With this distinction in mind, I would certainly call Linguistics far more of a science than an art. Without stretching definitions too far, one might refer to a specific utterance (e.g. a speech) {or even an entire language} as artistic - but the goal of Linguistics is to extract rules, structures, relationships, etc.
(Does that make a generativist an artist? Not really - creating language structures from rigid rules fails the psychological response test.)
Bruce Anderson Glendon College / York University
________________________________ From: Yuri Tambovtsev <yutamb at mail.ru> To: corpora at uib.no Sent: Tue, March 23, 2010 4:02:01 AM Subject: [Corpora-List] Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS?
Dear Corpora colleagues, Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS? I think the discussion about linguistics using either the scientific or artistic methods, is quite interesting. Really, is it ARTS (the Humanities) or Science. If we divide this man activity into Sciences and Arts, then linguistics for the exception of phonetics is Arts. Can linguistics reconstruct some parent language? We know that all the Romance languages have the parent language, i.e. Latin. But can linguists reconstruct Latin on the basis of Italian, Spanish, French and other Romance languages? The answer is NO. If linguistics had been SCience, then it would have been possible. But it is ARTS, thus it is impossible. Or am I mistaken? Looking forward to hearing from you either directly yutamb at mail.ru or via the net. Be well, Yuri Tambovtsev -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2680 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://www.uib.no/mailman/public/corpora/attachments/20100323/d5a8cf8e/attachment.txt>