Philology. Linguistics. Slavic Studies [Филология. Лингвистика. Славистика]

In this invited lecture given at the Slavic department of St. Petersburg University 04.03.2023, I discuss the relation of Slavic studies to philology and linguistic research. Many research traditions that focus on specific characteristics of Slavic, Germanic, Romance languages, etc. favor interdisciplinary research and encourage the students to pursue both linguistic and philologically-informed research of the texts. There are no reasons to assume that interdisciplinary approaches or cross-cultural studies are worse or better than research limited by the reach of one scientific branch, e. g. chemistry or linguistics. However, there are research tasks that require a more rigid definition of linguistics as a science discipline focusing on specific features of its research object, i. e. natural language. The traditional philological attitude towards text and language is based on the assumption that linguistics is a proper part of a broader research complex called ‘philology’.  This idea does not correspond to current state of linguistic research any longer. I argue that modern linguistics is a natural science, while philology is an art science. At the same time, the state-of-the-art observation about the linguistic community is that it is divided into the philologically-informed linguistics typically concerned with text analysis and interpretation of literary documents and mainstream non-philological systemic linguistics. I also argue against the overuse of the semiotic approach. Semiotics posits itself as a general theory of sign systems, but language structure has some aspects that require non-semiotic models.  In the final part of my talk, I outline a general procedure of analyzing Old Russian texts without mixing up philological commentary and linguistic analysis.   

Comments.

1. Some illustrations concerning the interaction of philologiical and linguistic methods can be found in my paper Zimmerling 2022. See the 'related works' section.
2. The point that systemic linguistics should not deal with unique objects is defended in Zimmerling 2024. See the 'related works' section.