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I have no idea what he says about that. In my field, whenever anyone says "Chomskyan linguistics" they mean universal grammar or language acquisition device or whatever. (These names make it sound like the universal translator on Star Trek to me.) You probably knew already that there's lots of evidence for this capability in humans, although it's not clear how it works. What does his approach to syntax have to do with language acquisition?vijayjohn wrote:Oh, OK. I thought maybe you meant there was evidence for the Chomskyan approach to syntax from language acquisition.
mōdgethanc wrote:What does his approach to syntax have to do with language acquisition?
Sure. We talk about psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, and it comes up in fields like neuropsychology, developmental psychology, and clinical stuff (learning disorders, aphasias, etc.). It's very important to understand basic linguistics if you want to understand this stuff.vijayjohn wrote:People in your field talk about linguistics?
And know that Chomsky is a linguist? I thought all anybody else knew about him was his politics!
I don't know of any neurological evidence for that. It's possible we might use different neural networks for different kinds of syntax, but the evidence for that would probably be very subtle and hard to see with the imaging methods we have now (I'm not talking about major tracts, but closer to the levels of individual neurons).mōdgethanc wrote:Well, he has (or at least had - I don't really remember to what extent he's stuck with his original ideas) certain ideas (don't remember all of them off the top of my head or anything, but I definitely remember something about switches in our brains that we use subconsciously to tell what word order a language we speak has, etc.) about how we process syntax, which of course is also part of language acquisition. I also just think it would be ideal if we had an approach to syntax that reflected more accurately how we actually process it in our brains.
mōdgethanc wrote:Sure. We talk about psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, and it comes up in fields like neuropsychology, developmental psychology, and clinical stuff (learning disorders, aphasias, etc.). It's very important to understand basic linguistics if you want to understand this stuff.
Nobody cares about his politics IME.
I don't know of any neurological evidence for that.
I don't know if you strictly need to, depending on the area you're interested in, but it's definitely helpful and it does come up. A psychologist, psychiatrist, or neurologist would come across several kinds of language impairment (dyslexia, Tourette's, apraxia of speech, auditory processing disorder, various aphasias etc.) and knowing what a grapheme is or what syntax is would definitely help with that. I mean, they wouldn't have to know as much as a speech-language pathologist would, but still. In my classes there was a lot of time spent on aphasias and reading disorders, especially those caused by strokes, and that including knowing the different types of them, what areas are affected, what kind of deficits are involved (semantic, phonological, etc.) and even some IPA was used. All of it was stuff you would see in a first-year linguistics course, but not everyone had taken one before.vijayjohn wrote:Wow, cool! I didn't know anybody had to know linguistics except like language teachers or something (and of course linguists).
In some fields, he is. But in the sciences, nobody gives a shit about that. So linguistics must be a science!Actually, that's true IME, too. My dad told me that that was what he was known for, though.
vijayjohn wrote:And there are just factual disputes, like researcher A says that the linguistic situation in such-and-such place is one way, but researcher B says it's another way, researcher C agrees with one of them, and researcher D says it's some totally different way and everybody else can go fuck themselves. (Or alternatively, some researcher says it's one way, but people who actually come from the area are like "wuuut? Fuck no!").
mōdgethanc wrote:That's doubtlessly because some weird Brazilian guy with a boner for Fluminense (probably a native speaker) has been editing everything to include it. This is why I said it's good to be skeptical of Wikipedia. Original research abounds.
ZON wrote:Perhaps it could even be said that linguistics is the last stronghold of scientific racism if you take into account the overwhelming majority of linguistic "experts" are elderly white men who refuse to recognize as valid any linguistic research by people of color, or by women.
vijayjohn wrote:I have something to say about racism in linguistics, but I'm scared to say it.
Scientific racism has found a niche in some fields like evolutionary psychology and population genetics, but generally people in these fields don't take these ideas seriously.ZON wrote:Perhaps it could even be said that linguistics is the last stronghold of scientific racism if you take into account the overwhelming majority of linguistic "experts" are elderly white men who refuse to recognize as valid any linguistic research by people of color, or by women.
Isn't it equally probable that some random linguist was genuinely mistaken about the existence of a language, reported it under the wrong name or just repeated hearsay from the locals, and nobody bothered to look into it further?Then considering what Wikipedia calls "spurious languages", languages that a random outsider decrees to have never existed based on his not having met any speakers on a one day trip to the general region where the language has been reported to have been spoken by somebody a decade or two before - with his mind set on the notion that the language does not exist.
Social science is capable of being objective. It's just harder.My opinion remains that linguistics is social science, not objective science - it is an important part of recording the cultural heritage of the human race.
Isn't it equally probable that some random linguist was genuinely mistaken about the existence of a language, reported it under the wrong name or just repeated hearsay from the locals, and nobody bothered to look into it further?Then considering what Wikipedia calls "spurious languages", languages that a random outsider decrees to have never existed based on his not having met any speakers on a one day trip to the general region where the language has been reported to have been spoken by somebody a decade or two before - with his mind set on the notion that the language does not exist.
ZON wrote:You're definitely right about recognition within academia, but I'm referring to those lacking formal education and qualifications - like myself. There is no convenient means as far as I'm aware to submit research for professional linguists to evaluate and conduct proper research on, in a manner that focuses on the actual observations or theory, or other content, but not than the person behind it. Linguists wanting credit for their research is silly but understandably part of the human process - what I fail to grasp is its necessity and the rejection of anonymous contributions to linguistic journals and what have you.
ZON wrote:Native speakers of less prestigious dialects and more nationalistic speakers of endangered languages would certainly push the system, with the odd conlanger promoting their project, but does that not already happen in wildly more inappropriate places?
ZON wrote:You're definitely right about recognition within academia, but I'm referring to those lacking formal education and qualifications - like myself. There is no convenient means as far as I'm aware to submit research for professional linguists to evaluate and conduct proper research on, in a manner that focuses on the actual observations or theory, or other content, but not than the person behind it.
Linguists wanting credit for their research is silly but understandably part of the human process - what I fail to grasp is its necessity and the rejection of anonymous contributions to linguistic journals and what have you.
Even in the academic discipline of Romani studies, the Roma are not masters of their own destiny. Non-Romani linguists have discovered the Romani language and are being given huge grants to study it, to the tune of half a million pounds and more. Meanwhile, Romani families are forced to deal with Romaphobia on a daily basis while struggling to find decent jobs, housing, education and healthcare, seeking no less and no more opportunity than that enjoyed by their non-Romani neighbours. It is surely a collective insult to the twelve million Roma that no university to this day in North America sponsors a chair of Romani Studies, while much smaller populations enjoy such privileges, as in the Basque Studies Center at the University of Nevada, which is devoted to the half-million-strong Basque people. It is a collective slight to the Roma that Ian has gotten no formal recognition from The University of Texas, where he works, although his contributions have merited recognition by the Texas House of Representatives in a public ceremony in the state Capitol, and where he is a member of the State Commission on Holocaust and Genocide.
It is surely a collective insult to the twelve million Roma that no university to this day in North America sponsors a chair of Romani Studies, while much smaller populations enjoy such privileges, as in the Basque Studies Center at the University of Nevada, which is devoted to the half-million-strong Basque people.
linguoboy wrote:It is surely a collective insult to the twelve million Roma that no university to this day in North America sponsors a chair of Romani Studies, while much smaller populations enjoy such privileges, as in the Basque Studies Center at the University of Nevada, which is devoted to the half-million-strong Basque people.
This is the only criticism I have trouble getting behind. Chairs get sponsored because there is money to do so.
vijayjohn wrote:Ian told me he was promised a chair before a certain person, who he said was clearly antigypsy, became the dean of Liberal Arts, so I think this is a reference to that (but Dileep Karanth, who wrote that, presumably didn't want to come right out and say it).
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