Many millenia ago, a number of genetic changes endowed the human species with the remarkable capacity: (1) to construct highly complex systems of expressions--human languages; (2) to copy such systems, once created, from other members of the species; and (3) to use them for communicative and perhaps other purposes. This capacity is not uniform; it is actually a set of interacting capacities, which are rooted somewhere in the brain of the individual. However, each of the three processes made possible by this set of capacities also involves social interaction with other individuals. The creation of a language, its acquisition--be it as a child or as an adult--as well as its use in communication are fundamentally social in nature. People do not know how the first language came into existence. However, it is not very likely that a particularly gifted member of the human species thought it out and then passed it on to his or her family and some of his or her best friends; languages grow in steady interaction among humans. The creation of, acquisition of, and communication by means of a linguistic system are processes that have a "biological" as well as a "social" side. The tradition of linguistic research from antiquity to the end of the 20th century has always been aware of these two dimensions. What it has been much less aware of is their "temporal" side. What linguists normally care for is not so much the properties of the three "processes" but the properties of the "products" that they bring forth. Linguists try to uncover the characteristics of linguistic systems and they try to understand the properties of the utterances. Practically all claims about the lexical and grammatical features of a human language are based on two elementary methods that are typically used in combination with each other: (1) looking at specimens of actual language production, usually written or spoken (and then transcribed) sentences; and (2) appealing to the linguistic "intuitions" of someone who speaks the language (very often the linguist himself or herself); this appeal can have the form of a grammaticality judgment or a question about the meaning. Is there any way, any instrument, any measurement, or any procedure that would allow people to go substantially beyond what these two methods can provide them? So far, no one has found such a method. In this article, the author discusses two interconnected developments which raise hopes.