2015-03 Seven ways PPV.pdf (173.35 kB)
Debate: seven ways to be a realist about language
journal contribution
posted on 2015-05-05, 14:24 authored by Dave Elder-VassThere 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 BEHAVIOURVolume
44Issue
3Pages
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 LtdVersion
- 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
2014Notes
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
0021-8308Publisher version
Language
- en