What if the revolution never happened? A thought experiment in linguistics and identity
Issue: Vol 9 No. 1 (2013)
Journal: Linguistics and the Human Sciences
Subject Areas: Writing and Composition Linguistics
DOI: 10.1558/lhs.v9i1.35
Abstract:
This article reports a thought-experiment in linguistics, and discusses implications for the scope and identity of linguistics today. It questions arguments that linguistics underwent a Kuhnian revolution around Chomsky's Syntactic Structures of 1957, and that his analysis of the sentence ‘colorless green ideas’ definitively created a split between grammar and semantics in linguistics. The thought-experiment asks: 'What if Whorf and Halliday’s work already published by 1956 were taken as paradigm-forming works that created identities in linguistics?' It argues that these works could have laid foundations for a more productive, inclusive linguistics, better able to analyse and negotiate identities.
Author: Bob Hodge
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