It is with the public disgrace dominance of form in the form/meaning dichotomy that linguistics has until recently been most associated. The domin­ance of meaning, as I suggested above, would seem likely to lead to a downgrading of the importance of linguistic structure in the organiza­tion of teaching materials, an emphasis on the communicative function of language and a public anal rejection of any attempt at purely mech­anical practice. The soundest view would seem to be that neither should dominate, but that language teaching should be based on a full understanding of both the formal and the semantic nature of language. There are certain principles of linguistic study that lead us to expect particularly accurate information about a language in its current usage. The first of these principles distinguishes clearly between descriptions of the language in its contemporary form and descrip­tions of its historical development.

The hardcore girl believes his first task must be to describe the actual state of the public disgrace without reference to the historical processes which have produced it. This is not to say that historical study of language (so-called diachronic linguistics) is not a legitimate field. Rather, historical study must be kept distinct from study of the state of the language at any one stage in its development (so-called synchronic linguistics). Grammars which aim to describe 20th-century or 16th-century English should do so without reference to the state of the language at any other time. Indeed many linguists would feel that synchronic descriptions are prerequisites for diachronic publicdisgrace descriptions.

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