[Lingtyp] odd clitic behaviours >> teaching terms and concepts in pedagogy

[Hartmut Haberland]

As to in between cases, I always tried to tell my students that the important thing was to understand why they are in between cases, not to resolve them.
Hartmut

Den 21. feb. 2022 kl. 13.20 skrev Greville Corbett <g.corbett at surrey.ac.uk>:

 Many thanks, Eltan, for this interesting turn.

A sobering question is “In ten years time, how many people in this linguistics class are going to care about the definition of phoneme, clitic or right node raising?" If the proportion is small, then a linguistics class can be invaluable in getting over messages which will matter in ten years time, such as:

  *   beware of arguments from authority
  *   respect the data
  *   don’t guess when you can measure
  *   beyond what we think we know there’s a seething mass of uncertainly and ignorance out there
  *   when we hit the ‘in-between’ cases, we don’t throw our toys out of the pram, but we try to understand the apparently clear cases better
  *   “...  the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.” (Peter Medawar: Advice to a Young Scientist 1979 p. 39)

Very best, Grev
On 20 Feb 2022, at 11:45, Eitan Grossman <eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il<mailto:eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il>> wrote:

Hi all,

I want to connect to the tangential issue that Martin and Peter raised about textbooks. I'm glad to see some discussion here of pedagogy, which concerns a lot of us in our everyday lives.

In my experience, teaching terms and concepts in linguistics tends to take one of two forms: (i) either choose a simple definition and hope or plan to complicate it for students down the line, perhaps mentioning that things are more complicated, or (ii) presenting a variety of definitions from the outset, showing the messiness of the field. This is not new, of course - there is a very old poem composed in Middle English about the multiple definitions of the phoneme from the 1935 2nd International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, see below for the poem.*

Again, in my experience, both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. Students often feel more secure in their learning when presented with something clear that they know how to apply. On the other hand, under this approach, it is not certain that students will ever be presented with the terminological and conceptual messiness that actually characterizes linguistics, at least not until an advanced degree, and this seems to me to be a lost opportunity for intellectual exploration. In general, I think we tend to follow our habits and temperaments and perhaps to replicate (or revolt against) what our various teachers did.

In either case, it seems important to be clear to ourselves about what practice we are following, and to communicate to students that this is a conscious choice, and recognizing that whatever choice we make, it is an imperfect one (not unlike life itself).

I realize that this is a tangential issue, unrelated to clitics per se, so if it is something people want to discuss on another thread (or not), that might be better.

Eitan

*From a letter from Jakobson to Trubetzkoy: “After the farewell banquet, all kinds of diversions were organized; that is, some members of the congress made jocular speeches, sang songs, and the like. Every time the word phoneme turned up, it aroused an outburst of universal laughter. Horn composed a poem in Middle English on the themes of the congress. It ended in the following couplet:

wat is phonemes, wat is sunds?

twelf men haf twelf difinitiuns.





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