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Debate: seven ways to be a realist about language

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-05-05, 14:24 authored by Dave Elder-Vass
There are many differing ways to be a realist about language. This paper seeks to classify some of these and to examine the implications of each for the study of language. The principle of classification it adopts is that we may distinguish between realisms on the basis of what exactly it is that they take to be real. Examining in turn realisms that ascribe reality to the external world in general, to causal mechanisms, to innate capacities, to linguistic signs, to social structures, to language systems, and to linguistic groups, the paper summarises the case for a particular critical realist ontology of language. In the process, it engages briefly with the work of Saussure, Chomsky, Halliday, and more recent explicitly realist thinkers such as Bhaskar, Pateman, Archer, Sealey and Carter. One implication is that language itself is not a phenomenon that separates us from a causally structured world, but rather a part of that world, a part with an identifiable causal structure of its own that is similar to that of other normative phenomena.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

JOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR

Volume

44

Issue

3

Pages

249 - 267 (19)

Citation

ELDER-VASS, D.J., 2014. Debate: seven ways to be a realist about language. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 44 (3), pp.249-267.

Publisher

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: ELDER-VASS, D.J., 2014. Debate: seven ways to be a realist about language. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 44 (3), pp.249-267, which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12040. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

ISSN

0021-8308

Language

  • en