funknet principles

John Myhill john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL
Tue Feb 22 08:09:23 UTC 2000


Thank you, Jon. In fact, I noticed this change more than a few months ago.
I do not think that the purpose of funknet should be to establish a dialogue
with formalists; the functionalists who are interested in doing this are
doing it out of a hope of making them 'see the light' or 'bring them
around' (they do not, of course, say this in general postings, but they do
in private postings), to `convert' formalists, and aside from being boring,
I think this
is just plain a waste of time (see my repeated earlier challenges to
funknetters to identify people who have been `converted' either way, which
yielded a grand total of two people, (one in each direction), neither of
whom had been converted by exchanges on funknet).

I see the purpose of funknet as exchanging information and ideas related to
functional-typological linguistics. A crucial part of this is, to me, is
a responsible and respectful attitude towards linguistic data, particularly
from languages which not so many of us know (where the proliferation of
misinformation is more likely and dangerous). This level of responsibility
simply doesn't exist in discussions among formalists, where it is routine
for people to make unchallenged and absurd statements about languages they
know nothing about, referring to studies by people who either also don't
know these languages or were highly impressionable graduate students at the
time they did the study. Listening to discussions among formalists about data
from non-Indo-European languages is basically like reading accounts by explorers
in the Dark Ages who would report that country A is inhabited by dragons
while the population of country B is made up of giants; they might even
bring back someone
from these countries to confirm these stories. This is not to say that
there are not individual formal linguists who have a responsible attitude
towards data (there are), but that the general tone of such discussions is
essentially empirically
irresponsible.

I DON'T WANT THAT TO HAPPEN ON FUNKNET!!!!!!!!!! I WANT TO BE ABLE TO TRUST
THE DATA I SEE ON FUNKNET!!!!!!!!!!

The discussion on reflexives in subject position was great. It was initiated by
Nino, a native speaker of Georgian, and there were contributions by
Wolfgang on Udi, Balthasar on Nepali, Meryem on Turkish, and Mick and
Dianne on dialectal
English. For each of these contributions, I had the impression that I could
basically trust the data. Then came David Pesetsky's contribution, from the
empirical Dark Ages, referring to the type of fifthhand hearsay which is
acceptable in formal linguistics but not in functional linguistics (at
least not to me). I don't want this, and I think it should be stopped. This
is NOT a matter of 'ideological purity.' It's a matter of 'empirical
purity.' If formalists who are knowledgeable about and respectful of the
data they refer to (e.g. Dan Everett) want to participate in funknet,
great. But I DON'T want people on funknet referring to studies by, e.g. Ken
Safir (as David did) as a source of cross-linguistic data. I know about Ken
(we overlapped at Penn); I know his data can (and should) be thrown in the
garbage can before people waste even more of their time making up theories
based upon them. I don't know how many of the other several hundred people
on funknet realize this.

Because I believe that it is necessary to stop the proliferation of
misinformation, I told David he should investigate this himself before
referring to it, and if he insisted on doing proliferating misinformation
without checking it, he at least keep this information away from
functionalist discussions. I worded this seriously (rudely, some might say)
because I wanted to make it absolutely clear that empirical
irresponsibility isn't a casual matter. If insistence upon empirical
responsibility means David doesn't want to participate in funknet, if Talmy
is deprived of this forum for trying to convert David to functionalism,
well, that's a price I would be willing to pay.

John Myhill



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