A philosophical analysis of the emergence of language
There is a research programme in linguistics that isfounded on describing language as an emergent phenomenon.This paper clarifies how the core concept of emergence isdeployed in this emergentist programme. We show that if oneadopts the weak understandings of the concept of languageemergence, the eme...
| Autores: | , |
|---|---|
| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2024 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Sevilla (US) |
| Repositorio: | idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:idus.us.es:11441/180091 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/11441/180091 https://doi.org/10.1111/theo.12507 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | emergence emergence of language emergentist programme linguistics philosophy of linguistics |
| Sumario: | There is a research programme in linguistics that isfounded on describing language as an emergent phenomenon.This paper clarifies how the core concept of emergence isdeployed in this emergentist programme. We show that if oneadopts the weak understandings of the concept of languageemergence, the emergentist programme is not fundamentallydifferent from the other non-emergentist researchprogrammes in linguistics. On the other hand, if oneadopts the stronger understandings of emergence thenthe programme would have a unique character, but at thecost of some corollaries (philosophical, but not only)which the emergentist linguists would seemingly want toavoid. We show that if the emergentists accept thosecorollaries, the resulting hypothetical emergentist pro-gramme would be totally different from the emergentistprogramme in its present shape. We conclude that theemergentist programme, as it stands, should be eitherabandoned or reshaped in both theory and methodology. |
|---|