It is this _sort_ of thing that has me more or less convinced that _at best_ Kennelly is a superficially educated pop-scientist writer; she may be a simple fraud. Carrol
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This is a needlessly harsh conclusion. It isn't mine, and there isn't anything wrong with becoming a well informed journalist in science. Shit we need more of them, not less.
As I was listening to Kennealy, I wondered, now why did you go into journalism rather than linguistics? Then I had a bunch of answers. Linguists are stick in the mudd dullards. The field is too turf war oriented to be much fun. Kenneally didn't have some intellectual axe to grind, so she wasn't aligned with a particular school, etc. And then writing about science is a whole lot more fun than doing it. I could dream up all sorts reasons academia wasn't very appealing.
Maybe she discovered she liked a greater level of generality than some narrow focus on some nit-picking problem in linguistics afforded her.
Be generous.
Let's get to this idea: ``I think it would be fascinating to study the semantics of that sentence, but clearly such a study would not in the least touch on what is to be learned through the independent study of its syntax as syntax. To see these as alternatives, as in any way in conflict, is (I would say) fraud.''
After several days of reading about linguistics, I would say you are confronted with a problem in overspecialization. In order to satisfy the empirical methodogy demands of a field, you have to narrow your focus down to something so tight, that it can be demonstrated as true, and accepted as a subfact of nature. Journal articles for example are so tightly focused that larger scale contradictions can go completely un-noticed---sometimes for years.
The article I posted a link to, called The Evolution of Evolutionary Linguistics went through some of these sorts of contradictions and conflicts in its overview. There was nothing fraudulant about it. It was a study in the problems of an overly differentiated field with too many specializations.
I got the distinct impression that there are conflicting schools within linguistics where the study of syntax and grammar as abstract entities are believed to yield more important insights than studies in the realm of semantics.
CG