schools and subdisciplines (nitpicking)

[Victor Golla]

11/13/99

> Functionalism is a school of linguistics, not a sub-discipline.

<...>

>
>I don't mean to pick particularly on Dan here, I've seen this usage
>on FUNKNET more than once before.  And maybe it doesn't matter at all,
>except that I fear it reinforces the widespread confusion that equates
>functional linguistics with the subdiscipline of discourse analysis.

Scott is precisely correct, and it does matter.  It is an ancient
strategy, employed by every dominant paradigm, to dismiss competing
paradigms as trivial or irrelevant because they are concerned with
peripheral issues of no moment in the central debate.  With apologies
the Emperor Charles:  "I am a Functionalist when I analyze discourse,
a Bloomfieldian when I do dialectology, a Neogrammarian when I do
comparison, but when I do linguistics it is in the Minimalist Framework."

                                                        --Victor Golla