On categories, rules and interfaces in linguistics

Abstract

The question this paper tries to answer is: What does it mean for linguists to do linguistics? The first part of the paper examines categories used by linguists as belonging to languages, but also to linguistic theories. It appears that while some of these categories are understood more or less in the same way by all linguists, there is a wide variation in the ways others are conceived of. The second part of the paper shows that the same applies to the notion of linguistic rule, whose interpretation is far from uniform across theoretical models. The paper finally studies the interfaces which link together the various levels of languages, from phonology to semantics. Again, the interfaces, although recognized by all linguists, are treated along different lines.