Comments on: The Crazy Thing about Linguistic Research http://pegasuslibrarian.com/2010/02/the-crazy-thing-about-linguistic-research.html Learning in Libraries and Loving It Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:39:45 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Mickey Schafer http://pegasuslibrarian.com/2010/02/the-crazy-thing-about-linguistic-research.html/comment-page-1#comment-2534 Mickey Schafer Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:56:27 +0000 http://pegasuslibrarian.com/?p=1312#comment-2534 I have SOOO enjoyed these last two posts! Linguistics is where I got my PhD, and its approach to data is partly why I left -- and this is what you ran into here. Descriptions of grammars, phonologies, text-types, etc get written once, then indeed, small moves are subsequently made as new hypotheses about structures are emerge. When I was still doing linguistic research, I was using texts from the late 1800/early 1900s because that's when someone catalogued the grammar. And in many cases, those analyses were written by non-linguists, especially a lot of missionaries. I never had a problem with this kind of data collection because it tended to be comprehensive. What drove me crazy is when a single sentence or small set of sentences is used as the empirical basis for a new idea because one native speaker (or maybe 6!) from a single region agree on the correctness of a given expression. This is where the anthropological history of linguistics fails to provide sufficient evidence for what are often cognitive claims. If appeals are made for using scientific criteria for evidence, then one can run afoul of linguistics profs who do not, by and large, feel the need for extensive data before hypothesizing wildly (Chomsky gets the blame for this -- the practice is an extreme adaptation of his tenet that language is its own system, perfectly formed in each normal adult brain, hence a single native speaker is all you need to represent the whole system). You may need to categorize the linguists you're working with into those who are traditionalists and those who are inter-disciplinary (meaning they look at connections to cognition and the brain). When I was a a student here, people who connected language to cognition belonged in psychology, not linguistics. And many of my profs were horrified when I started doing truly basic quantitative work (counting instances of a thing, for instance) -- I think b/c it went against the Chomkian view of the perfect native speaker. Several years ago I put together a course on Writing in Linguistics. It went away after just 2 years b/c we don't have enough linguistics undergrads (we have not yet made it from program into department!) to justify an outside-the-field upper-division class. I'll be happy to clean up the links and send them your way if you think it may help! I am hoping eventually to transfer that class to wikidot just so that I can point to it. And typically of linguists, when I put together this class, they were all mystified -- how dare I tell the language experts how to write??!! One piece of info that may be helpful if they ask you about writing. Linguistics paper don't often use a straightforward thesis statement/research question. It causes too many fights before the writer has had the chance to build an argument. My boss didn't believe me until I showed him a whole slew of publications, not one of which had anything resembling a scientifically-constructed thesis. The writing style is a blend of ethnography and philosophy. Very weird, but they are a contentious crowd. I have SOOO enjoyed these last two posts! Linguistics is where I got my PhD, and its approach to data is partly why I left — and this is what you ran into here. Descriptions of grammars, phonologies, text-types, etc get written once, then indeed, small moves are subsequently made as new hypotheses about structures are emerge. When I was still doing linguistic research, I was using texts from the late 1800/early 1900s because that’s when someone catalogued the grammar. And in many cases, those analyses were written by non-linguists, especially a lot of missionaries. I never had a problem with this kind of data collection because it tended to be comprehensive. What drove me crazy is when a single sentence or small set of sentences is used as the empirical basis for a new idea because one native speaker (or maybe 6!) from a single region agree on the correctness of a given expression. This is where the anthropological history of linguistics fails to provide sufficient evidence for what are often cognitive claims. If appeals are made for using scientific criteria for evidence, then one can run afoul of linguistics profs who do not, by and large, feel the need for extensive data before hypothesizing wildly (Chomsky gets the blame for this — the practice is an extreme adaptation of his tenet that language is its own system, perfectly formed in each normal adult brain, hence a single native speaker is all you need to represent the whole system). You may need to categorize the linguists you’re working with into those who are traditionalists and those who are inter-disciplinary (meaning they look at connections to cognition and the brain). When I was a a student here, people who connected language to cognition belonged in psychology, not linguistics. And many of my profs were horrified when I started doing truly basic quantitative work (counting instances of a thing, for instance) — I think b/c it went against the Chomkian view of the perfect native speaker.

Several years ago I put together a course on Writing in Linguistics. It went away after just 2 years b/c we don’t have enough linguistics undergrads (we have not yet made it from program into department!) to justify an outside-the-field upper-division class. I’ll be happy to clean up the links and send them your way if you think it may help! I am hoping eventually to transfer that class to wikidot just so that I can point to it. And typically of linguists, when I put together this class, they were all mystified — how dare I tell the language experts how to write??!!

One piece of info that may be helpful if they ask you about writing. Linguistics paper don’t often use a straightforward thesis statement/research question. It causes too many fights before the writer has had the chance to build an argument. My boss didn’t believe me until I showed him a whole slew of publications, not one of which had anything resembling a scientifically-constructed thesis. The writing style is a blend of ethnography and philosophy. Very weird, but they are a contentious crowd.

]]>