34.1354, Featured Linguist: Louise McNally

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1354. Fri Apr 28 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1354, Featured Linguist: Louise McNally

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Date: 27-Apr-2023
From: Lauren Perkins [lauren at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Louise McNally


Every year as part of our fund drive, the LINGUIST List features a
number of linguists on our blog whose research is of particular
interest to our readers, whose lives as linguists or path to
linguistics has been remarkable, or who’ve impacted and contributed to
the worldwide linguistics community. This week's Featured Linguist is
Professor Louise McNally of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Louise writes:

I’m interested in natural language meaning in a fairly broad sense, so
when I put a label on my research, I typically use
“morphosyntax/semantics/pragmatics interface” or “interaction of
lexical and compositional semantics.”

My vision of the field is heavily influenced by two main experiences,
so I will spend a moment on these. First, my training was very
diverse. I discovered linguistics (as so often happens, by accident)
through curiousity about literary and linguistic creativity. I was at
the University of Delaware in the mid-1980s, at a time when that
department only offered graduate degrees heavily focused on applied
linguistics; there were not many courses on the core description of
language or linguistic theory. Delaware had a great “design your own
major” option, and I convinced the relevant authorities to let me take
a potpourri of grad courses, including two on lexicography, as well as
some independent studies with Bill Frawley, whose interests were
incredibly wide-ranging and who was a very original, critical thinker.
I also spent a year working in Roberta Golinkoff’s infant language
lab, collecting data on acquisition of verb argument structure…more
lexicon, but now with syntax. The experimental work taught me that I
needed to understand syntactic theory. I had also been unsatisfied by
what I had seen of semantics and pragmatics – I could never tell when
a proposal was solid or not.

It somehow occurred to Frawley that I might like the University of
California, Santa Cruz, which had just started a PhD program. It’s
hard to imagine a more different training than I had gotten at
Delaware, but it was exactly what I needed: lots of formal syntax and
semantics. There was several very different generative syntactic
frameworks at the time (Government and Binding, Generalized Phrase
Structure Grammar, Relational Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar),
and we were encouraged to compare and translate between these, not to
see one as necessarily better than the rest. And thanks to the
extraordinary patience and support of another Bill, Bill Ladusaw, I
learned how syntax could be paired with a semantics in a systematic
way that made predictions about sentence interpretation. I can never
be thankful enough to all of my teachers at UCSC: They instilled in me
the idea that formal frameworks are simply tools, and that while some
tools do some things better than others, rarely does one do everything
better than all the rest.

The second experience that deeply impacted me was participating in a
project at U. Pompeu Fabra, in the late 1990s, to develop a dependency
parser for Catalan. I had a very low-level role, examining and
correcting a lot of parsed corpus data. This experience gave me a
completely different picture of language. The biggest challenges for
the parser had very little to do with the issues linguistic theorists
devoted most of their time to. In many cases, it was hard to identify
a best solution to a parse…and it began to look like in some cases
(though of course not all!) it didn’t really matter. This put
linguistic theory in a new perspective: I’ve never doubted that a deep
understanding of human language is essential for natural language
processing (despite the impressive results obtained just with “bags of
words,” especially if you have enough of them), but it did convince me
that theoretical linguists should regularly take extended looks at
human language data in its full, natural complexity, and take note of
data that go unaddressed in their respective theoretical corners.

This brings me to the future. Here is a list of some things that I
think are essential.

1. It has to remain possible for people to develop careers like the
one I have been lucky to have – an “atypical” undergraduate training
in linguistics, a very high level graduate training from a very
different perspective, tremendous freedom in pursuing a research
agenda as a junior scholar (the latter due to moving to Barcelona at a
time when, quite frankly, my future employment didn’t depend much on
having any particular sort or volume of research output). If I were to
apply now with the same training to any of the schools I applied to
35+ years ago, it’s far from clear to me that I would be accepted or
even wait-listed. The competitiveness of academia and the exponential
increase in the volume of research in all areas creates tremendous
pressure on people to specialize early, and stay specialized.
Specialization is of course essential, but everyone in a position to
do so should look for strategies and opportunities to promote breadth
and openness to different approaches to the study of human language
alongside depth, at all career stages.

2. A varied analytical toolkit! Over the years I have repeatedly
encountered a strain of thinking in some sectors of linguistic theory
to the effect that the more constrained the tools are that one works
with, the better. One effect of this thinking can be summarized with
the old adage, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a
nail….” even when it isn’t. But what worries me more is this: Tools
afford accomplishing tasks -- new tools, new problems that can be
addressed. The range of modeling tools available to linguists,
especially from the computing sciences, has grown tremendously in the
last couple of decades, but they are being adopted at an irregular
pace, slower than I would like. We need to incorporate more of these
without throwing away the good tools we already have.

3. In the case of the study of meaning specifically, there needs to be
a big push to get over the barrier – not always explicit, but
certainly extremely frequent in practice – between externalist, or
referentialist, and internalist, or cognitively-oriented, perspectives
on meaning. The meaning we create with language is central both to
thought and communication, and our theoretical and empirical research
on meaning should reflect that.

Finally, a plug for Linguist List. I’m a Linguist List freak. I still
remember getting an email announcing the creation of the list when I
was about half-way through grad school, and I joined right away. I get
the digest (on publications, calls/conferences, jobs, queries) sent to
my email and read it literally every day, just as I read the morning
news. It’s especially useful for learning about developments in parts
of the field that are distant from my own. The enormous, often
invisible work that goes into making Linguist List an invaluable,
continually evolving resource deserves all of our support.
______________

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