Language is a crucial instrument in creating the social realm – and at the same time, it is an important part of this realm and thus calls out for a social ontological analysis. This article explores the wide and diverse ground such an ontological analysis needs to cover, and argues that language is a transcategorial phenomenon, i.e., that it covers various ontological categories. Among other aspects, I follow Ferdinand de Saussure in distinguishing individual linguistic competences, abstract language systems, and their concretizations in oral or written linguistic performances. While some argue that language is always an aggregate of linguistic competences, I argue that ontological primacy among these aspects varies according to which variety of language is to be analysed: for living languages, individual linguistic competences are the ultimate authority, but for formal languages the abstract systems of rules, and for dead languages the corpus of surviving linguistic performances.
Linguistic entities play a major part in almost all elements of our lives. Despite this, relatively little work exists in philosophy that considers what such entities are. In the work that does focus specifically on the metaphysics of words, the dominant view is type-realism, which posits that words are abstract type...
This article explores the implications of English's role as a global lingua franca for other languages, with a particular focus on the transformations these languages undergo due to English influence. Such changes are most evident in the lexical domain, where they are typically examined under the framework of lexic...
This paper examines Carnap’s conception of linguistic framework in light of the Principle of Tolerance and its constitutive role in the architecture of scientific rationality. To this end, it engages with the recent scholarly debate involving the interpretations advanced by Steinberger, Eklund, and Broughton. Steinberg...
Miguel Ângelo Oliveira Martins· Transfinito· 0 citations
In recent years, so-called "gender-neutral language" has become a point of discursive contention in the public sphere, especially in cyberspace. Far from being restricted to a strictly linguistic issue, this debate mobilizes political, ideological, and symbolic disputes related to the inclusion, visibility, and recogni...
Linguistics has always stood against the belief, widespread across many cultures, that the true, primary, correct form of a language is located in its written version. Roy Harris called this belief ‘scriptism’, and made it one of the component fallacies of his ‘integrationist’ critique of mainstream linguistics, which...
J. Joseph· RENTAS: Jurnal Bahasa, Saste...· 0 citations
This article challenges the common belief in linguistics, semiotics, and the philosophy of language that a sign possesses its own content (“meaning”, “sense”, “signified”, etc.). To this end, it examines the division established in linguistic pragmatics between deictic and non-deictic units of language: some lexemes po...
A. Vdovichenko· Voprosy filosofii· 0 citations
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