The Individual Voice in Language

This article presents arguments for supplementing linguistic work focused on abstract social systems (languages, dialects, varieties) with linguistic work focused on individual speakers. It begins by reviewing how the individual speaker has been conceived of (when at all) in linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Two areas of linguistic research, discourse processing and linguistic variation and change, serve as examples of what is to be gained by supplementing a linguistics of systems with a linguistics of speakers. Finally, interest in the individual voice is placed in the context of a larger shift toward a more phenomenological approach to language and greater particularity in methods for its study.