Linguistics Forum

I just discovered this forum called Linguistics Forum. I only looked at a few of the posts and I was underwhelmed, but I've never been a forum-kind-of-guy, so my opinion should be of minimal interest to those of you who utilize these resources. Just thought I'd pass it along.

You Say 'poverty of stimulus', I say 'innateness hypothesis'...

I’ve posted on the Innateness Hypothesis several times before and I just ran across an article by Geoffrey Pullum and Barbara Scholz reviewing that very topic: Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments (pdf). Thought y'all might enjoy the read.

Abstract
This article examines a type of argument for linguistic nativism that takes the following form: (i) a fact about some natural language is exhibited that allegedly could not be learned from experience without access to a certain kind of (positive) data; (ii) it is claimed that data of the type in question are not found in normal linguistic experience; hence (iii) it is concluded that people cannot be learning the language from mere exposure to language use. We analyze the components of this sort of argument carefully, and examine four exemplars, none of which hold up. We conclude that linguists have some additional work to do if they wish to sustain their claims about having provided support for linguistic nativism, and we offer some reasons for thinking that the relevant kind of future work on this issue is likely to further undermine the linguistic nativist position.

Enjoy!

(HT: Language Evolution blog)

"The Stuff I Just Thought Up"

In a post titled “The Perils of Popularising Science”, Jason Zevin, a cognitive neuroscientist, gets in a little Pinker bashing. The whole post is worth reading, but here's a little nugget:

This is why it is always so disorienting to talk to people who have just read or are reading anything by Steven Pinker (such as his recent piece "The Moral Instinct" in the New York Times Magazine). Often, these people know all kinds of amazing things--including things I'm pretty sure aren't true. This is not to say that Pinker is a charlatan (although some researchers might actually go this far; a colleague just vandalised my copy of "The Stuff of Thought", changing it to "The Stuff I Just Thought Up"). The problem is that our field is one with many open questions, many confusing and apparently mutually exclusive data points, not to mention a dizzying array of theoretical perspectives to consider.

I have mixed feelings about Pinker. I admire his contribution to psycholinguistics, even while disagreeing with some of his major conclusions. He was a brilliant empirical researcher who moved the science of linguistics forward. His early work on the acquisition of argument structure continues to be influential and relevant. His popular works are well written and entertaining and have inspired new linguists. But of late, he seems to have jumped off the deep end of rationality and come to the conclusion that his opinions and intuition are more than that; they are now fact. I think we would all be better off if Pinker got off the lecture circuit and back into the lab and started studying verbs again.

(HT: Andrew Sullivan)

Prepositions Don't Count

From the often hilarious blog Totally Not Crazy we find another example of PGSLTSS (which I first blogged about here):

In any case I really hope Paris sells her next house to someone I'm tangentially connected__, so I can see what bold new choices she's forging in her design palette. (emphasis added)

The totally-not-crazy author might be sane (doubt it) but he’s clearly suffering from post grade school linguistics traumatic stress syndrome (PGSLTSS). Having properly completed the ditransitive construction sell X to Y, he was faced with both the terror of a possibly redundant “to” AND ending a sentence with a preposition (gasp!) because he decided to fill the dative argument of sell with the dislocated argument of connected, leaving the preposition stranded. Fearing retribution from The Nuns (perhaps) he chose to take the conservative route, and delete the last preposition, just in case. No biggie, right? Prepositions don’t really count anyway, hehe.

Language Evolution Blog

Thanks to Psycholinguistics Arena's blog posts aggregator, I just discovered the blog Language Evolution. The blog "aims to act as an informal resource, meeting place and forum for the academic field of language evolution."

Looks like an interesting blog.

How Does Language Work?

I only just now stumbled on to Liberman's post here about Stanly Fish's dark view of the future of The Humanities written about in "Will the Humanities Save Us?" and "The Uses of the Humanities, Part Two".

In 1996 I made the decision to quit graduate school in English Literature, near the beginning of a career in a field I was well suited to, to start fresh in a field I was woefully undertrained for: linguistics. I did this partly because I had lost the faith, so to speak. I shared Fish's "moments of aesthetic wonderment" but I just couldn't see what I would spend the next 30 years of my life doing. What do English professors do? I never found a satisfying answer to that question.

Linguistics, on the other hand, drew me in precisely because there were (and still are) so many unanswered questions. But the king daddy of them all, the fundamental question of linguistics, is this: How does language work? In the same way that you may look at a river and ask how does this work (Where does the water come from? Where does it go?), linguistics look at human languages and ask how they work.

Linguists are essentially reverse engineers. It is as if we have found a mystery box that does something: produces language. It appears to behave systematically and at least somewhat predictably. We'd like to know how it does that.

And the most tantalizing thing about linguistics is this: we have no answer to the fundamental question. We still don't know how language works.

I'm looking forward to reading Fish's article's more closely, but I fear we agree.

The Destruction of Turkey by Chomsky

It appears something strange and vaguely troubling has been going on in Turkey these last few days. After reviewing my Sitemeter data, it seems I have had no fewer than eight hits in two days from Turks Googling "innateness hypothesis". Is there a conference going on, or are Turks just wild about dated linguistic assumptions? My thoughts on the topic can be found here.

I'm not exactly sure how accurate Sitemeter's location information is, but I see 5 different Turkish locations, some with multiple hits.

Mustafa, Hatay
Trk, Burdur
Izmir
Bilgi, Van
Mersin, Icel

BTW: You REALLY gotta be a linguist to get my post title, don't you? For the interested observer, one could do worse than read this (PDF).