About HSL

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Language is a chimera.  Like the mythological beast, it is cobbled together out of various mismatched parts, in this case, ancient abstractions of words, grammar, and semantics.  Language does not exist in the physical domain and thus cannot be an object of inquiry in science.  A scientific linguistics, if there is to be one, must turn away from the ancient tradition of language and instead directly study the reality of people communicating.  It must learn to couch its theories not in terms of philosophical ideals like the supposedly flawless competence of an idealized native speaker-listener (from an assumed Universal Grammar) or non-existent perfectly homogeneous speech communities.  It must instead study physical realities accessible to observation and testing in the real world.  Hard Science Linguistics (a.k.a., Human Linguistics) is an attempt to establish a truly scientific program for linguistics.

Call for Papers -- What is Language and Why Should We Explore It? -- Dmitri Bogushevich, Editor, Minsk State Linguistic University -- click here for details

If we want to understand why there are so many "Schools of Thought" in linguistics, each insisting we accept its set of assumptions, why opinions about basic matters have in a short time often swung one way and then the opposite way, why the ground upon which linguistics stands seems to shift like sand, we should consider the following, from Yngve (1998):

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Let us start with the illusion of language. The old foundations follow the tradition in assuming that utterances, words, sentences, and languages somehow exist in spite of the fact that at least since Saussure they have been recognized as illusory.  Since the assumption of the reality of language and the objects of language is false, linguistics built on the old foundations leads us into the defense of error.  It leads to the proliferation of additional false assumptions, as an examination of mainstream theory and other grammatical or semiotic theories will reveal.

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The new foundations, however, recognize up front that language and the objects of language are illusory; that the relevant existing reality consists, instead, of the people who speak and understand, the sound waves of speech and other forms of communicative energy flow, and the real-world surroundings that often affect communicative behavior. A linguistics built on the new foundations needs no additional assumptions beyond the minimum standard assumptions underlying all science: that there is a real world out there, that it is coherent so we can find out something about it, that we can reason from true premises to true conclusions, and that from observed effects we can infer real-world causes.

Yngve, Victor H.  (1998).  Two foundations of linguistics briefly compared.  LACUS Forum 24.  Click here for the whole article.

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This page is maintained by Douglas W. Coleman <Douglas.Coleman@utoledo.edu>.  Please report errors and faulty links.