Open seminar with professor Per Linell:"Developmental and dialogical perspectives on language"

Seminar open to the public

In the seminar I will argue that structuralism in linguistics has precluded the possibility of providing explanations for language and languaging. This is so because structuralists tend to start out from the fully developed system of (idealised) maximally competent language users. Instead, we need developmental or 'genetic' explanations pointing to how phenomena came about, usually through a series of successive changes. I might also exemplify pre-verbal development using a recording of a congenitally deafblind person in interaction with her carer.