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Part of
History of Linguistics 2021: Selected papers from the 15th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS 15), Milan, 28 August – 1 September
Edited by Savina Raynaud, Maria Paola Tenchini and Enrica Galazzi
[Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 133] 2024
► pp. 14–30

Chapter 1
Can linguistics and historiography of linguistics profit from each other?

| Università di Verona (Emeritus)
I offer support for an affirmative answer to the question in the title by means of two case studies. The first one is on the notion of predication. I compare two recent theoretical studies, arguing that one of them is less satisfactory than the other, since it does not consider the original Aristotelian notion of predication, which is necessary for an adequate treatment of natural language. The second case study deals with Immediate Constituent Analysis, which some scholars argue dates back to long before Bloomfield: this conclusion was drawn by implicitly equating ‘constituent’ with ‘word group’, while the two concepts actually differ. Our discussion leads to the issue of ‘paradigm’ in Kuhn’s sense: to what extent are scientific notions formulated in different epochs and conceptual frameworks comparable? I maintain that they can be compared, by resorting to some approaches to the history of sciences that are different from Kuhn’s.
Keywords: predication, constituent, word group, paradigm, research tradition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Two case studies
  • 3.Some possible objections to our approach
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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References (36)
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