Rule format
A linguistic rule generally takes the form in (1) below in which the capital
letters represent linguistic elements or strings of linguistic elements, which
may be zero.
(1) A → B / C ___ D
This rule is to be read as ‘A becomes B when it is surrounded by C and D.’
The first element on the left is the element which is changed or expanded by
the rule. Only a single element should be in position A, never a sequence of