Columbia School of Linguistics - Orientations

Orientations

On the one hand, this methodology is more modest in its goals than most other schools. On the other hand, the results produced are more reliable, because they are based on objective data, rather than on mentalistic or philosophical entities. The assumption is that modest goals are more appropriate for a linguistic science still in its infancy, a science that hasn’t yet freed itself entirely from traditional philological parts of speech, self-standing sentence examples, and logico-philosophical entities such as subject and predicate. Conclusions about how the mind functions, based the structure of language, should wait until a new, more reliable linguistics emerges, as did astronomy from its origins in astrology.

A useful illustration of the differences between the Columbia School of Linguistics (CSL) and other linguistic approaches is the way each regards the field of mathematics. Rather than considering human language to be itself a kind of logic or mathematics, CSL uses mathematics as a tool to analyze and draw conclusions about languages. Instead of trying to produce rules to generate all possible “grammatical” sentences, CSL scholars count and compare numbers of occurrences of various phenomena and then apply statistical criteria to draw conclusions about the reasons for this usage. These conclusions, although not earth-shattering, are based on the CSL orientations of communication, physiology or psychology. CSL researchers typically search the gray areas for an explanation of why one form appears more often than another, and are not satisfied with a black-and-white mapping of the frontiers of grammaticality. Whereas most linguists talk of constraints and combinations of entities that are not permitted, CSL linguists discuss the choices that speakers of language have and how they make use of those choices.

CSL’s basic unit of language is the morpheme, the smallest meaningful unit of language. This is the linguistic sign, the unit shared by all other subdisciplines of semiotics. By taking the sign as the basic unit -- as opposed to the sentence -- CSL linguists can reasonably compare either spoken or sign language to all other forms of communication through signs, from ideograms to musical notation to bee dancing. It is not a goal of CSL to search for entities of human language that distinguish it from other forms of animal communication. As with all posited entities, CSL will accept them after they have been shown to have a function.