Linguistics as a Unique Science

Sonali Raj, Hindi & English, Delhi NCR

This essay attempts to answer the following questions: Why is linguistics a science? How are other sciences different from linguistics?

Linguistics has been concerned with observing patterns in languages. In ancient times, individual languages were analysed and catalogued in terms of categories (semantic, syntactic etc.) and rules that govern their use were articulated. An example of this sort of linguistic study was done by Panini around the 4th century BC. Paninis book Ashtadhyayi is said to be a descriptive study of the Sanskrit used by an educated minority of his time. The author would today be called a grammarian, not a linguist. However, this book could be called a scientific study because based on its predictions about the rules of the grammar it dealt with it would be possible to make new formulations that would hold within the system of that grammar. If such rules had led to predictions that seemed to be untrue in the world, it might have been observed that there exist other language grammars. A study of language, therefore, would come to be involved in comparative analyses of the grammars of different languages. When languages were compared, patterns across languages were discovered and similarly overarching generalizations were made. For instance, all languages observed so far use a subject-predicate sentence structure. We could therefore safely predict that any languages we discover in future will also have sentences of this form. In the past hundred years, more and more such generalizations based on the natural languages of the world have led to generalizations at a fundamental level, that concern themselves with the common structure of language, or universal grammar. The rules of UG are good for making predictions across languages, and in areas where they appear to fail, which they do in the case of infants, we can observe a different system of grammar, which is a property of that period of a normal humans use of language when he is still acquiring the language skill. Since infants tend to make similar types of mistakes in language use at different stages of development, (irrespective of whether they are Chinese or Italian) it seems that there is a common way in which children acquire language, and that because it is common, there is an element of the process that is innate in all normal humans.

Linguistics, in this way, uses the tools of scientific analysis: observation, generalization, rule formation, prediction, falsification, hypothesis formationand its ultimate aim has developed into a method of determining how the human mind works or how it perceives things. In this respect linguistics is different from other sciences (such as physics and chemistry) because though they use the scientific method, they are only concerned with describing the universe (same as Paninis grammar,) and do not aim to understand how the universe is perceived. That is to say that the natural sciences attempt to fix phenomena within systems (the system of the universe; the sub-atomical system and so forth,) whereas linguistic study allows for ways of looking at things. It would be incorrect to say that the Piraha speakers of the Amazon, who have two colour words light and dark, or white and black cannot perceive any other colour because they might describe the colour red as the colour of rust or the colour of grapes, same as English speakers use the lexical items rust and burgundy; but it would be correct to conclude that when people were first introduced to Charles Darwins theory of evolution in his book The Origin of Species, they were introduced, by the use of language, to a new way of looking at or understanding why creatures are what they are. Thus, if a person were to say, I believe in natural selection, versus another who says, I believe that God made the world in a flash of light, and they were both understood to be speaking the truth, we could draw some conclusion about how they perceive the world. Here, language is an intermediary between thought and the universe. A description of the first of which is the domain of logic, philosophy and mathematics; while a description of the latter encompasses sciences such as physics. Linguistics, in studying this intermediary, is in a position to comment on both the universe as an objective phenomenon as well as the ways in which it is perceived.

Sources: 1. Science and Linguistics, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Mit.edu (http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/whorf.scienceandlinguistics.pdf) 2. Linguistic Relativism (http://www.ontology.co/linguistic-relativity.htm) 3. A history of philosophy: Wolff to Kant, Frederick Copleston, Pgs 260-262 (http://books.google.com.au/books? id=2kpFQ3IiOAkC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)