Abstract
What is the relation between the individual speaker and language? How is social order possible? And where do we get our linguistic creativity?—These are the three questions which are fundamental to our understanding of language and human nature. That mainstream linguistics as practiced by linguists and taught as a course, with its many sub-disciplines and extended disciplines, tends to lose sight of these enquiries should not obliterate the fact that these questions were originally posed by three trailblazing theorists, Ferdinand de Saussure, Harold Garfinkel and Noam Chomsky, at crucial points of language research in the twentieth century. By refocusing on these three important themes, linguistic system and the individual speaker, social order, linguistic creativity, this book attempts to investigate how language theorists conceptualize human beings and how their theorizings are intimately linked with methodological dilemmas of linguistics as a discipline. It seems especially relevant to gain a solid and contextual understanding of models of the human in linguistics when calls to embrace posthumanist ideas both within and outside linguistics are increasingly heard these days.
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Notes
- 1.
A Martian is one of Chomsky’s favorite examples. He invites us to imagine ‘a Martian scientist who studies human beings from the outside, without any prejudice. Suppose that he has a great deal of time at his disposal, say, thousands of years’ (Chomsky, 1977). He goes on to hypothesize that the Martian scientist on observing the uniqueness of human species in many respects, will eventually seek to ‘determine the genetically fixed mental structures which underlie the unique achievements of this species’ (ibid.). By invoking this science-fiction-like example, Chomsky tries to lend force to his arguments about the existence of an innate language faculty in human species.
- 2.
These dilemmas are also shared by anthropology in its study of other human societies, their cultural and linguistic systems. The difference, however, lies in that anthropology is more vulnerable than linguistics because these dilemmas confront them more immediately (when abstract models break down in the face of diverse living realities) while in linguistics, the documentation of linguistic data and systematization of linguistic systems give an impression that languages are in the end systems of sound-meaning units. That also partly explains why anthropology experienced a major representation crisis in the 1960s while a similar crisis in linguistics has remained untouched until recently.
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Zhou, F. (2020). Introduction. In: Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_1
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