Johannes Woschitz

PhD Linguistics & English Language

  • Linguistics and English Language
  • School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Contact details

Address

Street

Dugald Stewart Building

City
3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9AD

Research summary

Sociolinguistics, Metatheory, Philosophy of Science, Scientific Realism

Current research interests

I am currently involved in theoretical work related to the epistemic status of sociolinguistics. Metatheoretical accounts in sociolinguistics have been scarce, though there has been a recent shift towards tackling the philosophical assumptions of the discipline. My work aims at contributing to filling the explanatory gap why some sociolinguistic disciplines are able to add to social theory while others do not. I address this question by referring to principles of the philosophy of science, especially scientific realism, and compare how these principles coincide with linguistic variationism in the Labovian tradition and linguistic anthropology along with the emergent socio-semiotic theory as pushed forward by Silverstein, Gal and Jaffe.

Prof John Joseph

Dr Josef Fruehwald

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