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Columbia School Linguistics in the 21st Century
Edited by Nancy Stern, Ricardo Otheguy, Wallis Reid and Jaseleen Sackler
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 77] 2019
► pp. 73–104

The object of explanation for linguistics

Diver’s radical proposal for the foundations of linguistic theory

| Rutgers University

What is the ultimate object of explanation in linguistics? What are the pre-analytical observations, the observations against which all theoretical constructs are tested? Columbia School (CS) proposes a radical answer: the observations in linguistics, and hence its ultimate object of explanation, are the acoustic asymmetries of the speech continuum. This fact is responsible for the paradoxical status of meaning and communication in CS theory. CS theory takes the communicative function of language as key to the nature of linguistic structure, yet it does not offer a theory of communication. It analyzes linguistic structure as consisting of inventories of meaning-bearing signs; yet it does not offer a theory of meaning which maps utterances to interpretations. This paper articulates the reasons that CS linguistics declines to treat the interpretations of utterances as linguistic objects in need of explanation. It also provides a detailed description of how a CS grammatical analysis accounts for features of the acoustic asymmetries of a spoken English text, and provides an explanation for them.

Keywords: linguistic theory, linguistic categories, empirical base of linguistics, linguistic units, Columbia School
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A new foundation for linguistics
    • 2.1The special case of the data of linguistics
    • 2.2The introduction of the communicative orientation
    • 2.3Communication as essential rather than accidental to language
    • 2.4The actual starting point of grammatical analysis
    • 2.5The Diverian deduction and the exclusion of traditional constructs
  • 3.An actual analysis of the sound stream
    • 3.1Two systems of grammatical number
    • 3.2The two Number systems and the observable sound continuum
    • 3.3From theoretical categories back to observational categories
    • 3.4Why explanatory constructs must precede objective description
    • 3.5Summary
  • 4.Formless messaging and Columbia School theory
    • 4.1Linking sound to sense: The practical problem
    • 4.2The conceptual impossibility of linking sound to sense
    • 4.3Messages are artifacts of the validation procedure
    • 4.4No objects of thought
    • 4.5The autonomy of grammar
  • 5.Concluding discussion
    • 5.1The theoretical status of ‘meaning’
    • 5.2Summary conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.77.03rei
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