ABSTRACT
Philosophy is important for linguists because once one has made certain philosophical assumptions, a number of conclusions naturally follow. Philosophy has a lot to do with linguistics; there is a subdiscipline called the philosophy of language, which may be considered an interdisciplinary enterprise. Linguists, like other academics, differ in their attitude to essentialism. Essentialism seems to be an unrewarding approach to language; there still remain many essentialists and semiessentialists in the linguistic community. Wardhaugh rightly pointed out: Linguists have found such concepts as sound, syllable, ward, and sentence equally difficult to define. In one sense, linguistics is all about trying to provide adequate definitions for words such as sound, syllable, word, and sentence. Although labels such as sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics may sometimes be helpful in assigning a study to a tradition within linguistics or in assigning a researcher to an organizational unit such as a university's department, nonessentialists do not ordinarily argue about discipline boundaries.
