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

Mon Feb 21 13:58:17 UTC 2022

I fully agree with Grev and Arnold that young scholars should be taught 
to be skeptical of earlier claims and proposals – especially in recent 
years, there's a widespread tendency in the society to demand that we 
should "believe the science", rather than to be critical of what the 
authorities tell us. So we cannot sufficiently stress Robert K. Merton's 
point that "science is organized skepticism". Yes, there is a lot more 
uncertainty out there than we tend to suspect!

And yes, when we can measure, we shouldn't guess, and for this, we need 
precise units of measurement, i.e. clearly defined concepts for 
comparison (I wrote about "measurement uniformity" here: 
https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2305). There is no room for "in-between 
cases" when it comes to measurement – if necessary, our tools for 
measurement must be made more precise.

The risk that I was talking about earlier 
(http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/2021-December/009355.html) 
was that we might mistake our traditional terms (such as "clitic") for 
something that really exists (though we haven't quite understood it 
yet), and to treat cases that we are unsure about as something that "is 
not a clear case". After all, why are we sure about "clear cases of 
clitics" in the first place?

The skeptical imperative goes all the way down, I would say. The most 
radical approach would be to start from scratch and avoid all 
traditional terms (because they are often associated with nonskeptical 
attitudes), but more moderately, I suggest that we provide precise 
definitions in our textbooks.

Let's take another example, the term "lexeme". In my 2002 textbook 
("Understanding morphology", p. 271, https://zenodo.org/record/1236482), 
I defined it as "the set of all word-forms that are so closely related 
that they are a single entry in a dictionary", but this definition makes 
reference to a practical mode of description (dictionary vs. grammar 
book) and is thus inadequate as a theoretical concept. So here's a new 
proposal:

A lexeme is the set of forms that minimally contain the same 
lexeme-stem, or one of its suppletive counterparts, and that may only 
contain inflectional affixes in addition.

This definition is based on the term "lexeme-stem", for which I propose 
the following definition:

A lexeme-stem is a form containing at least one root that can combine 
with inflectional affixes but does not contain any.

These definitions are relatively simple and seem to conform largely to 
our definitions, but they are meant purely as "units of measurement" – 
they do not rely on the contentious (and improbable) claim that 
"lexicon" and "grammar" are distinct cognitive modules.

Best,
Martin

Am 21.02.22 um 13:30 schrieb 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> 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 wordphonemeturned 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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-- 
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
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