Blog Archives

Some reflections on the uses and abuses of theory in linguistic thought

Jon Orman My purpose in this piece is to offer a few brief thoughts on a series of questions with which I have become increasingly interested in recent months. Linguistics, it seems to me, is awash with theories and theoretical

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Posted in Article, Linguistics, Philosophy

Praxeology and language: Social science as the study of human action

Daniel W. Hieber University of California, Santa Barbara danielhieber.com Introduction Since the formulation and elaboration of speech act theory by Grice (1957; 1969), Austin (1962) and Searle (1962) as part of the ordinary language movement in philosophy,[1] the linguistics community has

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Posted in Article, Linguistics, Philosophy, Pragmatics

Diversity, linguistics and domination: how linguistic theory can feed a kind of politics most linguists would oppose

Nick Riemer University of Sydney & HTL, Université Paris-Diderot What connections might linguists’ professional activities have to politics? Most recently, the question has been posed by the collective self-dismissal of the Lingua board and the journal’s metamorphosis into the open-access

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Posted in Article, Linguistics

Hendrik Pos and the epistemological foundations of structuralism

Patrick Flack Charles University, Prague The name of Dutch linguist and philosopher Hendrik Josephus Pos (1898-1955) is not one that rings many bells today, except perhaps in the Netherlands and the (growing) circles of Merleau-Ponty specialists. But to the keen

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Posted in 20th century, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Structuralism

Do linguists measure anything?

Nick Riemer University of Sydney and Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, Université Paris-Diderot Few questions in linguistics can be as hoary, fundamental or, perhaps, as unsatisfactorily handled, as that of the discipline’s empirical status – a question typically presented as

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Posted in Article, Linguistics, Philosophy, Semantics

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