how two people are able to talk together

But when a linguist says that he is doing some research which he hopes will help us understand a little better how it is that "two people are able to talk together," most people shake their heads in puzzlement.

Yet how two people are able to talk together is, of course, the central problem. During the 1930's and 1940's, most American linguists attacked it by trying to work out better techniques of discovering the structure of lan-

From NEA Journal (January 1965). Reprinted by permission of the National

Educational Association and the author.

EXPOSITORY TYPE: PROCESS

guage—any language—and of analyzing and classifying what they found.

Then, in the late 1950's there came a rather dramatic swing in another

direction: away from mere classification of data toward a search for uni-

versals and a broad, inclusive "theory of language."