The Object Called “Language” and the Subject of Linguistics

Abstract

The trajectory of linguistics in the coming decades is likely to be shaped by how it formulates its object of study (whether as language or as some narrowly defined aspect of language) and by the corresponding breadth or narrowness with which it articulates its own epistemic project within the twenty-first-century-academy. This article discusses two epistemic projects that have shaped linguistics in the previous century, both of which survive in rather distinct institutional zones of the academy today. I diagnose some of the assumptions underlying the narrower conception of linguistics in the first of these traditions. I argue that the “linguistic turn” within the academy is, by contrast, oriented to the study of language more broadly understood. This creates difficulties for any narrowly conceived linguistics, difficulties which a broader vision of language as an object of study—and of any discipline that studies it—must strive to overcome.