[Lingtyp] Typology: another broken system

Wed Mar 26 10:13:10 UTC 2025

Patrik, could you share the references to your articles with us? Hartmut

Den 26. mar. 2025 kl. 10.29 skrev Patrik Austin via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>:

I hope I did not overestimate typologists' communication skills. Let us expand it a little since everyone should have a good understanding of the basics of syntax. Please do comment.
As for the public reply, though, the following groups of experts are cordially invited: (1) the editorial board of the Linguistic Typology journal, including Prof Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm. (2) The WALS team, including Profs Matthew Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. Now, this is certainly not a matter of waiting for a coherent reply for just a month as the people mentioned above might be able to corroborate. Either way, it is coming out to the public, so if you have any words for this, choose them carefully.
As for a general discussion on this list, everyone, please join in. For an ice-breaker, there was an answer in the FB typology list to my request for comments from the top of the hierarchy or anyone:
”I<https://www.facebook.com/groups/168693006493630/user/526364535/?__cft__%5b0%5d=AZWAJbUoqoXrAxe1NhFs-HaFZE7JaZoTCmANhmDFyyT15aNEo8Nu_vVAs4uYJVcczlaxWwkj_EtKRjLXkfClO6IULJErq-ZzcJc958t4drMil_LCLTVIKOs8Ft-mYUUzGTOUR0HPecYK7Ene1RDYc6H7&__tn__=R%5d-R> sure hope you don’t mean Bickerton, Jakobson, Greenberg or Firbas… For one, you keep referring to mainstream syntactic typology without defining it. I can guess what you mean by it, but a) I shouldn’t have to and b) chances are, there is no such thing. Secondly, I am not even sure what the article tries to do. You misrepresent Dryer, mix up several different and incompatible types of word-order typologies (Hungarian in section 2, reference to transformations in 3.1), appeal to “logic” (“From a purely logical point…”), misrepresent the history of FSP (though points for including a reference to Weil) and misuse the words “prediction” and “algorithm”, talk about some thing called “classical grammar”… In short, that paper is a mess. And your basic issue now is that the “big guys” have failed to acknowledge your work. Do I have that right?”
Would this help Lingtyp subscribers to start a discussion addressing issues from the thread starter?
Thanks,
Patrik

Den tirs. 25. mar. 2025 kl. 14.46 skrev Neil Myler <myler at bu.edu<mailto:myler at bu.edu>>:
Your article's been out for a month, mate, and (at least where I am) it's the middle of the teaching term.  Cut us some slack.
It does look interesting, though.  I promise I'll take a look soon.
Neil

On Tue, Mar 25, 2025 at 9:27 AM Patrik Austin via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I hope you are doing well today. I recently published another article on syntactic universals, and as before, no reply. Let us look at the contents of this paper and the related issues.
1. Introduction and 2. Universals, the data, and the problem. This article is about dominance in the transitive clause relating to Greenberg’s universal #1, etc. When syntactic typologists write about it, it is possibly the most important unsolved issue in linguistics. However, when these scholars read my article, it suddenly becomes unclear whether it is an interesting topic in the first place. That being said, we tend to hear next that there is ”no such thing as syntactic typologists”, igniting the discussion of whether or not they exist. The conclusion might be that they do not exist in the sense suggested in this article (i.e., when criticized for failures). However, when funding is given, quite a few experts appear.
3. Previous research. A summary shows that syntactic typology is BS, to put it politely. Quite common names here. This is precisely what social psychology predicts: academia is a status game, and here, syntactic typologists are shown to have the job of making unnecessary complications to a relatively simple issue. There has never been true progress and never will if it is up to the professional group because their collective task is to keep the game going as long as possible. When it is played out, they will focus on another similar game.
Notice especially Figure 3 (rotate view to right), which shows how not just syntactic typology but also Generative Grammar is BS, which everyone of course always knew. But the curious thing is that while these two groups have created a facade of antagonism, we see quite clearly that they are actually collaborating by jointly maintaining a false dichotomy (”functionalism vs formalism”). Here, we see clearly that both are the same BS with only a vague connection to the scientific study of language.
Table 1: Dryer’s excuses. Since he does not reply, I think everyone is eligible. Please do.
4. The solution of the transitive distribution. 4.1 Highlighting: a new typological generalization. Table 2: a scorecard that correctly predicts the transitive distribution. When discussing this table, the standard reaction is that there is nothing but a scorecard in the whole paper, taking less than half a page in a 30-page article, which seems impossible. To outsiders, though, the question is: is it true? Does this scorecard do what it promises, i.e., mathematically generates the correct pattern? Interestingly, linguists seem totally incapable of answering such a simple question and would rather answer any other question, which they are great experts in.
4.2 A theory for the generalization, 4.3, 4.4. The deeper-level explanation is what it says in this section. So, what does it say? I am told there is only a scorecard and no link to scientific theory and empirical research. Is that so?
5. Conclusion. I suppose the conclusion is the prediction: 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. If this is not true, then, I will soon see many coherent replies to my article that explain which precise error has been made in the paper or else why it will not be cited even though it provides the seemingly long-awaited solution to this classic problem that so many professionals have very special knowledge of but cannot explain in a way comprehensible to the outside world.
Thanks, and trust yourself – you can do it!
Reply.
Patrik
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