El problema de la explicación en la lingüística

Abstract

The problem of explanation has been, during a good part of this century, either the Achilles' heel (and therefore of fundamental concern) ar the bugbear (and so nothing to worry about) of linguistics, as of the social sciences in general. In this paper we review the predominant paradigms of scientific explanation and then, in the light of these and with the object of illustrating the problem, we examine critically the explanations postulated by the three major schools of linguistics for the phenomenon known as "linguistic change"; the fact that languages change has merited the attention of linguistics since its inception. We propose that, although the "explanations" put forth thus far for this phenomenon have not been able to meet the requirements of the canonical models of explanation, these latter, or similar variants, should continue to serve as a touchstone if we intend linguistics to live up to its selfimposed definition as "the scientific study of language".