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1 The paradigm in linguistics and its distinctive features.

LECTURE 1 (наша вузовская)

The concept of linguistic paradigms. Changing linguistic paradigms. Characteristics of modern linguistics.

Language has been the subject of different kind of research for over 2,000 years. There has been an objective, logical approach, meaning the investigation of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation in a detailed and organized way.

At the end of the 18th century the subject attracted a larger and larger number of scholars, and a new field of scientific research emerged, language analysis being its focus. This approach was known as philology and dealt with the historical development of the language.

In the XXth century the subject included more than the history of the language, and the name of the science has mostly been used as linguistics.

In ancient times (in European tradition it was in Ancient Greece) the scholars who studied the language were mostly grammarians and philosophers, nowadays they are called linguists and philologists. Aristotle was writing about “the art of writing”.

In the 19th century a comparative method was used in linguistics. It allowed proving systematic comparison of languages with respect to their sound systems, grammatical structure, and vocabulary and proving that they are “genealogically” related. The relations among the languages of the Indo-European family were studied systematically by Franz Bopp, Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm, and A.Ch. Vostokov. These linguists carried out historical and comparative research of the related languages and created a historical comparative method in linguistics. For example, J. Grimm found that where Gothic had an f, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit frequently had a p (Gothic: fotus, Latin: pedis, Greek: podós, Sanskrit: padás, all of them meaning “foot”).

The rise of this method marks the appearance of linguistics as a science in the strict sense of this word. A new theory was trying to grasp the mutual interconnection and interdependence in the language, taking and describing language as a system. The first linguists who did it were: Beaudoin de Courtenay, F.F. Fortunatov and Ferdinand de Saussure.

De Saussure’s lecture notes were published as a book “A Course in General Linguistics” that contains the ideas, which are the basis of linguistic knowledge now:

    language is a system of linguistic signs; language has two aspects: language and speech; linguistic sign has both form and meaning; linguistic sign is interconnected with other linguistic signs; etc.

In the theory of scientific paradigms, 2 types are distinguished (Kisiel, 1982):

- paradigms in a broad sense – a set of views, procedures, principles and research techniques used,

- paradigms in the narrow sense – examples of solving specific problems, which later serve as models for the interpretation of other problems.

In linguistics, the concept of “paradigm” is similar to the concept of “the philosophy of language”. A “paradigm” acts as a special stereotype of scientific thinking, as “the dominant view of language in any given era, associated with a certain philosophical trend and a certain direction in art, and in this way that philosophical theses are used to explain the most general laws of the language, and the data of language, in turn, are used to solve some (usually only some) philosophical problems” (Stepanov, 1985).

In the middle of the XXth century, a scientific paradigm began to be called “scientific achievements recognized by all, which for a certain time provide the scientific community with a model for posing problems and their solutions” (Kuhn, 1962). However, the majority of linguists (Demyankov 2006; Kubryakova 2006; Serio 2001; Sussov 1999) came to the conclusion that the term paradigm in the understanding of T. Kuhn is not quite applicable to linguistics.

A paradigm usually means the predominance of some idea, the predominance of some (“paradigmatic”) view of things, which goes beyond the framework of one scientific discipline.

Yu. S. Stepanov defines the paradigm (or “philosophy of language”) as “the dominant view of the language in any given period, associated with a certain philosophical trend and a certain direction in art; and the data of language, in turn, are used for solving some philosophical problems”. “The paradigm is associated with a certain style of thinking in science”. Thus, the paradigm is a historical phenomenon.

The formation of a new paradigm in the contemporary linguistics – the anthropocentric one.

Acad. V. Vernadsky wrote that science is being rebuilt in front of our eyes (Vernadsky 1988). A new paradigm is being created on the basis of synthesis of the (natural) mapping of the world. The nucleus of this paradigm is formed of the ideas of synergetics.

The history of European linguistics can be represented as a change of “scientific paradigms”. Here are some of them:

    “universal grammar” (N. Chomsky) “comparative-historical grammar” (F. Bopp, Neogrammarians (“young grammarians”), A. Meillet (A. Mейе)); “synchronous linguistics” (F. de Saussure); a) “structural linguistics” (R. Jacobson); b) “descriptive linguistics” (L. Bloomfield); c) “structural typology and linguistics of the universals” (J. Greenberg); “transformational-generative grammar” (N. Chomsky);


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