ABSTRACT
There is a strong tendency to view language as an object (or an inventory of objects such as lexemes) rather than as verbal communicative behavior. This tendency has given rise to the metalanguage of linguistics, and the metalanguage in turn perpetuates the language-as-objects mindset. While acknowledging from the outset that the metalanguage is necessary in order for us to reduce the infinite complexity of the verbal communicative behavior to manageable categories, it is important to recognize that we do this for convenience, at times at the expense of accuracy. We are inclined to believe that our metalanguage reflects what is obvious about language, yet there are categories and dichotomies (e.g. noun, verb) that we assume for which there are no exact or approximate equivalents in the lexicons of other languages, particularly in preliterate communities. It follows that the categories and distinctions are not obvious to speakers of those languages, or are not considered important enough to have names.
