Form and formalism in linguistics
About this book
"Form" and "formalism" are a pair of highly productive and polysemous terms that occupy a central place in much linguistic scholarship. Diverse notions of "form" – embedded in biological, cognitive and aesthetic discourses – have been employed in accounts of language structure and relationship, while "formalism" harbours a family of senses referring to particular approaches to the study of language as well as representations of linguistic phenomena. This volume brings together a series of contributions from historians of science and philosophers of language that explore some of the key meanings and uses that these multifaceted terms and their derivatives have found in linguistics, and what these reveal about the mindset, temperament and daily practice of linguists, from the nineteenth century up to the present day.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- Preface James McElvenny
- 1 Visual formalisms in comparative-historical linguistics Judith Kaplan
- 2 Alternating sounds and the formal franchise in phonology James McElvenny
- 3 On Sapir's notion of form/pattern and its aesthetic background Jean-Michel Fortis
- 4 Linguistics as a ``special science'': A comparison of Sapir and Fodor Els Elffers
- 5 The impact of Russian formalism on linguistic structuralism Bart Karstens
- 6 The resistant embrace of formalism in the work of Émile Benveniste and Aurélien Sauvageot John E. Joseph
- 7 Linguistics as a science of structure Ryan M. Nefdt
- 8 Formalism, grammatical rules, and normativity Geoffrey K. Pullum
- 9 Linguistic form: A political epistemology Nick Riemer
- Index
