secondary response

A term introduced into LINGUISTICS by Leonard Bloomfield to refer to UTTERANCES people make about their LANGUAGE. The term includes not only the METALINGUISTIC utterances of linguistics but also the loosely organized, yet fairly uniform system of popular pronouncements about language, e.g. ‘bad grammar’, ‘correct pronunciation’. It is distinguished from ‘primary’ response (the use of language as such) and TERTIARY RESPONSE (the evaluation of secondary responses).