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The Grammar of Social Science

Bromma, Sweden

Claude Lévi-Strauss hinted that society was like a language. Kenneth Pike’s distinction between emic and etic vernaculars probes the relation between the language in a society and the language of social science. Our thesis is that etic scholarly language that classifies social reality is synonymous with some deep linguistic structure (in Noam Chomsky’s sense) of everyday emic language, in some measure unconscious for the user, but discoverable by science. Adding insights of Charles Morris and Charles Stevenson, we maintain that language becomes differentiated into descriptive, evaluative and prescriptive usages, each of which contains executive and emotive components. Such a language can codify societal orders, represent riches, summarize knowledge, embody beauty, define sacredness and express virtues. It can be subject to the operations of the common language of sciences, i.e. logics, mathematics and statistics. It opens an easy door to social structuration and can rephrase dramas of human life.

Key Words: deep structures • linguistics • philosophical pragmatism • social reality • structuration

Acta Sociologica, Vol. 49, No. 3, 245-256 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0001699306067706


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