Re-reading Franz Boas: Intertextuality, discontinuities, and strategies in the history of modern linguistics.

摘要

In light of recent theoretical developments in the philosophy of history, linguistics, critical semiotics, literary theory, and philosophical hermeneutics, this dissertation reflects on the epistemology and tacit assumptions about interpretation, representation, texts, contexts, and communication underlying the work of positivist and pluralist historiographers of linguistics. The dissertation articulates a pluralist historiography in terms of intertextuality and historical and textual discontinuity through a re-reading of Franz Boas' linguistic texts.;This reading of Boas' linguistic discourse focuses on the intertextual levels of citationality and the already read, thus foregrounding the scientific discourses intersecting in Boas' texts and the discontinuities existing between Boas' texts and other texts. The strategic shifts and contradictions in Boas' thinking responsible for the tension underlying his texts are highlighted. The Boasian link between European linguistics and American structuralism is clarified in terms of Boas' establishment and participation in transatlantic and American scientific networks and the intertextual relations of his texts.;Boas' texts on phonetics are characterized by the presence of the concepts of compositional sounds, apperception, and differential thresholds. For Boas, grammatical categories reflected the inner form of a language and determined the worldview of its speakers. Boas' study of these categories provided a window to the abstractive faculty and associative processes of the human mind and indicated to him the existence of universal functional relations in language. Boas attempted to establish a typology of inner forms of Native American languages and rejected one-sided genetic classifications. He considered both language mixture and independent development as alternative explanations for the occurrence of the same linguistic features in different languages.