Workshop: The Future of Linguistics

Louis ten Bosch, Nick Enfield, Mirjam Ernestus, Helen de Hoop,
Stephen C. Levinson and Pieter Muysken

Around a century ago Ferdinand de Saussure, lecturing in Geneva, pointed to the tension between langue – the idealised, generalised, and uniform structure of a language – and parole – the unique and concrete manifestation of language use by individuals in specific settings. During many decades the focus in linguistic research has been on langue, but now parole is coming to the foreground.

In this workshop various speakers explore the implication for linguistic studies of a number of partly related paradigm shifts, which may be loosely summarised under the label ‘usage based patterns’:
(a) from language universals, often postulated a priori, to attention for actually occurring variation between languages;
(b) from structural constraints to frequency patterns;
(c) from explorations of the intuitions and linguistic competence of individuals to the study of larger language samples and linguistic corpora.

The implications of these paradigm shifts are both methodological and theoretical, and are profound for the future of the discipline.

In this special workshop organised by the IMPRS for Language Sciences, speakers will formulate a set of theses as the core of their presentations. IMPRS for Language Sciences students will ask questions of the speakers to lead the panel discussion that follows.

All welcome.