[Lingtyp] A plea for productive & respectful rhetoric

Tue Apr 1 08:24:10 UTC 2025

Dear Patrick, dear all,

I agree that it is useful to question our activities, and that it must be done constructively.

One first question I'd have for you Patrick (and others as well): are your criticisms addressed to linguistics specifically, or would they also apply to other scientific disciplines? Social sciences and humanities? Hard sciences?

Cheers and thanks for the debate, Maïa

Maïa Ponsonnet

Chargée de Recherche HDR @ CNRS Dynamique Du Langage

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Adjunct @ University of Western Australia

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Co-rédactrice en chef du Journal de la Société des Océanistes

https://journals.openedition.org/jso/

Membre du Comité d'Ethique de la Recherche, Université de Lyon

<https://www.universite-lyon.fr/recherche/comite-d-ethique-de-la-recherche/comite-d-ethique-de-la-recherche-245561.kjsp>

https://tinyurl.com/cerunivdelyon

________________________________
De : Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> de la part de Patrik Austin via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Envoyé : mardi 1 avril 2025 09:51
À : lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Objet : Re: [Lingtyp] A plea for productive & respectful rhetoric

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
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