Humans Who Read Grammars

In a language serving a complex (i.e., real) community,  it is absence of structured heterogeneity that would be dysfunctional Uriel Weinreich wrote this in the much influential paper " Empirical foundations for a theory of language change" from 1968, and it is as true today as it was then. The paper was written by him, William Labov and Marvin Herzog. It was published and finalised after Weinreich's death, he died in 1967 at the age of 40. In the last weeks of his life, he devoted his time to discussing and writing this very paper. In the preface of the paper, his two co-authors write about him and the work behind this paper, and how honoured they are to have written this with him. They write that by section 2.4, the personal editing of the paper by Uriel Weinreich ends. While the finalisation of the paper was their work and the arguments represent their joint discussions, they underline that the conception and much of the writing was his. The paper is well-c...

New writer here (new both to this blog and to blogging in general). My name is Siva Kalyan; I’m a visiting researcher at the ANU, and have interests in both cognitive linguistics and (computational methods in) historical linguistics. A few weeks ago, when looking for something else*, I found a paper called “ The Role of Language in Science ”. It opens with a quote that was too good not to share: “Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach on the province of grammarians, and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.” —David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , Appendix IV. This is a familiar gripe about philosophy: that disputes often end up not being about the concepts that philosophers claim to be studying, but about the words that they use to study them. But even granting that this were the case (and who are we to question Hume?), is this such a bad thing? Mayb...