what is linguistics?

s.t. bischoff bischoff.st at gmail.com
Thu Jan 8 18:58:50 UTC 2009


Hi all,

I'm on a tropical island rather isolated (in terms of linguists and much
more)...if you are wondering why so many posts in a short time...and why
this one is so long...

Thanks again to those that responded to the earlier question regarding
axioms. Bloomfield 1926 turned out to be quite interesting and informative.
Also Tom's comments about axioms in the sciences was something I wish I'd
heard the first day of graduate school. I had thought that Plato's onomata
(nouns) and rhemata (verbs) expanded on by Aristotle, would perhaps be have
been axiomatic or "laws" but Bloomfield notes,

"Other notions, such as subject, predicate, verb, noun, will apply only to
some languages, and may have to be defined differently for different
ones,-unless, indeed, we prefer to invent new terms for divergent phe-
nomena."

rightly I think...despite Baker's 2002 attempt to make nouns, verbs, and
adjectives universal. This led me to Hegege 2004 (''On categories, rules and
interfaces in linguistics''). Hegege argues that all theoretical frameworks
(I interpret "theory" here as "linguistic inquiry" perhaps not rightly so)
have in common the notions of phonology, morphology, syntax,  semantics,
and pragmatics...but that technical terms in these various theories are "far
from having the same meanings."

This leads me to a second question...what is linguistic inquiry and what is
langauge? That is, what is it that "linguists" are interested in learning or
discovering? Chomsky seems only interested in "language" as much as it can
tell him something about the "mind/brain"...is that really what linguistics
is? It seems for C "language" is a phenomena to study in order to learn
something about the object that produces it the "mind/brain"...but sure;y
typologist and others view the issue differently...so what do we tell
introductory linguistics students "language" is and "linguistics" is about?



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