What if the revolution never happened?
A thought experiment in linguistics and identity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.v9i1.35Keywords:
Identity, linguistic revolutions, thought-experiments, Chomsky, Halliday, WhorfAbstract
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.
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Bateson, G. (1971) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Paladin.
Bernstein, B. (1971) Class, Codes and Control. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203014035
Bloomfield, L. (1933) Language. New York: Henry Holt.
Chomsky, N. (1957) Syntactic Structures The Hague: Mouton.
Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N, and Halle, M. (1968) The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row.
Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Everett, D. (2012) Language as Cultural Tool. London: Profile.
Ferguson, N. (1997) Virtual History. New York: Basic Books.
Gandler, T. (2002) Thought Experiments. New York: Wiley.
Gilroy, P. (1996) British cultural studies and the pitfalls of identity. In H. Baker, M. Diwara and R. Loudeborg (eds) Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, 223–239. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Goodman, N. (1949) On likeness of meaning. Analysis 10 (1): 1–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/analys/10.1.1
Halliday, M. (1956) Grammatical categories in modern Chinese. Transactions of the Philological Society 55 (1): 177–244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-968X.1956.tb00567.x
Halliday, M. (1994) Introduction to Functional Grammar. London, Edward Arnold.
Harris, Z. (1952) Discourse analysis. Language 28 (1): 1–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/409987
Hodge, B. and O’Carroll, J. (2006) Borderwork in Multicultural Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Jakobson, R. and Halle, M. (1956) Fundamentals of Language The Hague, Mouton.
Kress, G and Van Leeuwen, T. (2006) Multimodality London, Routledge
Krugman, P. (2007) Colorless green ideas New York Times 23 February.
Kuhn, T. S. (1968) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Kuhn, T. (1979) Metaphor in science. In A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, 533–542. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003) Metaphors we Live By. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226470993.001.0001
Locke, T. (2010) Beyond the Grammar Wars. London: Routledge.
Lyons, J. (1970) Chomsky. London: Fontana. McGregor, W. (2009) Introduction to Linguistics. London: Continuum.
Said, E. W. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Sapir, E. (1921) Language. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.
Saussaure, F. de (1974 [1917]) A Course in General Linguistics. London: Fontana.
Whorf, B. (1956) Language Thought and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Published
2014-04-14
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Hodge, B. (2014). What if the revolution never happened? A thought experiment in linguistics and identity. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 9(1), 35-58. https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.v9i1.35
