ABSTRACT
What I want this story to highlight is the fact that where you can get to – in language description as in anything else – depends a great deal on where you start from; and that starting from the wrong place may make it much more difficult to get to the desired kind of destination. In the second half of the last century, there built up an immensely influential view of what the study of language should involve that insists that there is only one proper place to start – from a view of language as an abstract set of generalized rules detached from any particular context of use. It would be possible to ignore this view and simply start with the approach that I will be setting out in the book – based on a view of how language functions as a system of human communication. However, a comparison of different possible approaches will help us to understand better not only the destinations that each approach allows us to head for but also the reasons why we might choose one of the approaches in preference to another.Therefore, in this chapter I will briefly outline the approach that was dominant, showing why it was so attractive but also showing why an increasing number of linguists have come to feel that it does not make it easy for us to talk about many of the most central features of language. I will then go on to introduce an alternative approach which takes full account of those features, and which offers a more appropriate place to start from if we are interested in language in use.
