[Lingtyp] A plea for productive & respectful rhetoric

[Patrik Austin]

Yes, let us discuss it constructively. What is the problem in linguistics
that led to broken research, in your opinion?



Am 31/03/2025 00:07, schrieb Adam Singerman via Lingtyp:
> I am writing in response to Patrik Austin's message to LingTyp from
> Tuesday, March 25th, in which several different research traditions
> were disparaged using rhetoric that is at best simply not collegial
> and at worst counterproductive to our collective efforts as linguists.
> Patrik's message contained several comments which I think need to be
> called out, since if we allow this kind of rhetoric to take hold on
> LingTyp (or in our scholarly spaces in general) we will be unable to
> make progress towards our overall goal as linguists, which is to
> understand individual languages as well as capitalized Language in all
> its richness and complexity.
>
> I should say at the outset that I have been trained primarily in
> formal analysis & theory (generative syntax, generative phonology,
> Distributed Morphology) and while I agree with many of the goals of
> formal analysis & theory, I often find diachronic explanations for
> synchronic patterns to be more convincing and satisfying than
> formalist ones. (I enjoy teaching historical linguistics much more
> than I enjoy teaching syntactic analysis, for example.) So please do
> not think that I am writing this message because I am a practicioner
> of any particular formalist school of thought. On the contrary, I
> think that we ned to approach questions from different angles using
> the analytic tools provided by different schools of thought.
>
> Here are two comments from Patrik's message which bothered me:
> (1) "A summary shows that syntactic typology is BS, to put it politely"
> (2) "Figure 3... shows how not just syntactic typology but also
> Generative Grammar is BS, which everyone of course always knew"
>
> Both "syntactic typology" and "Generative Grammar" are *scientific
> research programs* in the sense of Lakatos. Hundreds if not thousands
> of linguists have made contributions to each of these research
> programs over the course of many, many decades, and some linguists
> have worked in both of these programs. In my experience the best
> linguists are ones who recognize that we will need formal AND
> functional explanations; it is an open question whether a given
> phenomenon is best explained formally or functionally, which is where
> a lot of the most interesting debate happens. Now, it is definitely
> the case that many individual *hypotheses* that have been formulated
> within the research program known as syntactic typology, just as it is
> surely the case that many individual *hypotheses* formulated within
> the research program of formal analysis/theory ("Generative Grammar")
> are false. This is how science progresses: hypotheses are formulated,
> are tested, and are falsified, and we discard the falsified ones. But
> to say that all of syntactic typology and all of Generative Grammar
> are BS is far too coarse and far too negative a judgment. Both of
> these research programs contain valuable insights, and to call them
> both bull**** is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
>
> Finally, I want to respond to the following comment:
> (3) "linguistics is a farce, a status game, a broken system, and
> people doing it are hostages to the system with little will of their
> own. It is a sad, pathetic world, and no one can fix it because all
> participants are economically and emotionally tied to it."
>
> Once we make this kind of assertion, which disparages not only the
> research being done but also the people who do the research, we leave
> the territory of collegial, civil scientific discourse and enter a
> world of ad hominem attacks.
>
> I do think it is fair for someone to say that, in their opinion, too
> many resources (jobs, grants, PhD scholarships, publications in top
> journals, etc) have been devoted to a particular school of linguistics
> over another, and that our entire field would do better if there were
> to be more balance between the subfields. (For example, I think that
> more departments in the US should have historical linguists on
> faculty, and I think that all graduate students being trained in
> synchronic phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, etc should have
> to take at least one semester of historical linguistics, too.) But to
> say that our entire field is "a farce, a status game, a broken system"
> ? and that all the researchers who work within this field are
> "hostages" who lack free will ? is not respectful or productive.
>
> Best,
> Adam
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp


>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20250401/eada098d/attachment.htm>