On Sacks as linguist

Truly original thinkers know no disciplinary boundaries. Sacks is generally thought of as a sociologist, with a primary interest in the possibility of social order. However, in investigating the workings of social organization, Sacks soon discovered that, as an indispensable enabler of that organization, language (as indexical expressions) plays a critical role, and needs to be meticulously observed and unpacked. To this end, he goes to great lengths in almost every one of his lectures to show how the most unexceptional bits of language often turns out to work in previously unnoticed and unimaginable ways. By associating Sacks with the category “linguist”, we do not mean to pigeon-hole a trailblazer who is uncategorizable. Rather, our aim is to show that there is much in Sacks’s highly original work that is still relevant, and indeed valuable, to students of language, even to this day. Within the space of this article, we confine ourselves to two of Sacks’s paradigm-shifting insights on grammar. These include his treatment of collaborative utterances and personal pronouns.