With friends like Edmondson (1979), the descriptivist needs no enemies. The descriptivist's dilemma which Harris (1978) drew attention to was a dilemma about the assignment of truth values to performative and corresponding non-performative utterances. Edmondson's appeal to an obscurely drawn distinction between semantics and pragmatics is simply irrelevant to this issue. The semantic theory with which Edmondson saddles the unfortunate descriptivist makes his position, if anything, worse.

At a time when linguistic theory is becoming increasingly fragmented and decreasingly dominated by a single orthodoxy, it has been an encouraging exercise to compile a list of statements about language which are likely to be accepted by virtually all linguists, irrespective of what they think about all the many issues on which linguists disagree. The following list contains no fewer than 83 claims which have been accepted by a wide range of British linguists, and there is no reason to believe that the sample of linguists who have helped me in compiling the list is particularly biased. It seems reasonable to claim that other linguists are LIKELY to accept these statements, although I certainly cannot claim that every linguist accepts every one of them. So far as I know, no attempt has ever been made before to find out what linguists at large actually believe, although any writer of an introductory text-book hopes that he is expounding a widely held set of views. Considered as a piece of research, this investigation seems to me to have produced at least one interesting result: linguistics really is making some progress, in a cumulative way, and we are not just lurching from one 'paradigm' to another, as some of us sometimes suspect in our gloomier moments. Moreover, it raises the interesting question what other statements could be added to the list given here, which certainly is not meant to be exhaustive. I hope that other linguists with more imagination than me can bring the list into the hundreds, as should surely be possible.

Pillinger (1980) argues that the Latin accusative and infinitive construction provides evidence against some of the current assumptions of Relational Grammar (RG) and, 1to a lesser extent, the Extended Standard Theory (EST). I argue that, even if one accepts Pillinger's analysis of this construction – as I would, perhaps with less diffidence than Pillinger himself – then this analysis is completely neutral with regard to deciding between RG and EST and compatible with either.

The first sentence of David Lightfoot’s review (1981) of my Liberty and language (1980) refers to the recent emergence of ‘the ̏nouveaux philosophes̋ and ̏the New Right̋ ’. Later in his first paragraph he characterizes this group as people who ‘believe in the predominance of heredity over education’. His second paragraph begins: ‘Liberty and language is a contribution to this literature.’