Linguistics, a discipline that aims to grasp essential features of language, has adopted methods and assumptions that require a suppression of the temporality of speech and exclusive attention to its atemporal dimension. In doing so, it has lost sight of a crucial aspect of the notion of structure in language; that it is distributed over time and across persons. In this paper some of the consequences of this suppression for the theory and practice of linguistics are noted, and some alternatives indicated. These alternatives bring linguistics closer to the epistemes of poststructuralism and postmodernism.
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