Post-Relativism as a New Paradigm in Linguistics: A Bibliometric Review
The relevance of the study is determined by the emergence of post-relativism as a new scientific paradigm in modern linguistics. This approach, originating at the turn of the 21st century, offers a fundamentally different perspective on the relationship between language, thought and culture. As a response to the limitations of classical universalism and neo-relativism, post-relativism highlights the need for an integrated study of cognitive processes within an authentic socio-cultural context. That makes a comprehensive analysis of its current state and development prospects particularly pertinent.
The problem is that despite the growing number of theoretical and empirical studies devoted to the linguistic relativity principle, there is no substantiated understanding of postrelativism’s structure in terms of its constituent disciplines, its core and periphery, nor the correspondence between current research and the theoretical claims about its interdisciplinarity.
The aim of this paper is to verify the process of postrelativism’s formation as a scientific paradigm through bibliometric analysis. In accordance with the PRISMA protocol, a dataset of 1029 relevant publications from 1998 to 2024 were compiled based on the OpenAlex database. Data visualization and analysis, including co-citation analysis and keyword co-occurrence mapping (using concepts algorithmically generated by OpenAlex) to identify the conceptual structure of the field, were performed using VOSviewer software.
The study resulted in identifying the most productive authors (P. Athanasopoulos, P. Kay), influential journals (Frontiers in Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognition), and key research centers. Conceptual network analysis and mapping revealed that the core of the field consists of cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience, while linguistic typology, anthropology, and embodied cognition theory remain on the periphery. The interdisciplinary thesis is partially confirmed, as linguistic relativity is most prominently represented in this dataset in papers related to philosophy of language, psychology and computer science. A peak in the field activity was established (2016), followed by a decline, which is interpreted as a possible transformation of the research landscape requiring (considering the algorithmic nature of OpenAlex data) further qualitative analysis.
The analysis confirms the emergence of post-relativism, but points to the unevenness of its development, both in terms of interdisciplinarity and its alignment with the theoretical program. The obtained results not only describe the current state of the field but also clearly outline its promising directions, the exploration of which will contribute to the establishment of post-relativism as one of the leading research programs in modern linguistics.
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Glukhova, O. V. (2026). Post-Relativism as a New Paradigm in Linguistics: A Bibliometric Review, Research Result. Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 12 (1), 67–89.
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