Everybody is warmly welcome to BKKI seminar October 22, Friday, 3 p.m. which will take place both live and online:
Live 314B aud.
The speaker is dr Vladimir Panov /Centre for General Linguistics
Theme: What can practice theory contribute to linguistics?
Summary: Contemporary mainstream linguistics as a discipline rests on certain philosophical assumptions about the nature of its research object. First, it by and large accepts the Saussurean "langue" - the language system - as an entity logically prior to its real-life implementation ("parole", speaking). Second, partly as a consequence of the first, linguistics focuses on the modelling of the individual knowledge of language, whereby language system is seen as a "cognitive" phenomenon. Third, synchrony and diachrony are usually treated separately. In my talk, I argue that this view, despite its undeniable success in establishing linguistics as an autonomous discipline and contributing to huge research progress, has its limits. I then present an alternative foundation for the science of language arguing that the latter is not only a cognitive but, first and foremost, a social phenomenon, and is to be treated on a par with other social phenomena. This view can be supported by a family of approaches in social sciences known as "practice theory". These are associated with figures such as Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens and others. In my talk, I will report how their ideas have been recently applied by some linguists in treating concrete linguistic phenomena. Finally, I will discuss how practice theory can be reconciled with cognitive linguistics, frame semantics and construction grammar in particular.