27.3370, Disc: Re: Honeybone's critique of my book review

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3370. Tue Aug 23 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3370, Disc: Re: Honeybone's critique of my book review

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Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2016 16:02:41
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Re: Honeybone's critique of my book review

 
Read Review: http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-2947.html 
Read Discussion: http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-3338.html

In his discussion of my review of “Researching Northern English”, Patrick
Honeybone elevates some differences of academic opinion into an ad hominem
claim that I am too ignorant to have reviewed the book at all – my review
“does not meet academic standards”, according to Honeybone.

Let me focus on what seems to be Honeybone’s most serious objection.  The book
reviewed contained a chapter that is largely about people’s changing
perceptions of “Yorkshire English”, and I queried the value of this, pointing
out that “It is not as though ‘Yorkshire English’ were a linguistic reality”. 
According to Honeybone, “this is not for Sampson to say!”  It might not be for
me to say based on my individual knowledge alone, but my assertion explicitly
referred to analysis by Peter Trudgill, probably the best-known living English
dialectologist.  Trudgill distinguishes between “traditional” and “modern”
dialects, and (as I said in my review) according to him half of Yorkshire
falls into one top-level “traditional dialect” division of England and the
other half in the other division, while in terms of “modern dialects” most of
Yorkshire falls within a dialect area far too large to be identified with
Yorkshire in particular.  In other words, “Yorkshire English” is not a
linguistic reality.

Peter Trudgill is no more omniscient than anyone else, and it would be open to
Honeybone to object that Trudgill’s dialect analysis is mistaken, if he thinks
it is.  But Honeybone makes no attempt to do that.  Instead, he argues that
the chapter I was criticizing was an exercise in “perceptual dialectology”,
meaning the study of people’s opinions about dialects.  I do not doubt that
many laymen believe there is such a thing as “Yorkshire English”, because
county names are the only categories they have for classifying any regional
phenomena.  But linguistics is the scientific study of language, not of
people’s opinions about language.  Plenty of people believe that one
interesting aspect of the movements of the planets is the influence these have
on the characters and fates of individuals here on Earth, but I do not suppose
many professional astronomers would accept that the study of horoscopes is a
worthwhile branch of their discipline.  As I said in my review, “Perhaps it
might be seen as an exercise in sociology, though not, I should have thought,
very interesting sociology”.

In other cases Honeybone resorts to nit-picking in his attempt to portray me
as a hopeless ignoramus.  For instance, one contributor to the book reviewed,
discussing reduction of the definite article to a consonant alone, implies
that if this consonant is fricative it will be voiceless.  I am used to
hearing a voiced interdental fricative in this context, and asked “whether it
is ever voiceless”?  Honeybone quotes evidence that voiceless variants do
occur, though they are “not ... the most common”.  That answers my question,
without changing the fact that the passage I criticized was misleading.

I aimed to make my review both fair to “Researching Northern English” and
interesting to readers of the Linguist List, many of whom will know less about
the specifics of Northern English than I.  I believe I succeeded in those two
aims.



Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics
                     Sociolinguistics



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