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Language in context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Robin Lakoff
Robin Lakoff*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

Traditional transformational grammar attempts to define the conditions on the applicability of grammatical rules on the basis of superficial syntactic environment alone. This paper discusses a number of examples in several languages that show that such a goal is unattainable—that, in order to predict correctly the applicability of many rules, one must be able to refer to assumptions about the social context of an utterance, as well as to other implicit assumptions made by the participants in a discourse.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , December 1972 , pp. 907 - 927
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I should like to thank the following people, who have served as informants or made valuable suggestions regarding the Japanese data: Chisato Kitagawa, Tazuko Uyeno, and Kazuhiko Yoshida. I should also like to thank George Lakoff for much helpful discussion. All errors and misinterpretations are, of course, my own responsibility.

References

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