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Deconstructivism, postmodernism and their offspring: disorders of our time

  • John Edwards EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: December 8, 2022

Abstract

Our interest should always be aroused when scholars reject the testable approaches that have underwritten scientific development since the seventeenth century. Academic excursions in the arts and humanities need not adhere to scientific benchmarks, of course, and discussions relevant to science that are presented there need not always be subject to rigorous examination. When investigations move into social-science territory, however, more focused attention is called for. Since the scholars discussed in this paper clearly think of themselves as social scientists, it is quite legitimate to subject their investigations to scientific scrutiny and logical analysis. This article briefly describes contemporary investigations and research paradigms characterized by unnecessary neologisms, flatulent jargon, fuzzy thinking, and unconvincing arguments about the discovery of new territory in well-ploughed ground.

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Published Online: 2022-12-08
Published in Print: 2022-12-16

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Titelei
  2. Sociolinguistica: past, present and future
  3. Writing regime change: a research agenda
  4. Pasts, presents and futures: discourses of colonization and decolonization
  5. Metalinguistic activities as a focus of sociolinguistic research: Language Management Theory, its potential, and fields of application
  6. Deconstructivism, postmodernism and their offspring: disorders of our time
  7. Language biographies
  8. Progress in LPP: towards an assessment of challenges from critical perspectives
  9. Sociolinguistics in an increasingly technologized reality
  10. Language policy research directions embedded in the sociolinguistic enterprise
  11. Superdiversity and its explanatory limits
  12. Language and identity: past concerns, future directions
  13. Reconstructing multilingualism in the Habsburg state: lessons learnt and implications for historical sociolinguistics
  14. Language planning and language policies for sign languages: an emerging civil rights movement
  15. Rethinking some terminological and disciplinary boundaries in researching language maintenance and shift (in the context of migration and beyond)
  16. The macrosociolinguistics of language contact
  17. Beyond the binarism: locating past, present and future sociolinguistic research on ideologies of communication
  18. The pursuit of language standardization research as a mission for true sociolinguists
  19. Spatial representation and sociolinguistic synergies
  20. Reviews
  21. Josephson, Olle (2018): Språkpolitik [Language policy]. Stockholm: Morfem. 320 p.
  22. Chalier, Marc (2021): Les normes de prononciation du français : une étude perceptive panfrancophone (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 454). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. 544 p.
  23. Spolsky, Bernard (2021): Rethinking Language Policy. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 276 p.
  24. Borbély, Anna (ed. 2020): Nemzetiségi nyelvi tájkép Magyarországon (Linguistic Landscape of Nationalities in Hungary). Budapest: Nyelvtudományi Intézet, 262 p.
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