Do non-linguists practice linguistics?

Marie-Anne Paveau (1)

1 CENEL - Centre d'Etudes sur les Nouveaux Espaces Littéraires

The paper begins with a typology of nonlinguists based on categories that are not discrete. To be a nonlinguist is not a permanent state but an activity that can be practiced at a particular point in time and in a particular place even by linguists themselves. There is in this sense a nonlinguist position that can always be traded for another position. Examples of activities that belong only debatably to folk linguistics will be examined. These examples will be used to challenge the relations posited between the 'identities' of nonlinguists and the nature of their activities. Secondly, following on from Paveau 2007 and 2008a, the paper will examine the complex epistemological and philosophical issue of the validity of folk linguistics, a question clearly linked to (and subsumed by) the validity of the folk sciences more generally. In particular, the paper will examine the concepts of knowledge and epilinguistic awareness, which provide arguments in favor of an integrational position , i.e. an anti-eliminative position: folk propositions are not necessarily false beliefs that must be eliminated from the sphere of science, but constitute perceptive, subjective and incomplete forms of knowledge that need to be incorporated into the scientific data of linguistics.

Mots clés: folk data; folk linguistics; intuition; non-linguists; eliminativism; realism

Domaines: Linguistique

Marie-Anne Paveau. Do non-linguists practice linguistics?: An anti-eliminative approach to folk theories. AILA Review, 2011, 24, pp.40-54. ⟨hal-00660080⟩