Interdisciplinarity in linguistic research

Interdisciplinarity is a fashionable notion. It is declared by many researchers though only a few actually practice it. This text was motivated by a question I was asked at one point, regarding the possibility of interdisciplinary research in historical linguistics, which has been my field of work for over twenty years. The said question made me ponder the understanding of interdisciplinarity, its possibilities and limitations, the positive and negatives effects that appear as a cause of a wide perspective on the object of research- in my case, language. The below text considers the etymology of the lexeme interdisciplinarity, which from a word formative point of view is a compound of Latin origins. Further I go on to discuss the notion of interdisciplinarity in linguistics. The analysis of linguistic texts, whose authors declare said approach, shows that it can be interpreted in various ways. On the one hand it is seen as complementing linguistic data with data from other branches of science, on the other hand as a way to draw methodological inspiration. The appearance of borderline linguistic sub-disciplines, such as psycholinguistics or socio-linguistics, points to yet another way of understanding interdisciplinarity. The last part of the paper is dedicated to presenting the advantages and disadvantages of applying interdisciplinarity to linguistics. Pointed out are the benefits (broadening the field of research, breaking the isolationism of linguistics) and the dangers (loss of focus on the object of research - the language, incompetent applications of scientific terminology) stemming from applying interdisciplinarity.