Proposta de investigação

"August Schleicher, the First Controversialist in Linguistics"

- Schleicher intended to promote a naturalistic turn in the study of language:

- Naturalistic in Schleicher context meant empirical and historical;

- He polemicized against the classical philological approach to the study of language that had been developing in indo-European linguistics since at least the ideas of Schlegel:
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- Then Schleicher adopted from his friend Ernest Haeckel the Darwinian perspective on evolution, proposing that language was the natural object that could satisfy the so called ‘missing link’;

- Schleicher developed the branching method, the tree diagramming method to represent the genetic relationship among languages;

- In a sense it was Schleicher who originated the biological approach to the study of language;

Some questions:

How e why does a controversialist attitude emerges in a scientific discipline at the same time defining it and making it a science?
            -Maybe some answers will be find starting from the transformations occurred to the argumentative forms at the end of the 19th century (see Plantin);
         - This same fact is directly related to the opposition linguistics and philology;

Some ideas:
A controversialist is not a natural born kind, it is allowed by its context.