[Lingtyp] discovery procedures vs. diagnostics

[TALLMAN Adam]

Oh there was one more source I meant to attach by Seuren, in his review of Croft's 'Radical Construction Grammar'. It is really the only source that directly brings up the relationship (that I know of it), but its very succint (and silly).

"Croft then proceeds to show (pp. 29–47) that, on this premiss, distributionalanalysis leads to a quandary caused by the fact that no two elements have exactly the same distribution under any system of categorization in anylanguage, which makes it hard to establish syntactic categories. Moreover,once categories have been established for one language, as a result of‘methodological opportunism’, a further appeal must be made to this ‘opportunism’ to establish cross-linguistic categories, such as those of noun,adjective, adverb, or subject, direct object, etc., which all have non-identicaldistributions in different languages. Therefore, established linguistic methodology is at fault and RCG will put things right.

The first thing a professional linguist will say, at this point, is that thisquandary has been well-known since at least the 1950s. It was precisely thereason why the inductive method of distributional analysis meant to yield so-called DISCOVERY PROCEDURESwas abandoned as a method for discoveringcorrect linguistic analyses and replaced with the deductive method of theformation and testing of descriptive hypotheses. That is, one just positscategories for each specific language and assigns them certain structuraland/or semantic properties, and one then sees to what extent the machinery(or module) that is based on them yields the right results, according to an agreed set of eliminative adequacy criteria."

Any other sources that try to draw out the relationship would be appreciated (even if they are not particularly informative or accurate, like the one above).

best,

Adam



Adam James Ross Tallman (PhD, UT Austin)
ELDP-SOAS -- Postdoctorant
CNRS -- Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596)
Bureau 207, 14 av. Berthelot, Lyon (07)
Numero celular en bolivia: +59163116867
________________________________
De : Lingtyp [lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] de la part de TALLMAN Adam [Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr]
Envoyé : jeudi 24 décembre 2020 11:20
À : lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Objet : [Lingtyp] discovery procedures vs. diagnostics

Hello all,

I wonder if anyone has read any sources that explicitly discuss the difference or relation between (in theory and/or in practice) between 'diagnostics', which are used to link up theoretical models with new data, and 'discovery procedures', which are disparaged, but seem to be, in some ways, ancestors of the former notion.

Attached are some relevant citations if you've never heard of the notion 'discovery procedure'.

best & happy holidays,

Adam





Adam James Ross Tallman (PhD, UT Austin)
ELDP-SOAS -- Postdoctorant
CNRS -- Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596)
Bureau 207, 14 av. Berthelot, Lyon (07)
Numero celular en bolivia: +59163116867
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