On nonobjects of syntactic study

Sydney Lamb lamb at RICE.EDU
Thu Jul 12 16:06:54 UTC 2001


Dan - I have no quarrel with nuch of what you say in your
message of Wed, 11 Jul 2001,

> Good points. I will try to respond to them. My response in caps.

And I'll respond to a few of your caps responses in my
lower-case:

> THE IDEAL SPEAKER-HEARER IS AN ILLUSION TO BE SURE. AND BILL CROFT, IN HIS
> BOOK _EXPLAINING LANGUAGE CHANGE_ OFFERS AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR ABSTRACTIONS
> THE CONSTRAINT THAT OUR GENERALIZATIONS BE BASED ON THINGS WHICH ARE
> 'SPATIALLY-TEMPORALLY BOUNDED', WHICH I THINK IS A GREAT IDEA. ON THE OTHER
> HAND, I BELIEVE THAT MOST OF WHAT WE STUDY IS IDEALIZED AND ILLUSORY.
> ...

But we should try to get beyond the illusions and study reality.

> ...
> YES, WE CAN. BUT WE MAY STUDY THEM 'AS IF THEY WERE ISOLATED' KNOWING THAT
> WE ARE NOT AND KNOWING THAT TO BE A MAXIMALLY USEFUL STORY (IF THAT IS
> ...

I don't understand how it helps to study them as if they were
isolated.

> > > ...
> > linguistics while also being realistic. Instead of imagining an
> > 'ideal speaker-hearer' we can observe the Typical
> > speaker-hearer, a real object. Our concern should be with the
> > linguistic system(s) of such (a) person(s). Moreover, we know
> > ...
>
> I AGREE WITH ALL OF THIS, EXCEPT THAT THE TYPICAL SPEAKER-HEARER IS ALSO AN
> IDEALIZATION. THERE ARE ONLY SPEAKER-HEARERs - PLURAL - NOT SINGULAR. JUST

Evidently you misunderstand: What I am advocating as object of
study is NOT some abstract 'typical speaker-hearer' but one or
more actual speaker-hearers; hence, not an idealization.  On
thinking it over i see that it would have been better to
say 'representative speaker-hearer'. For example, what I called
my 'Northfork Mono Grammar' was actually -- and consciously and
intentionally -- a description of the system of one
representative speaker, my informant Lucy Kinsman. The title was
perhaps misleading, but less so if (as I surmised and hoped) whe
really was representative.

> AS *LANGUAGE* IS AN IDEALIZATION. LANGUAGES ARE TOO, BUT PERHAPS LESS SO.
> PERHAPS MORE USEFUL. ULTIMATELY PRAGMATISM LEADS, I BELIEVE, TO A RETURN TO
> DESCRIPTIVISM AND THEORIES/STORIES CONCERNED WITH PLURALITIES, PEOPLE, WIDER
> AND THICKER CONNECTIONS, WHERE DIFFERENCES AMONG LANGUAGES BECOME AGAIN AS
> IMPORTANT AS SIMILARITIES.

Yes, right on. Except that languages are also too much of an
idealization to be realisticalluy studied. The 'individual
language' is a very abstract concept, so much so that it
could be considered illusory. What is real, by contrast, is
people speaking. And each person's system differs from that of
every other person -- hence misunderstanding and imperfect
understanding, which we observe going on all the time --
probably even now.

So its not only differences among languages that are important,
but differences among the linguistic systems of people who are
(loosely) said to 'speak the same language'.

We have to give up the idea that linguists should be studying
languages, if we want to be realistic, for languages do not
exist. Instead, linguists should be studying people speaking and
comprehending, and figuring out what they can about the
neurocognitive systems of those people.

All the best,  - Syd

Sydney M. Lamb                  http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lamb/
Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences
Rice University, Houston, TX



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