Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

SLE 2006 in Bremen - welcome!
On behalf of the organising team, I welcome all participants of the 39 th Annual Meeting of the
Societas Linguistica Europaea in Bremen. The Institut für Allgemeine und Angewandte
Sprachwissenschaft (IAAS) [= Institute for General and Applied Linguistics] and the
Studiengang Linguistik feel honoured by the fact that this year’s meeting has been allotted to
our department. Moreover, we also hope that the interest the international linguistic circles
take in this event in Bremen will help our institute to overcome the politico-economic turmoil
which has put the survival of linguistics in Bremen at stake. However, the present state of the
humanities not only in Bremen or in Germany, but in general requires that we make the
general public understand that what we are doing professionally is important and not a
negligible hobby-horse. The general topic of the meeting is “Relativism and Universalism in
Linguistics”. This dichotomy of science-philosophical viewpoints is something that will also
appeal to the interested laymen and thus, may attract people from outside academia to attend.
In this way, the public awareness of the importance of linguistic research can be strengthened.
We hope to achieve a similar effect by large-scale media coverage for our meeting.
With a view to setting the scene, I take the liberty to repeat what I have said in the conference
description published on the internet: Throughout the history of linguistics, two opposing
views on linguistic facts have been competing with each other. Simplifying, a crude version
of relativism takes the structural diversity of human languages to be evidence of the
differential determination of language structures by non-linguistic factors (most prominently,
culture-dependent world-views, etc.). An equally crude universalism, on the other hand,
denounces the very same facts as secondary and thus largely unimportant phenomena behind
which the “real” language is hidden. This supposed real language, then, is organised in such a
way that it obeys universally valid rules (which may be innate).
The program of SLE 2006 comprises six plenary lectures which are devoted to the problem of
Relativism vs. Universalism. Furthermore, the largest section of our conference, section B
(with 16 talks), shares its title with the general one of the meeting. In addition, several of the
workshops focus on aspects of Relativism and/or Universalism within a special branch of
linguistics. Of course, many of the talks which are on the program of other sections and
workshops also touch upon the major topic of SLE 2006. Thus, we expect that the 39 th Annual
Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea will give a new impetus to the above debate.
Thomas Stolz
(Local organiser)