Horizon

Ahh, syntax. I remember almost nothing from my syntax and morphology class, except that strat didn't seem any more unreasonable a theory than anything else I'd heard.

What are you in school for, if I may ask?

>> Ahh, syntax...

In my syntax-class days, we had (some iteration of) the revised extended standard theory, if'n I recall correctly. Haven't thought much about it in...twenty years.

I don't imagine anybody nowadays cares about what node c-commands the others, eh?

cheers,

Henry

Argh! I accidentally deleted the first two comments. Sorry Alan! I'll be more careful from now on.

So, anyway, I have finally decided to study linguistics. No idea what I might specialize in yet, though preliminary interests are psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, that sort of thing, among others.

Near as I can tell, we are going to focus on something similar to government and binding theory (sorry, Ben), with maybe a little "minimalism" thrown in. That seems to be the text's focus, anyway. All I know at this point is a smattering of xbar theory so what do I know?

I'll also be learning Chinese. :)

If I might make a request, please do try to take a course on historical linguistics. It may be transformative, as (unlike most of the rest of the field) it's had about a century-and-a-half to mature. It's also had more opportunities for empirical testing, as linguistic reconstruction is actually predictive, and epigraphical finds can verify or disprove theories.

People I know who studied historical linguistics either became disillusioned with the squishiness of the cogsci branch and focused on historical or they were entirely bored by the subject. I'd compare histoical linguistics to 1920's-era chemistry, and most of the rest of the field to seventeenth-century chemistry/alchemy. Historical appears too cut-and-dried to most of the cogsci sorts I knew — they felt there wasn't anything exciting going on anymore. On the other hand, my classmates with a more scientific/technical mindset (many of them CompSci/Ling double-majors) were turned off by the hand-waving and guesswork they perceived in cognitive fields, and did whatever they could to avoid those courses, preferring the solid scholarship of comparative method and internal reconstruction.

If I confessed that I don't even know what "Formalism" is despite my degree in "Linguistics and Semiotics", could you place me in one of those two camps?

If I might make a request, please do try to take a course on historical linguistics.

I did, actually, a long time ago, and I loved it. But I don't really see what's so squishy about the psycholinguistics I've read about. As for what could really be called cogsci stuff, apart from the fact that everyone starts off from one or another model of the human mind for which no one seems to have any real evidence one way or another -- hm, okay, I guess maybe squishiness is somewhat fair. There's an interesting debate between Dennet and Searle in the NYRB archives that is worth looking at in that regard.

Still, I have never been one to regard only those areas of inquiry which are susceptible to non-squishy methods as worth studying. Anyone who says so strikes me as quite the radical.

And, if you think mainstream cogsci is bad, Ben, maybe you haven't yet been introduced to "cognitive poetics".

The thing I remember driving my friends nuts about cogsci was that there was so much in the field that was fascinating and real, but was buried in fluff. A researcher would discover something absolutely fascinating about the human mind, but it would only appear as an obiter dictum in a long paper making an tendentious argument about something obscure. I think they felt like Tantalus, and most were driven to English or Philosophy.

But I confess that all my impressions are based on poorly-remembered undergraduate conversations many years ago.

A researcher would discover something absolutely fascinating about the human mind, but it would only appear as an obiter dictum in a long paper making an tendentious argument about something obscure.

Reading a little last night about "second language acquisition" I came across talk about quite a few cogsci studies in the field and I have to admit a lot of the conclusions sounded a lot like just-so stories, like evolutionary psychology or sociobiology. That does bother me a bit.

Believe me, as someone who studied English, I know the sort of thing you're talking about and I do want to avoid it as much as I can. I remember learning about deconstructionism, nodding my head and thinking, "Uh, okay, I guess that makes some kind of sense, but how could someone write literary criticism with this?" So I found a "deconstructionist" essay on The House of Mirth and was astonished to find that apart from using some of the jargon associated with deconstruction the paper was a standard affair of extremely low caliber. That really shocked me!

That's why I laughed out loud in the bookstore when I read this bit of Frederick Crews' "Postmodern Pooh", which comes near the beginning of a scathing parody of literary deconstructionists:

"Now that we've dispensed with both author and reader, you will be interested to learn that I'm going to go right on discussing them."

I'll check out the Pooh next time I'm in a bookstore. I've posted it here once, but if you haven't read How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, you should.

Excellent, great article. Particularly liked:

Fortunately, you have a wide range of intellectual tools at your disposal, which the rules allow you to use in literary criticism even though they would be frowned upon in engineering or the sciences. These include appeals to authority (you can even cite obscure authorities that nobody has heard of), reasoning from etymology, reasoning from puns, and a variety of word other games. You are allowed to use the word "problematic" as a noun. You are also allowed to pretend that the works of Freud present a correct model of human psychology and the works of Marx present a correct model of sociology and economics (it's not clear to me whether practitioners in the field actually believe Freud and Marx or if it's just a convention of the genre).

and

Intellectual tools that might help prune the thicket are systematically ignored or discredited. This is why, for example, science, psychology and economics are represented in the literary world by theories that were abandoned by practicing scientists, psychologists and economists fifty or a hundred years ago.

I wonder if any academics have ever read this...

The essay was on my mind lately specifically because the line "pretend that the works of Freud present a correct model of human psychology and the works of Marx present a correct model of sociology and economics" got stuck in my head.

Despite the smugness, I usually enjoy tales where a programmer dons a pith helmet and journeys through a different, equally odd subculture.

the conclusions sounded a lot like just-so stories, like evolutionary psychology or sociobiology

"Just-so stories" is a really good description of many of the conclusions from those fields (or at least the ones that escape into popular culture). I actually think that it's not so much that the hand-waving-speculation-presented-as-fact phenomenon originated within those fields as that the conclusions of harder science gets mythologized within the popular imagination. I've written elsewhere about the mythification of evolution, but it's a pretty universal phenomenon. The professional study of such scientifish speculation was probably inevitable.