History

[Daniel L. Everett]

Wally,

I do not think that we have come full circle. I think we have gone in a
straight line. Chomskian research has continued the Bloomfieldian practice
(in fact we can drop Bloomfieldian and just say scientific) of isolating
certain components of its empirical domain (language) for study, i.e.
grammar. All functionalists do this too - nobody studies everything or
ever plans to have a theory of everything. As Mark Durie points out, a
priori any field runs the risk of committing egregious errors by slicing
the pie the wrong way. The idea is that the robustness of the research
results has got to be the guiding light, as it were. Those of us who
divide the sentence from the discourse as a research strategy very often
do this awake and consciously, believing that we know why we are doing it,
and not simply because we are unaware of the history or alternative
possibilities.

The issue here is neither methodological nor historical, but ontological
and empirical. The *only* way to really evaluate alternative research
programs is in terms of the quality of their empirical production.
Arguments must revolve around the empirical, case-by-case.

That said, 'quality' is clearly subjective and at some point (which we are
a long ways from), it will be like trying to convince each other that blue
is prettier than red.

-- Dan

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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