[lbo-talk] munchers

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Jun 10 06:16:03 PDT 2009


Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> ravi wrote: [clip]
> > With this understanding in hand, I think it will be easier to
> > understand why his research programme was not centred around studying
> > this or that real world language and analysing it. This also addresses,
> > I think, Miles' "snarky" question.


> Not so much. Let me put it bluntly: if you're not doing research, you
> do not have a "research programme". You have (at best) some interesting
> philosophical speculation.

This is about the first time I remember disagreeing with Miles. It is impossible to search/research without having a question in mind to guide the search, but as I've often argued, a blank question is worthless to without a preliminary answer, whether that answer is correct, incorrect, inspired intuition or wildass crazy, there has to be a question with a powerful answer before research can ever begin. (I'm not trained at all in linguistics, & Michael or someone will have to correct what follows - but that process itself will illustrate that questions must come with a provisional answer or they are pretty stupid.) The question that generated philology two+ centuries ago had what we would regard as a wild-ass answer: all languages went back to the language Adam spoke, and the task of philology was to "find" that original language, which had been lost to us with the Tower of Babel. The results from that search for the language of Adam generated the enormous progresds in philology for a century and a half or more.

We still of course do not know whether or not modern languages have a single common source, though I would guess not. (Tatersall's speculation is thought-provoking here.) But philology was running into the sands, and in fact was proliferating into hundreds of different little studies merely accumulating more and more piles of essentially disconnedted facts.

And Chomsky revolutionized linguistics, and he will remain the Newton of linguistics even if (as happened with Newton) there will come a point at which all his concrete conclusions are rejected. And it is probably as silly for non-linguists to carp at his empirical base as it would have been silly for non-physicist pop writers to carp at Newton's empirical base in (say) 1880.

Carrol



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