Axiom of categoricity

The axiom of categoricity is a term coined by J. K. Chambers in 1995 to refer to the once-widespread tenet of linguistic theory that in order to properly study language, linguistic data should be removed or abstracted from all real-world context so as to be free of any inconsistencies or variability. This principle was, for different theorists and schools of thought, taken as a prerequisite for linguistic theory, or as a self-evident falsehood to be rejected. It remains an influential idea in linguistics.

Ferdinand de Saussure divided language into two categories, langue (the abstract grammatical system a language uses) and parole (language as it is used in real-life circumstances). Historically, the range of language study had been limited to langue, since the data could easily be found in the linguist's own intuitions about language and there was no need to look at the often inconsistent and chaotic language patterns found in everyday society.

In the 20th century, scholars began to further embrace the assumption that linguistic data should be removed from its social, real-life context. Martin Joos stated the axiom this way in 1950:

"We must make our 'linguistics' a kind of mathematics within which inconsistency is by definition impossible." (Joos 1950: 701-2)

In 1965, Noam Chomsky offered a more substantial definition, incorporating his concepts of linguistic competence and linguistic performance, terms that closely parallel Saussure's langue and parole.

"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance." (Chomsky 1965: 3)

Around this time, several linguistic studies began to acknowledge not only the presence, but importance of variability found in speaker data. Instead of dismissing this variability on the grounds that the variants either belonged to different coexisting linguistic systems or demonstrated unpredictable free variation as had been done before, they recognized that it might be influenced by the speaker's circumstances. Sociologist John L. Fischer conducted one of the first systematic studies of language variation in 1958 to address variation in the speech of New England schoolchildren. Finding free variation to be an unsatisfactory explanation, he wrote:

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