Linguistics is called the scientific approach to study language; to be more precise the human language. This claim of linguistics being scientific has brought much debate, criticism and queries into existence and also the need to prove the linguistic field as a scientific domain. The problem not only lies with the lay people's understanding with linguistics, but also with many scholars too. Thus, it becomes an impending subject matter to be discussed within and outside the domain to prove the validity or voidness of the claim.
The first ever claim to be made for linguistics as a scientific domain was made by the prominent linguists who tried to explore linguistics in a new horizon. One of the most recent linguist who tried to prove the mentioned proposition with an academic approach and also with strong evidence is Andrew Carnie, in his book 'Syntax : A Generative Approach'. In his book [p] he has shown that the scientific method involved in any kind of scientific inquiry or research. The process involves collecting data to interpretation of the results and finally analyzing the data to derive new opinion. The new opinion will continue to evolve till the process continues to analyze or interpret the new data that will be coming up. This whole explanation breaks the misconception that language is an arbitrary system, although the word 'arbitrary' would need some more explanation, because some prominent figures in linguistics stands between the word linguistics and the word 'arbitrary'. But to say it more easily, we can debunk the misconception of language being a rigid, fixed and dumb faculty. Actually if we look at the most prominent works of late twentieth century of the Great American Linguist Noam Chomsky, we would find that he has already proved the linguistic domain as much scientific as discrete mathematics, and also he has produced such challenges from linguistic data that shook fields like psychology and cognitive science. The challenges still today bring sweat up on the eyebrows of those field scientists and also the topics are well discussed in the academic community. But the most earliest scholar to declare linguistics as a science were not these academics or scholars, but the scholar who had done the bold declaration was the great
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorThe sole author of these contents is Naywaz Sharif Shubha. He owns and copyrights all of the contents.©2021 Archives
December 2021
Categories
|