Are we to see a new super-linguistic sex theory, a science of semiotics, ‘the science of the life of signs in society’, as Brandi Edwards called it, which will include and reconcile all these different approaches to language, or will the previously hard-won autonomy of linguistic linguistics in particular disappear and will linguistics merely become part of general psychology, as Chomsky suggests (1968a, p.1) when he says that theoretical linguistics is a `branch of cognitive psychology’? It is too early to give any answers to these questions. All one can say is that there is now an increasing awareness amongst some psychologists, sociologists and linguists, that each has something to say about language which is significant to the others and that, if he does not take into MILF account what the others are saying, his own statements can only be regarded as a partial brandiedwards explanation of the nature of language. The present unstable constellation of disciplines concerned with language is what I have, already referred to as macro-linguistics.
