[Lingtyp] discovery procedures vs. diagnostics

Thu Dec 24 18:00:45 UTC 2020

Apologies for the error in the link to the last paper listed -- I've corrected it below, Bill C

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of William Croft <wcroft at unm.edu>
Sent: Thursday, December 24, 2020 10:04 AM
To: TALLMAN Adam <Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr>
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] discovery procedures vs. diagnostics

Adam's quotation from Seuren's review of Radical Construction Grammar prompts me to cite a passage of the book (pp 10-11) which Seuren ignored in his review:

"It has been suggested to me that the methodological question is of relatively

minor importance. In particular, reference is made to Chomsky's argument that it is unreasonable to ask linguistic theory for a discovery procedure for identifying the right grammar for a particular language (Chomsky 1957: 50–3). However, the problem which I am referring to is more basic than that. It is what Chomsky calls the condition of generality (ibid., 50), necessary for any adequate theory of grammar: ‘we must characterize the form of grammars in a general and explicit way so that we can actually propose grammars of this form for particular languages’ (ibid., 53–4). That is, for a particular language we can argue for and thus justify the analysis of that language's structures as an instance of the structures found in Universal Grammar.

It is the condition of generality that I believe current syntactic theories fail. That is, the methods that linguists use to argue for their syntactic theories carry hidden fallacies which are largely unremarked upon. When these fallacious assumptions are uncovered, their abandonment leads us to a very different approach to syntactic theory than that advocated by formalist theories and even the functionalist syntactic theories referred to above."

I've written about those hidden assumptions and fallacies in numerous places besides the book, particularly in the references cited below.

Happy Holidays,
Bill

Croft, William. 2009. “Methods for finding language universals in syntax.” Universals of language today, ed. Sergio Scalise, Elisabetta Magni and Antonietta Bisetto, 145-64. Berlin: Springer.

Croft, William. 2010. “Ten unwarranted assumptions in syntactic argumentation.” Language usage and language structure, ed. Kasper Bøye and Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen, 313-50. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Croft, William. “Word classes in Radical Construction Grammar.” The Oxford handbook of word classes, ed. Eva Van Lier. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Draft at:
http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/Papers/WordClassesRCG.pdf

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of TALLMAN Adam <Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr>
Sent: Thursday, December 24, 2020 3:50 AM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] discovery procedures vs. diagnostics

  [EXTERNAL]

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
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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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