Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 165

abstraction, fruitful within certain limits, but all too narrow
and dogmatic in a wider sociolinguistic perspective. Dia-
lectologists on their part have accepted phonemic checking
in their recording of dialectal materials as routine, even
though, to be sure, most of the work of applying the benefits
of structuralism not only to phonology but also to other levels
of linguistics, e.g., morphology, syntax, and semantics, re-
mains to be done.
In this situation, dialectology and structuralism have now
both met with a new common dilemma, the clash with gen-
erative transformational linguistics.
In one respect the generativists have taken up the mantle
of Louis Hjelmslev’s glossematics, i.e., the vision of a universal
grammar for all human languages, characterized by simplicity,
completeness, and consistency. From a more traditional lin-
guistic point of view, one could say that they see human
language as an enumerative system of ordered rules applied
to linguistic entities or signs (called formatives) which are
classified through (strings of) syntactical, semantic, and pho-
nological features. However, compared with that of their
nearest forerunners, their theory is much more fiexible and
dynamic. The decks between the different levels of grammar,
such as syntax, morphology, and phonology, are removed or
smashed, and the dichotomy of synchrony and diachrony, as
well as those of content and expression and of form and
substance, are not maintained rigorously. One may further
admit that the generativists are open to linguistic empiricism
and inclined toward a continued revising and developing of
their theory. Thus generativism, although working with a
new type of coding of grammatical phenomena and aiming
at a mathematical rigour unknown in traditional linguistics,
would seem to fit the old-fashioned school of pre-structural
dialectology quite well.
The vision of a generative dialectology has been expressed
by Mario Saltarelli (1966:51): ‘Basically dialectology aims
at a general theory of variation. The achievement of the ulti-