When someone lumps together all linguists as belonging to the same theoretical school

By -
You know when someone who's not in linguistics think of all linguists as belonging to the same theoretical school of thought? Isn't it frustrating? It's just bad and annoying, as are all needless and incorrect generalisations.

It's also surprisingly common - in my experience especially in fields that overlap with linguistics like psychology and neurology. A good friend, Petter, sent me a link to a fun blog about rap. (I really liked it, go read it - it's good stuff). However, it also contained an example of this phenomena:

In closed-off, inaccessible academic circles, linguist brohs openly hate on computer brohs for creating models of language that are based on “probability” and that don’t take into account the “underlying structure of language”.

This quote does not have to mean "all linguist bros", but it kinda seems like it. Not all linguist bros hate on probabilities. That is a major misunderstanding. Many of us are quite big fans of 'em even.

Hornstein might believe that 2/3 of linguists are generative, but well, I ain't got no way of checking that number but it would surprise me if it were true.

As a person who grew up in a department dominated by functional typology and fieldwork (Linguistics, Stockholm University), went to another similar department (Linguistics, Univeristy of Manitoba), later moved to the MPI in Nijmegen which also is of similar persuasions and now find myself at the Australian National Univeristy which also is not generative-dominated but again rather more focused on typology and field work..  well as such a person it becomes kind of odd when people assume we're all of the generative type.

Perhaps I grew up in a "shielded bubble", but if that's true then it's a pretty large bubble. I even had the opposite problem at times, I heard more that generative theory was bad than I heard about the actual content of the theories and what was good and useful, so I had to learn on my own when in my fourth year I finally had minimalism. (That does not mean I didn't know anything about syntax or grammatical theories before then, I knew plenty I just hadn't done a generative model throughly. There is syntax without generativism.)

Again, I got no numbers on this and I get the feeling Hornstein might be thinking of the USA community only, but well. It's still annoying. Why would all linguists belong to the same school?

</rant>

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Global Tree of Languages

By -
Image
I was a reviewer for the Evolution of Language (Evolang) conference for the first time this year, a tedious-sounding task that turned out to be hilarious.  The conference attracts some bizarre manuscripts on the origins of language, one particularly imaginative one I wanted to devote a blogpost to, but regretfully cannot because of reviewer confidentiality. Also in my inbox to review was the most exciting paper about language that I’d ever seen.  I recommended acceptance obviously, even though it was only tangentially related to the theme of the conference, and it was accepted as a poster and published in the conference proceedings (available here ).  The paper was by Gerhard Jäger and Søren Wichmann, about constructing a world family tree of languages using a database of basic vocabulary, the ASJP database .  Claims about how language families may be related are nothing new but are normally statistically uninformed (such as work by Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Gr...
Read more

Language family maps

By -
Image
Last week, I assigned Bernhard Comrie's (2017) chapter 'The Languages of the World' (from The Handbook of Linguistics, 2017) to a class. It's a basic overview of the world's language families, which is what I wanted them to read, but for one thing: there are no maps in it. I overcompensated in class by presenting a 30-item list of maps, because some things are just so much easier to understand using visual representations. I decided to post some of the best ones I could find here, for future reference and in order to invite you to post better ones in the comments. This blog has featured posts on maps before, by  Hedvig on how to best represent linguistic diversity on maps and by  Matt on new approaches to ethnographies-linguistic maps . It's clear that the kind of maps that are typically used to depict the spatial distribution of languages of a single language family are fraught with difficulties. Typically they deal with multilingualism very poorly, the data...
Read more

My ELAN workflow for segmenting and transcription

By -
Image
Hello everyone, Hedvig here. I'm currently writing up my PhD thesis, hence the lack of writing here. Hopefully I'll be able to pick it up after submission, there's a lot of drafts lying on blogger waiting for completion. If you really, really miss me in particular, you could listen to my ramble at Talk the Talk - a weekly show about linguistics. Now that the shameless plug and excuses are done with, let's get down and talk about: THE TRANSCRIPTION CHALLENGE! In this blog post, I will focus on a part of this challenge¹ - the workflow for segmenting and transcribing  audio material. This is a rough guide, if it turns out people appreciate something like this I'll re-write it more thoroughly. This is a bit sloppily written in places, but trust me - if I do this "properly" right now I will lose days of work time that I should be spending on my thesis... so, I'll only do it if people really want it - and I might wait a while until I do. Sor...
Read more