January 9,2 0 0 1In May of this year,I will be visiting China,along with my colleague from the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania,Anthony Kroch.I am looking forward with keen anticipation tothe opportunity to make contact with Chinese linguists.I hope to learn as much as pos-sible about your research and the progress you have made in the study of the Chineselanguage as it is developing today.The scholars who have invited me have expressed an interestin the approach to thestudy of language that I have developed in the English- speaking com munity,and its ap-plication in other parts of the world:in Western Europe,the Middle East,L atin Ameri-ca,Japan and Korea.The goal of this approach is to base a linguistic science on the ob-servation of people's use of language in everyday life.The firststep in such a study is toovercome the barriers between the university and the wider community:for the linguistto enter thatcomm unity,make new contacts,and record speech thatis as close as possi-ble to the way that people talk when they are not being observedI first came to China in1974,as a mem ber of the Am erican L inguistics Delegationto the PRC.This was in the lastyears of the Cultural Revolution,when some of the ex-treme forms of that movement had begun to recede.Many of the linguists and cadresthat I met expressed a strong interest in sociolinguistic research,and saw a relationshipto the political agenda of breaking down the barrier between the university and the com-munity.However,the social situation at that time did not permit systematic linguisticresearch,and itwas only recently thata new initiative on your parthas created the pos-sibility of close contacts between American and Chinese students of the speech communi-ty.Research in the speech community rests upon a natural alliance of historical linguis-tics,dialectology and sociolinguistics.In our department,we argue that a studentworking on linguistic change in progress must acquire,by one way or another,a solidknowledge of the past history of the language.Here you are fortunate in being able todraw on the rich developmentof historical linguistics in the Sino- Tibetan language fami-ly.You also have a solid dialectological basis for your work.The national survey ofChinese dialects carried out in 195 8was used by my friend and colleague William S.Y.Wang to create the first Dictionary- on- Computer
.It is only recently that I havebeen able to achieve an over- all survey of English dialects,the Atlas of North Am ericanEnglish.You can review the progress of the Atlas on our web site:www.ling.upenn.edu/ phonoatlas.What about the relationship of empirical research to linguistic theory?This is adeep problem thatrequires careful thought.On the one hand,linguistic theory in NortAmerica have undergone such rapid changes in both syntax and phonology that descrip-tions of a linguistic system written 2 0 years ago in the then current theoretical fram e-work may be hard to decipher today. This might mean that a long- range program forgathering cum ulative knowledge of the speech com munity mustavoid commitmentto them ost recent theoretical notation.On the other hand,a sociolinguistic study of an isolat-ed features of the language cannot achieve a good understanding of the variation orchange involved.Our approach to the study of language variation and change requiresthe over- all view of the system provided by a formal linguistic theory.The quantitativeanalysis of variation rests upon an algebra of closed sets,so that we can calculate thenumber of times a certain variant appears divided by the number of times that it mightpossibly have appeared.The theories of change and variation that we construct are in-ferential,proceeding from the known to the unknown,rather than a series of deductionsfrom a theory of a universal grammar that fits all languages. Yetwe cannot achieve ourends without reference to the framework that has been erected by those searching for u-niversal principles. In the U nited Stat
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