언어학과 인접과학

Abstract

Linguists have tended to be somewhat insistent on the need for autonomy, because they have felt that, in the past, the study of language was usually subservient to and distorted by the standards of other studies such as logic, philosophy and literary criticism. The principle of 'autonomy' as it has been applied in linguistics over the last fifty years, has led to a more general conception of the nature and function of language than was possible in the earlier periods of linguistic scholarship. (J. Lyons, 1970, New Horizons in Linguistics, England) Now that linguistics has become a mature academic discipline with its own methology there is no longer the same need to insist upon the principle of 'autonomy'. That linguisticsis now less insistent on the principle of autonomy is not the tendency that linguistics only has: it is part of a marked trend in such behavioural sciences as linguistics. The barriers between different disciplines are now rapidly weakening, and multidisciplinary approches to particular problems are increasingly being undertaken. As a direct result of this trend towards multidisciplinary synthesis there has been a growth of interest in the exploration of topics in the borderlands between the territories of the older disciplines.