Idiomological School as a New Linguistic Paradigm: From Local Description to Global Extrapolation

The idiomological school, as a scientific paradigm, establishes a range of methodological foundations that reflect its intellectual novelty, theoretical autonomy, and interdisciplinary potential. Its core postulate is the idea of idiomocentrism, according to which language is not seen as an abstract unity but as a multitude of concrete local linguistic systems, which are idioms, each possessing its own structure, cognitive and pragmatic specificity, and unique models of nomination, categorization, and communication. Within this paradigm, the subdialect is viewed as a full-fledged linguistic system with its own lexicon, grammar, syntax, discourse, pragmatics, and linguistic worldview, rather than as a variant of the standard language. Linguistic integrity and multi-level analysis serve as key research guidelines: the description encompasses phonetics, morphology, lexical semantics, syntax, pragmatics, cognition, and sociolinguistics. The basic unit of analysis is the idiomeme — a minimal linguistic unit representing the local features of a community’s speech. The principle of evidentiality implies reliance on corpus-based data, which are digital recordings, transcripts, cartographic materials, frequency tables, and morphographic models. The idiom is regarded as a component of a linguistic ecosystem formed within a specific historical, social, geographical, and ethnocultural context. Extrapolative potential is particularly important: analyzing a single linguistic system allows the formulation of general typological principles of language organization, including the functioning of grammatical structures, lexical derivation, pragmatic scenarios, and cognitive categorization. Idiomology as a field involves modeling the idiom at all language levels and exploring its semiotic, pragmatic, cognitive, ethnocultural, and folkloric conditioning. In this context, the following scholarly approaches emerge: idiomemology, pragmalinguistics of local communication, idiomocognitology, idiomoethnolinguistics, linguistic semiotics, and corpus idiomology. The school is focused on the development of digital corpora of subdialect speech that integrates text, audio, mapping, and commentary, thus ensuring a deep integration of empirical data with analytical methodology. Therefore, the idiomological school is not an isolated phenomenon but an open theoretical and methodological field, where the local serves as a basis for the universal, and language is seen as action, memory, identity, and a living cognitive-cultural process.