Metalinguistic truisms and the emancipation of the language sciences

In his influential critiques of the theoretical foundations of the language sciences, Nigel Love claims that modern linguistics is based on “a cultural metafiction” and that it must “emancipate itself from what is no more than a profoundly important but nonetheless culturally parochial way of construing linguistic phenomena.” This paper reviews Love's account of the historical sources and modern consequences of this cultural metafiction and asks why it is so frustratingly difficult to emancipate the language sciences from the epistemological presuppositions of this ethnocentric metafiction. In addressing these questions, the paper explores the accountability of the expert metalinguistic discourse of the language sciences to the normative rhetoric of lay metalinguistic practices - or, in Wittgenstein's distinctive use of the term, to the 'grammar' of those practices.