“Antes que mentir exclusividad que no siento”. Saberes lingüísticos e instituciones reguladoras en Delfina Molina y Vedia

Abstract

This paper analyzes the activity of Delfina Molina y Vedia (1879-1961), an Argentine linguist who developed her work in the 1930s and 1940s. First, the most relevant aspects of her biography are reconstructed. Then, her actions are scrutinized in the field of language discussions and regulation: her early thoughts in Delfíneas (1933), the establishment of the Argentine Society of Linguistic Studies and the newsletter Por nuestro idioma (1935), and her main work: Cuestiones lingüísticas de América (1936). Molina y Vedia’s contributions from the margins of a scientific field taken at the time by the Institute of Philology are relevant in at least three senses: they advocate a novel stylistic perspective on language, they use task-specific argumentative strategies, and they lay bare the ideological devices underlying the knowledge upheld by the Spanish philologists who ran the Institute.