Teaching English

In the case of idiosyncratic dialects, some of the rules required to account for the dialect are not members of the set of rules of any social dialect; they are peculiar to the language of that speaker. All idiosyncratic dialects have this characteristic in common that some of the rules required to account for them are particular to an individual. This has, of course, the result that some of their sentences are not readily interpretable, since the ability to interpret a sentence depends in part upon the knowledge of the conventions underlying that sentence. The sentences of an idiolect do not therefore present the same problems of interpretation since somewhere there is a member of that social group who shares the conventions with the speaker.

It is in the nature of idiosyncratic dialects that they are normally unstable. The reason for this is obvious. The object of speech is normally to communicate, i.e. to be understood. If understanding is only partial, then a speaker has a motive to bring his bahaviour into line with conventions of some social group, if he is able. This instability accounts for part of the difficulty experienced by the linguist in describing idiosyncratic dialects. The data on which a description is made is fragmentary. This means that the usual verification procedures required in the construction of a projective grammar are not readily available.

The other difficulty the linguist experiences is that of placing an interpretation on some of the sentences of the dialect. Without interpretation, of course, analysis cannot begin.
The language of a second language learner is not the only type of idiosyncratic dialect. Error Analysis is not applicable only to the language of second language learners. one class of idiosyncratic dialects is the language of poems, where this cannot be accounted for wholly in the terms of the rules of some social dialect. Second class of idiosyncratic dialect one might consider is the speech of an aphasic. The third class is that of the infant learning his mother tongue. the fourth class is that of the learners of a second language.

All the learner’s sentences should in principle be analysed. This is all the more necessary since many of his apparently well-formed sentences may have a derivation different from that assigned by the rules of the target dialect.
The making of errors is an inevitable and indeed necessary part of the learning process. The correction of error provides precisely the sort of negative evidence which is necessary to discovery of the correct concept or rule. Consequently, a better description of idiosyncratic sentences contributes directly to an account of what the learner knows and does not know at that moment in his career, and should ultimately enable the teacher to supply him, not just with the information that his hypothesis is wrong, but also, importantly, with the right sort of information or data for him to form a more adequate concept of a rule in the target language.

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