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- Title
On the characteristic features of linguistic discovery.
- Authors
Pericliev, Vladimir
- Abstract
This paper tries to isolate the characteristic features of linguistic discovery, or what distinguishes truly creative linguistic work from that of a journeyman. To this end, four famous discoveries from the history of linguistics are briefly inspected: Saussure's discovery of the concept of "linguistic system", Verner's law, the discovery of the Indo-European language family commonly attributed to Sir William Jones, and the idea of implicational universals attributed to Greenberg. It is found that, apart from the self-evident requirement of truthfulness, these findings additionally also possess the features novelty, unexpectedness and importance. These features are logically independent from one another and all need to be present in a finding to properly call it discovery. It is also noted that the feature of novelty is distinct from scientific priority and this problem is briefly discussed in the cases of the discovery of Indo-European and implicational universals.
- Subjects
HISTORY of linguistics; GERMANIC phonology; JOURNEY workers; TRUTHFULNESS &; falsehood; JONES, William, Sir, 1746-1794
- Publication
Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 2019, Vol 29, Issue 1, p173
- ISSN
0939-2815
- Publication type
Article