ABSTRACT
One might argue that a major task would be for me to formulate a coherent alternative to a WLB linguistics. Unfortunately, this is hardly feasible within the bounds of this book, the primary aim of which has been to argue that there is indeed, in the first place, a WLB in most of the language sciences of past and present times. Yet, I hope that the ALTERNATIVES under the respective points of Chapter 5 can be taken as fragments of a realistic theory of language, with a special emphasis on spoken, interactional language. Towards the end of this chapter, I will also quite briefly summarise some aspects of a dialogical alternative. The main bulk of this chapter, however, will consist of a discussion of some attempts in the language sciences to theorise the relations between language ‘out there’ and the linguists’ own activities and models.
