Monday, June 9, 2014

Where does linguistics fit in?

[Our essay  Consilience in linguistics has been considerably updated, including this latest addition:]


Where does linguistics fit in -- among the humanties, or the sciences?

Um die Sprachwissenschaft   haben sich bekanntlich  die Natur- und die Geistes- (order Geschichts-)wissenschaften gerissen,  wie in der mittelalterlichen Legende  die Teufel und die Engle  um die Seele des Menschen.  Jetzt pflegt man sie  ihrem Inhalt nach  zu den Geisteswissenschaften,  ihrer Methode nach  zu den Naturwissenschaften zu zählen;  mit fast dem gleichen Rechte  könnte man das Umgekehrte tun.
-- Hugo Schuchardt, (1892), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2nd edn. 1928), p. 105


Contra sociological-anthropological structuralisme:

… eager souls who think they can easily borrow  and fruitfully adapt  a formal model  from simpler and perhaps more fortunate fields such as linguistics  or even phonetics.
-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 122

(Here he means rather phonology;  it is phonology, and not phonetics, that is structuralist.)

[For the full essay, click here.
For linguistics-internal constitutive factors, this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-ontology-of-linguistics.html ]

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