Humans Who Read Grammars

Today is International Women's Day. Here at HWRG we're celebrating it by highlighting an important female linguist. Today we're honouring Joan Bresnan, who together with Ronald Kaplan, founded the theoretical formal grammatical framework Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and has written numerous influential papers. Trading card of Bresnan by Parkvall . She is still active as a Professor Emerita in Humanities at Stanford University and also a Senior Researcher ( Spoken Syntax Lab ) at Stanford's  Center for the Study of Language and Information.  Her research and LFG is much informed by a wide knowledge of linguistic diversity, in particular of Australian and Bantu languages. LFG is still a popular framework in linguistics and continues to develop.  Here is a quote by Bresnan that illustrates her ideas and experience of formal linguistics very well: I began to realize that we theoretical linguists had no privileged way of distinguishing the possible formal...

This is a blogpost about the way that different linguists see the great challenges and aims of linguistics, it's full of quotes that I hope will prove illustrative. The quotes are taken mainly from here   and here , you can also go there to read more. As usual, you're more than free to skim and scroll, there's quite a few quotes this time. On this blog we're interested in discussing  what the "Big Research Questions" in linguistics  are, and also we've been interested in getting past the functional-fenerative divide that often is very destructive.  Two of our readers even commented that the inflammatory "debates" of the Great War are "profoundly unattractive" and that they had left that part of linguistics intentionally because of it's unproductive nature. Here's Haspelmath describing the situation: It is not hard to see that linguists who work on linguistic diversity tend to fa ll into two very rough sociological g...