[Lingtyp] A plea for productive & respectful rhetoric

[Adam Singerman]

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