Le discours de la linguistique

Overview & Synopsis

What makes linguists tick? Like any scientific discipline, linguistics has been the subject of many histories, which tell its vicissitudes and achievements. The present book takes a different approach, investigating the ways of doing, and more specifically the ways of saying in linguistics? Linguistics is seen here as a discourse that constructs knowledge through specific gestures (naming, explaining, modeling, etc.) and feeds on a variety of imaginaries (Life, Progress, Goodness, etc.). These gestures and imaginaries are analyzed through concrete case studies, which focus on paradigmatic figures such as Benveniste and Chomsky, on disciplinary projects such as biolinguistics and linguistic typology, and on theorized objects such as the phonological accent and metalinguistic terms, in both the French and English scholarly works. By revealing the discursive craft on which linguistics is based, this richly documented survey should serve both research and teaching purposes for all linguists, and, more broadly, for all Humanities scholars.