Language as a Living Organism: A Corpus-based Study on Gramsci’s Linguistic Philosophy

Abstract

This paper explores the linguistic philosophical views of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci through corpus analysis. By collecting, organizing, and analyzing Gramsci’s collected works, this paper uncovers his core ideas and theoretical contributions in the field of linguistic philosophy. Section 1 introduces Gramsci’s language research, outlining Gramsci’s foray into language issues and the motivations driving his linguistic inquiries. Section 2 presents the research methods, with a particular elucidation on the Corpus. In section 3, through corpus analysis, key terms together with their grammatical and collocational structures are examined to uncover how his linguistic philosophical views are manifested and developed at both textual and contextual level. Furthermore, section 3 moves on to discuss Gramsci’s ideas on language, based on the statistics significance of the corpus. The paper concludes in section 4 by summarizing the implications and ramifications of the views developed in the previous sections as well as providing new perspectives and insights for a deeper understanding of Gramsci’s linguistic philosophical ideas.