[Lingtyp] A plea for productive & respectful rhetoric

[Cat Butz]

Hi Adam,

If the rest of the mailing list is anything like me, they're probably 
just as uncomfortable with the messages as you, and think that what you 
expressed in your plea goes without saying, which are two reasons to 
just keep our mouths shut in disapproval, but now that you've made it 
explicit, I might as well second you. I don't think the kind of anger 
that speaks through Patrik's rhetoric should be what fuels scientific 
discourse, and makes it harder to take it seriously. In any case, 
Patrik, if your claims are true, they will hopefully be integrated into 
linguistics regardless of your delivery of them.

Warmest,
---
Cat Butz (she)
HHU Düsseldorf
General Linguistics


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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