Concerning WALS

[Wolfgang Schulze]

Dear Tom and others,
> (...) But I have to agree with Hanson (and, for that matter, Chomsky, 
> perish the thought...) that in science facts are never theory-neutral, 
> and that to propose to do a science of "pure facts", even as a 
> preliminary exercise to  subsequent theory-building, is the height of 
> self delusion.
Yes! It is good to see someone making this point! All the more, 
linguistic data are in fact /phenomena/ (in the Kantian sense) not 'true 
objects'. They take shape in terms of their (scientific) perception (> 
description, classification etc.). In fact, linguistics is by large a 
phenomenology (see http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/redling.pdf on 
more about this problem, if you want [alas, in German ]). This shouldn't 
prevent us from doing empirical work even in the sense of Martin's 
'comparative concepts', but just as Basic Linguistic Theory (BLT) à la 
Bob Dixon cannot be theory-neutral, 'comparative concepts'  cannot be 
either.... The main point is that we should always integrate (and 
pronounce!) our (scientific) perceptual background when giving a gestalt 
to linguistic phenomena....

Best wishes,
Wolfgang
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*Prof. Dr. Wolfgang 
Schulze                                                                   
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