post from Dianne Patterson, U.Arizona

[alex gross]

Thanks to Richard Hudson and Aya Katz for your thoughts!

> I just think it would be extraordinary if his [Chomsky's] work had been 
> ALL wrong.

Oddly enough, I have no problem at all with this notion.  Would it really be 
helpful if his work turned out to be only 90% or 95% wrong? If you have not 
already seen it, you just might want to take a look at "44 Reasons Why the 
Chomskyans Are Mistaken" by myself and Sergio Navega.  It comes in both a 
longish, full-text format and a small-chunk, easy-reading hypertext version, 
they're down at the bottom of the Linguistics menu at:

http://language.home.sprynet.com/lingdex.htm

> But maybe the question to ask isn't how good other disciplines think 
> linguistics is, but whether anyone else is doing 'our job' better than us.

To this question, I would juxtapose Aya Katz' point:

>  While many of our colleagues who are established in the academic world do 
> good and useful work of an applied nature, many more are in exile from the 
> field, because their contributions were not accepted.

How could anyone else be doing your job better, when you have not even 
allowed them to begin trying to do so?  When for at least three decades the 
whole field was steeped with so high a level of monomania and triumphalism 
that perhaps even its chief exponent might have noted with a certain sense 
of irony a similarity to Stalinism? When you have heaped so much ridicule on 
opposing theories that even more recent & relatively moderate observers like 
Pinker & Deutscher have also found it necessary to devalue the Whorf-Sapir 
approach?

Precisely why have culture and local beliefs no place in the formation and 
hence also the analysis of language?  I challenge any of you to answer this 
question without falling back into generative dogma and generative jargon.

Also, why was it de rigueur over several decades for mainstreamers to 
pillory Whorf for his claim that the Inuit have a number of words for 
"snow," yet it suddenly became okay and primely Chomskyan for Searchinger in 
his film "The Human Language" to show that Arabic can have many words for 
"camel," replete with scenes of numerous snorting camels?  I would love to 
hear a non-terminological, non-obfuscative answer to this question.

All the best to everyone!

alex





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "A. Katz" <amnfn at well.com>
To: "Richard Hudson" <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
Cc: <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
Sent: Saturday, October 23, 2010 8:34 AM
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] post from Dianne Patterson, U.Arizona


> If the rest of the world wants to know about relative clauses or verb 
> paradigms, they consult a grammarian, hopefully one fluent in the language 
> in question.
>
> While many of our colleagues who are established in the academic world do 
> good and useful work of an applied nature, many more are in exile from the 
> field, because their contributions were not accepted.
>
> Philologists and grammarians are the ones whose work had the biggest
> impact on the field in the past. We claim them as our intellectual 
> ancestors, but they did not call themselves linguists.
>
> There is a real problem in this field, and rather than simply congratulate 
> ourselves on how great the past fifty years have been, we should ask 
> ourselves if any of us have contributed anything with as much lasting 
> value as Grimm's Law.
>
> Best,
>
>    --Aya
>
>
> On Sat, 23 Oct 2010, Richard Hudson wrote:
>
>> Dear Fritz and everyone else,
>>
>> All this is rather negative and depressing for linguists, isn't it? Which 
>> is a shame, because we've actually come a long way in the last 50 years, 
>> partly thanks to Chomsky's insights. (OK, you can all throw your bricks 
>> at me if you want, but I'm not a Chomskyan; I just think it would be 
>> extraordinary if his work had been ALL wrong.) But maybe the question to 
>> ask isn't how good other disciplines think linguistics is, but whether 
>> anyone else is doing 'our job' better than us. Maybe our job is a 
>> particularly hard one? And maybe the extreme divisions we find in 
>> linguistics make it hard for outsiders to define a helpful concept 
>> 'linguist' on which they can pass judgements? E.g. we have plenty of 
>> colleagues who do corpus linguistics, text-based sociolinguistics or 
>> field linguistics, with a great deal of hard data and quantitative 
>> analysis, but psychologists and neuroscientists probably don't know about 
>> them.
>>
>> If the rest of the world wants to know about verb paradigms and relative 
>> clauses, they need a linguist. (Non-linguists sometimes think they can do 
>> better, but the examples that I've seen don't convince me.) The rest of 
>> the world may get frustrated by our attempts to analyse such things, and 
>> may wonder why we're taking such a long time to reach agreement; but 
>> we've been at it for (probably) four thousand years, and we really are 
>> trying hard. Maybe all that work has actually given us a depth of insight 
>> into our subject matter that younger disciplines haven't yet achieved? 
>> And none of them, incidentally, has to cope with 7,000 completely 
>> different complex systems, all of which somehow have to be reconciled 
>> with theories developed more or less independently in a bunch of 
>> neighbouring disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience.
>>
>> I still think that linguistics is a fantastic area to work in, and I love 
>> it. I know its weaknesses as well as anyone does, but it has enormous 
>> strengths as well.
>>
>> Best wishes, Dick
>>
>>
>> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
>>
>> On 22/10/2010 22:33, Tom Givon wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Dianne Patterson has asked me to post this for her:
>>>
>>> ====================
>>>
>>>
>>> Dear All,
>>> I'm afraid I can't quote anything of interest in the literature, but I 
>>> second Tom Givon's private experiences.  I have a BA in Philosophy, a 
>>> Masters in Linguistics, and a PhD in Psychology.
>>> I've worked on language acquisition, animal-language issues, done 
>>> fieldwork in a remote region of Mexico, and spent the last 10 years 
>>> doing neuroimaging work.
>>>
>>> I have found that academics in Psychology, Speech Sciences, Biology and 
>>> Anthropology think many linguists associated with the old School 
>>> Chomskian perspectives are out of touch with real data and out of touch 
>>> with how research is conducted.
>>>
>>> This cultural divide is too bad, since I honestly believe linguists 
>>> might be able to contribute to these fields if they were a little more 
>>> willing to appreciate the perspectives, methods and hard work of people 
>>> in these fields.  Instead, linguists often leave behind them a trail of 
>>> offended scientists by making a variety of poor choices in their 
>>> approach:
>>>
>>> -Asserting time and again the sort of quasi-religious dogma that humans 
>>> are "qualitatively different" than other creatures (this is NOT a 
>>> scientific hypothesis, it is not clear what it means, nor is it obvious)
>>>
>>> -Assuming that only linguists have any insights into language...and 
>>> never bothering to learn what other disciplines might have to offer 
>>> (e.g., well vetted tests in Speech Sciences).
>>>
>>> -Suggesting time and again that real data from real people is of no 
>>> interest.
>>> And, if linguists are interested in data:
>>>
>>> -Assuming researchers who have worked long and hard and at great expense 
>>> to acquire data should just turn it over to the linguist who has 
>>> contributed nothing and/or offers VERY little (asking for a free ride is 
>>> not a good way to ingratiate yourself)
>>>
>>> -Thinking of language disordered populations as resources to confirm 
>>> Chomsky's latests theories with (sorry, these are real people, not lab 
>>> rats. If you aren't interested in helping, then rethink your goals.)
>>> I hope that training in linguistics and the attitudes that go with that 
>>> training can change, because otherwise other academics will just avoid 
>>> linguists, and that's too bad, because linguists have some unique 
>>> problem solving skills...and I the "True Believer" linguists give the 
>>> more reasonable linguists a bad reputation.
>>>
>>> -Dianne
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>