How General are our Generalizations? What Speakers Actually Know and What They Actually Do

In this paper I bring several perspectives from languagechange and diachronic linguistics more generally to bear on thequestion of how broad linguists’ generalizations about speakers’linguistic behavior should be, and the extent to which they correspondto what speakers actually do themselves. Examples are drawn from thedevelopment of Greek, of English, and of Slavic, and from processes oflanguage contact, in the Balkans and elsewhere, to address this issue.The methodological import of this investigation is to raise the questionof whether linguists’ analyses ought to match more closely with whatspeakers do as they use and change their language, and to bringdiachronic and language-contact evidence into the picture in resolvingthis question.