Why do we say linguistics is a science？（北外2011研)

Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language. It tries to answer the basic questions "What is language?" and "How does language work?" Linguistics studies not any particular language e. g. English Chinese Arabic and Latin but it studies languages in general. It is a scientific study because it is based on the systematic investigation of linguistic data conducted with reference to some general theory of language structure. In order to discover the nature and rules of the underlying language system what the linguist has to do first is to collect and observe language facts which arc found to display some similarities and generalizations are made about them; then he formulates some hypotheses about the language structure. But the hypotheses thus formed have to be checked repeatedly against the observed facts to fully prove their validity. In linguistics as in any other discipline data and theory stand in a dialectical complementation ; that is a theory without the support of data can hardly claim validity and data without being explained by some theory remain a muddled mass of things.
(此题考查语言学作为一门学科其科学性，为开放性试题，从其研究内容及方法角度作答即可。)