[lbo-talk] Challenge to Chomskyan Linguistics

[bitch at pulpculture.org]

At 09:55 AM 4/24/2007, Jerry Monaco wrote:
>If anyone wants to read some of the  scholarly articles in this debate
>I can email them to you in PDF form.  I have Everett's 2005 article
>from "Current Anthropology", and Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues
>criticism of the article, and Everett's reply to the criticism.
>
>I came across this debate about four years ago when some of the
>research was  discussed.    I read the New Yorker article and I am not
>quite sure why the debate has become a "news" item now, except for the
>fact that the New Yorker is a sort of cultural-intellectual arbiter
>and if the New Yorker notices the debate it suddenly becomes a "real"
>debate.
>
>In answer to Bitch.  It is not a matter of empirical testing. Chomsky
>assumes that his theories should be tested with research on natural
>languages.  What Chomsky claims is that the research project of
>cultural anthropology and its work on language has nothing to do with
>his research project one way or another.  If you are interested in why
>Chomsky makes this argument I would suggest the book "Atoms of
>Language" by Mark C. Baker.  See especially Baker's discussion of the
>language of the Navajo.

Right. If so, then Everett was, supposedly, laboring under Chomsky's 
paradigm. He wasn't in the field as a cultural anthropologist and had 
little training in that regard.

In the social sciences, Michael Burawoy has argued that what happened to 
Everett is more often than not what happens -- and indeed, he's tried to 
flesh out an alternative model of theory development that doesn't hew to 
the hypothetical deductive model prominent in the "real sciences." We go 
into the field with our theories, as well as inchoate conjectures, and test 
them against what we find. We build theory as we go along, correcting this 
aspect or another. He outlines this in a couple of places, _Ethnography 
Unbound_ and in the follow up, I think it was entitled, _Global 
Ethnography_. Interestingly enough, Burawoy's earlier work for which he was 
more well-known once is called _Manufacturing Consent_ -- which, to some 
extent, fleshed out labor process theory of which our illustrious Mike 
Yates has expressed interest, IIRC.

k

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stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube

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