The success of transformational grammar owes a great deal to its high degree of idealization. By assuming an unrealistic ideal speaker/hearer in a homogerecus linguistic community, and by proposing the expication of this speaker's linguistic ability t...
The success of transformational grammar owes a great deal to its high degree of idealization. By assuming an unrealistic ideal speaker/hearer in a homogerecus linguistic community, and by proposing the expication of this speaker's linguistic ability to be its ultimate goal, transformational grammar devised a system of grammar which has even become one of the standard motions of the discipline today. Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, is a discipline that has developed it self with a methodology which diametrically opposes that of transformational grammar. Its remarkable progress in recent years has led Dell Hymes, William Labov, and M.A.K. Halliday to assert that sociolinguistics is linguistics, and hence the prefix “socio-” is redundant and unnecessary(Halliday, 1974 : 81).