Political Correctness and ideology: a cross-cultural linguistic study

My aim in this thesis was to show that language and culture are not two distinct entities. In order to do this, I criticallydiscussed, in the first part, some of the assumption that are at the basis of an important part of the linguistic investigation in thiscentury: the distinctions between langue and parole, i.e. (abstract) language structure and language use; the notion of linguisticstructures and signs being arbitrary; the approach to linguistic relativity that considers relations between perception anddecontextualized language structures (thus excluding context to a large extent)[1] For a critical discussion of the distinctiondiachrony vs synchrony see Labov 1972 and Milroy 1992.I tried to show that users of a language (interactants, or participants to a linguistic interaction) not only possess a backgroundknowledge of grammatical structures (what Chomsky terms competence), but also the ability to use this knowledge in specificsituations. This ability is not a simply a context-independent set of rules (what Hymes termed communicative competence),but highly elusive and shifting from situation to situation. I used the term ideology to describe this ability because it is based onbeliefs or sets of beliefs