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Language economy.

  • Authors: Rausell-Köster, Pau
  • (2002).
  • Publication types: Article
  • URL Publication: Language economy
  • Abstract:

    That economic science considers language as a subject of study requires at least a brief introduction. It has been customary for some years now for other social sciences, and even the most critical aspects of the economy itself, to accuse the imperialism of the economic paradigm. The economy, rejected, first as a mystical of the contemporary age with the Marxist dissolution, then discredited as a technocratic ointment with the difficulties of Keynesianism, and finally bored by the prosaic miseries of the market, sought new fields of cultivation. Econometrics, health and education economics, game theory, justice and crime economics, ecological economy, family economy, mathematical onanism, etc. are some of the forward leaks and some of the impasses where Smith's science ends in disbelief. Two hundred and fifty years have been enough to turn the economy, almost the youngest in the sciences, into a decadent old lady. It did not seem to have dared with the major words of Art, Aesthetics, Culture, Language..., but it has done so (e.g. Frey, 2000; Towse and Khakee, 1992; Mosseto, 1993; Trimarchi, 1993; Bretton, 1999). Perhaps, as economist David Levy says: "Linguistics may be the last of the social sciences to avoid the rational choice approach". However, he himself describes how Adam Smith, more than two centuries ago, interactions between language and economy: [Smith's] argument in Wealth of Nations is that trade and language are two aspects of the same process; humans trade because we have language, nonhumans do not trade because they do not.

  • Pp. 15

    HANDLE: 10550/76555