The Problem of Language Variety: an example from religious language

One of the most significant trends within linguistics in the 1970s has been the move away from the formalised models of language introduced by Chomsky towards an account of language that incorporates functional premises. As Charles Fillmore put it, in a 1972 paper, the emphasis on formalisation needs to be balanced by a consideration of what exactly it is that linguists want to formalise. Putting this another way, a contrast can be drawn between the stress laid in the 1960s on the specification in formal terms of the common factors that underlie utterances (on the similarities – deep or surface – between the sentences of a language, and on the similarities – the formal and substantive universals – between different languages) and the stress laid in the 1970s on the specification in functional terms of the differences between language forms, as captured by such notions as dialect, style, level, etc.