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March 19, 2005
Hawaiian's Phoneme Inventory (yawn?)
Tenser, said the Tensor has a linguistics quiz designed to highlight the small core of languages that get used as standard examples in linguistics. The quiz contains questions like:
Name a head-initial language
and
Name a language with basic word order SOV
The author predicts that in many cases, the answers of those educated in linguistics will match his own (in this case, English and Japanese respectively.)
Languagehat is mildly critical of the situation, supposing it shows that linguistics education is unimaginative. And maybe Languagehat is right. But whether or not it is a bad thing to have a core of examples like this depends on what you tend to do with them.
It would be bad if these examples were all that was used to generate and support general theories. New and non-standard cases make good tests of generalities, so we should get off the beaten track and see if a theory that works at home also works in less familiar territory.
But there are some tasks that a well-known core of examples will perform perfectly. Want to show that there are languages with noun classifiers? Then Mandarin Chinese is all you will ever need, and it really doesn't matter if everyone studying linguistics in the last 30 years has learned the same example. Existential claims, unlike general theories, can be well supported by a single example.
As can negative generalisations (e.g. it is not the case that all...- negations of general theories) since they are really just existential claims in disguise. Certain examples may be standard because they are clear counterexamples to an otherwise plausible or popular theory. Think that dialects are always mutually intelligible? Uh-uh: Chinese shows otherwise (at least according to the quiz.) There's no need to leave the beaten path here.
So, while it might be right that the quiz shows that linguistics lacks imagination, it does not necessarily show a flaw in its methodology.
We might also note that other disciplines have a core of standard examples as well. Off the top of my head, some examples would probably include: physics - Young's double slit experiment in optics, the Michelson-Morley experiment, Rutherford's gold foil experiment. Philosophy - Putnam's robot cats from Mars, Jackson's "Mary"-example, Kripke's Goedel case. And maybe psychology: the Milgram experiments, split-brain patients, the Muller-Lyre illusion.
Posted by logican at March 19, 2005 01:47 AM
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Comments
Once a fashionable concept, the head-initial or head-final parameter lost its theoretic status and descriptive utility years ago. Data from such languages never supported such parametrisation and since Kayne's anti-symmetry it is no longer part of syntactic theory.
Posted by: Tony Marmo ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.logicandlanguage.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 21, 2005 04:14 PM