>>Yes, there are political dimensions to these disputes. Linguistics is,
>>in a sense, a branch of psychology, and how we think about people's minds
>>is fraught with political repercussions. But I don't think that's the
>>most important source of dispute. Linguists argue over which type of
>>analysis is best without very much knowledge of how language actually
>>works in the brain. Since the early days of structuralism, it has become
>>possible to make theories that, if you fiddle with them enough, will
>>explain all the data. Unfortunately, many different kinds of theories,
>>with fundamentally different kinds of analyses, can all be made to fit
>>the data more or less, and it's very hard to justify any of them on
>>empirical grounds.<<
One of the disputes -- Chomskyans versus dependency syntax people -- that you described seems to have a political dimension. The idea that syntax is independent of semantics strikes me as akin to a liberal notion of justice: justice is procedural; free speech as form can & should be defended independent of content; etc. On the other hand, the extreme position that goes into the opposite direction -- there are only words & their properties and is no such thing as grammar at all -- may have an affinity with postmodern pragmatism & (implicit) empiricism.
Neither extreme seems desirable.
Yoshie