NEWS: Half Of World's Languages Disappear Within The Century

The offense is based on louys' completely uncalled for criticism of people like the Lakoffs and Chomsky. It's the same as me telling you that corporate law is a total shambles, and Alan Dershowitz, Johnnie Cochran, and Judge Judy are to blame for it. Lgx. is a big field, and there is room for everybody in it. When people doing computational lgx. projects start criticizing the validity of work completely unrelated to their own discipline without bothering to even, you know, acknowledge the work of people within their own discipline, I feel compelled to call foul.

Louys is a linguistics-wallah, so I think he has the right to complain about Comsky and Lakoff or whoever else. Even if he weren't in the field, it's a fucking absurd ad hominem argument to respond by saying, "what do you know, you aren't even in the field" to a criticism. How does saying that actually, you know, refute the substance of what Louys said? I call bullshit on dumbass rhetorical strategies that are intellectually bankrupt and demonstrate a lack of integrity.

And what does complaining about a lack of funding have to do with it, either?

Look, let me put it in plain English: the Lakoffs, Chomsky, etc. haven't done field work because they are theorists. It's like complaining about math professors not using their expertise to build bridges or do astronomy- it's not even in their domain of inquiry, so writing them off for not being in the field is a completely invalid criticism. When you begin with "absurd ad hominem" arguments regarding people who have nothing to do with what you're talking about, you're not exactly inviting civilized debate. Whether you call bullshit or not, if that point has contined to go over your head, you might just, you know, be in over your head.

It takes money to go hang out with native speakers to gather evidence to write a grammar of a language. Since that seems to be louys' litmus test, I thought it would be germane if I actually responded to the one point that has anything to do with the subject at hand.

and it still continues..... ::sigh::

aj:

Linguistics is balkanized into incompatible subfields, as you yourself point out:

It's not that I'm questioning the validity of most theoretical linguistics. In fact, my point of view is more extreme even than that: I think computational approaches are the way forward not only in practical applications of the study of language, but in theory, as well.

Generative linguistics has next to nothing to show for several decades of work.

"Keep drawing trees, folks, we'll find the Language Organ in there somewhere! It's gotta exist! It's just gotta!"

The reason many theoretical linguists ignore language on the web (and feel justified in snidely deriding those who work while "sitting behind their computers"), is that real language is messy. Theorists like pretty things. Theorists want algebra, they want Euclidian derivations, they want sytems of rules. I myself (and I'm not the only one(pdf)) believe that this is wishful thinking; language will never be reduced to an abstraction. "The last rule" will never be found, and yet theorists keep behaving as if it will.

But there is another tradition in linguistics, an empirical tradition, which did not share this article of faith: Sapir knew that "all grammars leak" in 1921. He titled his book Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech because he was interested in the reality of language, not an abstraction of it: he was responding to the dogmatic strain of traditional philology of written language (grammar in the "grammar nazi" sense so contentiously discussed in these boards). When he found things that weren't internally consistent, he didn't wave his hands around and say, "Oh, well, let's add a formalism to account for that and then we'll write a rule which accounts for this exception over here, ooh, I like that exception, and then let's cook up some corollaries and..." No, he described his observations, and he moved on. In other words, he behaved like a scientist.

That attitude used to hold sway over linguistics as a discipline: empirical investigation was the default. But those days, "officially," are gone. And the cold hard truth is that the field of linguistics isn't as all-encompassing as you suggest: nowadays, one does theory, or more likely than not one is not a part of the linguistics establishment. Money only exacerbates this sorry situation: and we see the Amerindian efforts at Pitt, which you mention, sadly, being lined up for the chopping block.

You claim that the theorists are like "mathematicians," and that I'm wrongly faulting them for not doing something they never said they would do. But mathematicians are permitted to choose their own axioms, and then follow them to their logical conclusions: the domain of mathematics is abstract by definition.

Language, on the other hand, is real. Elusive, yes, but real.

You know, I could be a "theoretical" cosmologist, say, by your definition. I could sit around going "well, today I shall think up a new cosmology... Hmm... let's see... I think today's cosmology shall consist of solar systems shaped like prunes... hmm, yes... revolving around giant alpacas." And when a physicist "cries foul," our hypothetical theoretical cosmologist responds: "But I'm doing theory, don't you know, we're both doing cosmology, I mean physics, and I don't mind if you want to specialize, but please, let me do my theory!"

In statistical representations, and in reality, grammaticality is a gradient. But the current party line stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that fails to account for aspects of language which can only be explained by statistical models. Even the newfangled Optimality Theory is about rankings, and not gradients. (Just recombine your n examples in the one of n-factorial orderings that supports your theory... all done!) In another theory, Chomsky and friends have recently argued that the defining feature of the human language faculty is recursion -- yet again, we are to believe that language is quintessentially an algebraic system. Nevermind the fact that there is little evidence that deep recursion actually happens in human language (with the possible exception of linguistics papers), we're doing theory here!

So yes, I do fault the theorists. I fault them for promulgating and institutionalizing a view of language which is, for them, irretrievably abstracted from reality, one which is utterly inaccessible to anyone who is not certifiably fluent in linguist-ese. And I think that this process is not unconnected to their disdain for language teaching and language preservation, and above all, for empirical study, which these days, as anyone will tell you, requires a computer and a healthy dose of statistics.

Ask yourself why linguists get indignant if you ask them what languages they speak. I know there's a party line on that, too. But ask yourself anyway. You claim that it's like mathematics versus engineering, I claim that it's a result of the widening chasm between abstractions that theorists ponder and the erstwhile object of their theorizing.

But it's just my opinion. My opinion, and the opinion of many others, who have discovered that "sitting behind a computer" and learning to study language in the raw, in the guise of the greatest living corpus ever constructed, the internet, is actually... productive. Not to mention, to be perfectly honest, fun.

(And I hope you get your funding dude, I don't know why you feel compelled to take that out on me. I'm not exactly rolling in cash myself, lest that be your impression.)

not to make the whole questionable funding seem like the most important issue here. BUT, i'm the vice president of a non profit organization and i don't seem to have any trouble getting monetary nor merchandise to give away.

i guess it's in who and how you ask for help ::shrugs::

I never claimed to be competent to argue the substance of linguistics politics, did I? Not only am I not competent to engage in such an argument, I couldn't care less about the argument. The fact remains, however, that your responding "what do you know, you're not in the field" to Louys was an ad hominem attack. In other words, you attacked him and not the ideas he put forth. Do I really have to explain that to you, mister smarty-pants-linguist? You begain with the bitch-ass ad hominem attack, so who the fuck is the one not inviting civilized debate?

No, it's not germane. Really. Please. "I want to go hang out with native speakers but wah wah no one will give me funding." Dude. Get a clue. If you are competent, getting funding is easy, at the most a minor inconvenience. If you are incompetent, getting funding is hard. I don't shed a tear for you, amigo.