What is this dispute anyway?

[Daniel L. Everett]

John,

You are quite right to be upset with linguists who want to wear the
'mantle of science' but do not have the same rigor in their research that
other scientists would expect. Many of us have probably been guilty of
this. And I think that you are right that Chomsky can be manipulative in
his use of words like 'interest' and that his writings are often
unquestioningly followed by many syntacticians to the detriment of the
field.

But discussions like those on this list can change minds. I have read more
functional linguistics as a result of being impressed with answers and
comments I have read on this list and I have felt the need to answer
functional counteranalyses in my own research because I have realized that
such analyses are indeed intuitively appealing and well thought out, so
that if a particular formal analysis I am proposing is going to be fully
convincing to me I must grapple with the functional issues. I spend some
time doing this at different places in my new book, _Why there are no
clitics_. I also have changed my attitudes positively towards a number of
researchers whose work I might have ignored in the past, because of the
reasonableness of their replies on this list.

Maybe I should have been able to figure out the reasonableness and
relevance of functionalist alternatives on my own, without this list, but
this list has helped quite a bit. There are still a number of theoretical
positions that I hold even more strongly as a result of reading this list
(because I am more convinced than ever that the alternatives proposed are
weak), but that too has been worthwhile. Lists like this provide a forum
for discussing our basic assumptions in ways that refereed publications do
not, for good reasons. So don't get too upset with us for discussing these
issues of 'ideology' instead of empirical work. It can be beneficial.

-- DLE

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Dan Everett
Department of Linguistics
University of Pittsburgh
2816 CL
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Phone: 412-624-8101; Fax: 412-624-6130
http://www.linguistics.pitt.edu/~dever