ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY
Keywords:
linguistics, philosophy of language, linguistic turn, linguistic relativity, meaning as use, distributional hypothesis, speech acts, linguistic experiment.Abstract
The paper considers the relationship between linguistics and philosophy as a recurrent cycle in which a philosophical thesis about language is turned into a linguistic research programme, tested on empirical material and returned to philosophy in a corrected form. The cycle is traced along three lines, namely language and the view of the world from W. von Humboldt and B.L. Whorf to experiments with Russian colour terms, meaning as use from L. Wittgenstein through J.R. Firth and Z. Harris to distributional vector models, and the utterance as action from J.L. Austin to speech act theory. L.V. Shcherba’s idea of linguistic experiment is interpreted as an early programme of the empirical stage, and Russian and Uzbek material is proposed for further tests.
