Linguistics. A methodological introduction

general courses

Classroom

The course is offered primarily to students who follow a programme for achievement of PhD degree in linguistic disciplines and for whom the course is obligatory. It is possible to follow the course in the framework of so called „general university subjects” („przedmiot ogólnouniwersytecki” / „ogun”), but such choices on the students’ part cannot infringe on the course’s professional mode of propaedeutic preparation for linguistic research (the course is not meant to serve the aims of popularization of selected elements of knowledge about languages).

1. Linguistics as a scientific discipline. Theoretical research (the interface between philosophy and science of languages); research of the empirical data. A historical overview (basically, pertaining to theoretical research). The Hindu tradition. The Chinese achievements. The central pathway of linguistics: the Greek-Roman-Arab-European-American line of research. The impact of German-Danish, Polish-Russian, French-Swiss, Czech research. The contemporary domination of American and British research. The contention between psychocentrism, expressive logocentrism and epistemic logocentrism as the leading theoretical propositions.

2. Fundamentals of the theory of knowledge and the theory of science (including possible classifications of studies). Their Weltanschauung background.Quality and quantity of information. Proof and explanation. Linguistic illustrations.The principles of scientific investigation: (a) pragmatic; (b) immanent – in the procceses of conceptualisation, proposition selection, assertion.

3. The essence of language; language / langue and speech / parole. Sentence, utterance, someone’s saying something. Locution, illocution, perlocution. Competence, performance. Particular properties of linguistic studies. Their classifications: general-theoretical and specific-item-oriented.

4. Internal (synchronic) linguistics. Expression.The first and the second levels of articulation.The basis of language vs. its peripheries. ‘Saying that _’, ‘saying: _’; other utterances.Unit of language; syntactic projection of the fundamental stock of the units. „Lexical” and operational units. Inflection; word formation („derivation”). Asyntactic units.The second level of articulation. The problems of learnability and redundance. Phonology, phonetics; graphematics.Semantic properties of expressions vs. pragmatic properties of expressions: (a) code properties, (b) performance properties (the problem of tropes).The principles of description. Proportionalism. Negativism.

5. External linguistics: synchronic and diachronic. Comparative linguistics.Stylistics.Diversity of languages: genealogical and typological. Etymology. Ethnolinguistics.Changeability of languages. Changes: „phonetic”; „analogical”; others. Their regularities vs. irregularities.Confrontative linguistics: taxonomic; translational.

6. Constructivistic linguistics.

Studia z metodologii i filozofii językoznawstwa (Łódź, pod red. P. Stalmaszczyka; np. zeszyt 3: Od zdania do aktów mowy – rozważania lingwistyczne i filozoficzne. Łódź 2015); A. Bogusławski, Science as linguistic activity, linguistics as scientific activity. Warszawa 1998.

Fundamental compartments of linguistics. Linguistics in its relation to the four-fold nature of scientific studies: absence of nomological studies in linguistics.

Particular properties of linguistic studies. Their classifications: general-theoretical and specific-item-oriented.

Internal (synchronic) linguistics vs. external linguistics. Descriptive and comparative linguistics.

External linguistics: synchronic and diachronic. Stylistics. Diversity of languages: genealogical and typological. Etymology. Ethnolinguistics. Changeability of languages. Changes: „phonetic”; „analogical”; others. Their regularities vs. irregularities.

Internal comparative linguistics: typological vs. confrontative; confrontative linguistics: taxonomic vs. translational.

Constructivistic linguistics.

Test; conversation.