[Corpora-List] Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS?

[Bruce Anderson]

Scientific methods attempt to extract rules (with predictive power) from observations; artistic methods attempt to apply rules (e.g. harmony, balance, abstract metaphor) that elicit a psychological response from people - typically admiration of beauty.

With this distinction in mind, I would certainly call Linguistics far more of a science than an art.  Without stretching definitions too far, one might refer to a specific utterance (e.g. a speech) {or even an entire language} as artistic - but the goal of Linguistics is to extract rules, structures, relationships, etc.

(Does that make a generativist an artist? Not really - creating language structures from rigid rules fails the psychological response test.)

Bruce Anderson
Glendon College / York University





________________________________
From: Yuri Tambovtsev <yutamb at mail.ru>
To: corpora at uib.no
Sent: Tue, March 23, 2010 4:02:01 AM
Subject: [Corpora-List] Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS?

 
Dear Corpora colleagues, Do you think 
LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS? I think the discussion about linguistics 
using either the scientific or artistic methods, is quite interesting. 
Really, is it ARTS (the Humanities) or Science. If we divide this man 
activity into Sciences and Arts, then linguistics for the exception of phonetics 
is Arts. Can linguistics reconstruct some parent language? We know that all 
the Romance languages have the parent language, i.e. Latin. But can linguists 
reconstruct Latin on the basis of Italian, Spanish, French and other Romance 
languages? The answer is NO. If linguistics had been SCience, then it would have 
been possible. But it is ARTS, thus it is impossible. Or am I mistaken? Looking 
forward to hearing from you either directly yutamb at mail.ru or via the net. Be well, Yuri 
Tambovtsev 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20100323/232cf113/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora