tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post3859074630028042667..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: How much THEORETICAL work is there in syntax?Norberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-90984196730758309512014-01-16T17:52:22.666-08:002014-01-16T17:52:22.666-08:00A rare exception to the absence of celebrated equi...A rare exception to the absence of celebrated equivalence results is Robin Cooper & Terry Parsons' demo that a 'Generative Semantics' like and 'Intepretative Semantics' like treatment of quantifiers were equivalent. (in Partee (ed) 1976 _Montague Grammar_). This certainly made an impression on people in the early-mid 70s.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-50918305092835233362014-01-16T15:00:11.810-08:002014-01-16T15:00:11.810-08:00"In syntax, it seems that anyone who works on..."In syntax, it seems that anyone who works on syntax is a theoretician ... treating everything that a syntactician does as theory makes it hard for this other different kind of practice to find a foothold".<br /><br />I think this is a very good point. The usage of the term "theoretical linguistics" seems quite unhelpful. It causes a related problem, I think, in psycholinguistics: there is a tendency to treat "theoretical linguistics" as disjoint from "psycholinguistics", which makes it difficult for an empirical/theoretical split within psycholinguistics to find a foothold.<br /><br />There is some sense in which syntacticians/semanticists/etc. are doing "more abstract" work than psycholinguists are, and this probably underlies the tendency to label the former "theoretical", but I don't think the abstraction involved is the kind of abstraction that separates Norbert's (a)/(b) from his (c)/(d). It's perhaps a bit more like the relationship between physics and chemistry; the terminology we have at the moment in linguistics is analogous perhaps to calling chemistry "theoretical physics" because of the higher level of abstraction.<br /><br />(There is also the separate question about whether it's useful to associate the prefix "psycho-" with the lower level of abstraction, which I think produces distinct confusions of its own.)Tim Hunterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11810503425508055407noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-72043939419950721482014-01-16T04:33:58.122-08:002014-01-16T04:33:58.122-08:00You're definitely correct that there is a spli...You're definitely correct that there is a split in popularity between research of types A and B versus types C and D. Two pieces of evidence:<br /><br />1) There are no attempts at pure unification. Chomsky's unification of Ross's island constraints, for example, isn't really a unification but rather a reanalysis that covers all the data and, crucially, makes new predictions that are empirically borne out. I think if Chomsky had just provided a technical unification of all known island constraints without new empirical insights this line of work wouldn't have been received quite as enthusiastically. Quite generally, whenever you're reading a paper that claims to unify various analyses, you are guaranteed to encounter a chapter that discusses new empirical predictions. So unification is not considered important by itself, what matters in the end is the empirical payoff.<br /><br />2) If alternate accounts are compared, the result is publishable only if the accounts turn out to be distinct. I can't think of a single linguistics paper that concludes that two approaches are empirically equivalent, even if that means making rather ad hoc assumptions about how those approaches may be modified, extended, what the evaluation metric should be, etc. That's actually not surprising, because linguists are never taught that having equivalent theories is a <i>good</i> thing (at least I wasn't, and UCLA is a fairly theoretical place). Physics is full of empirically equivalent theories, and in mathematics equivalence theorems are some of the most useful. That's because such equivalences increase your understanding of the problem at hand --- having multiple perspectives is a good thing. Of course, if you care primarily about the empirical payoff, then such results are pretty much worthless.<br /><br />In sum, if you want to publish theoretical work, make sure there is some empirical pay-off and your results aren't too abstract. Hmm, why does it feel like <a href="http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2013/11/computational-linguistics-too.html" rel="nofollow">I've written something like this before</a>? ;)Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07629445838597321588noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-45591264439137832772014-01-16T04:13:27.502-08:002014-01-16T04:13:27.502-08:00It also depends on which (sub)field you're loo...It also depends on which (sub)field you're looking at. In physics, pure theory is indeed held in high regard and there is a split between theoreticians, which are pretty much mathematicians nowadays, and experimentalists that produce data and test theoretical predictions. But things are already muddled in chemistry, and biology is pretty much in the same situation as linguistics. Recently there has been some interesting theoretical work such as deriving the maximum possible size of animals from the properties of their metabolism and the environment they live in, but those are still outliers.<br /><br />There's also the issue that many people would consider all of mainstream syntax theoretical because it isn't applied. In computer science, for example, the split isn't between theory- and data-driven but between theoretical and applied. And since so little of linguistics is being recycled in computational linguistics, all of it is theoretical from that perspective.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07629445838597321588noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-65381019718268785262014-01-15T12:07:07.326-08:002014-01-15T12:07:07.326-08:00I don't know actually. However, I get a sense ...I don't know actually. However, I get a sense that in other sciences there is a better feel for the difference between "real" theoretical work and other kinds of work. In syntax, it seems that anyone who works on syntax is a theoretician. Does this make a difference? Perhaps. I think that within syntax theory needs some nurturing. It is only relatively recently that interesting theory has become possible. By treating everything that a syntactician does as theory makes it hard for this other different kind of practice to find a foothold. Note, to forestall revulsion: none of this is meant to imply that theory is better than the other stuff or that it is even more important. It is only meant to suggest that unless we understand the differences that we will avoid mooching them all together, to the detriment of theoretical work.Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-74535133653797652042014-01-15T10:47:04.023-08:002014-01-15T10:47:04.023-08:00Do we have any reason to think that in other scien...Do we have any reason to think that in other sciences, pure theory is any less of a minority project? My impression is that the science departments I'm familiar with have many more people focussing on experiments in their labs rather than sitting back and thinking about what's behind it all. Perhaps, there is an optimal balance (somewhere in the 80% data, 20% theory region?)?Kaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15945107024431546144noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-53126272427661057622014-01-15T05:00:35.518-08:002014-01-15T05:00:35.518-08:00In the context of theoretical vs. formal in lingui...In the context of theoretical vs. formal in linguistics, this quote from Jan Koster (<a href="http://www.let.rug.nl/~koster/papers/glot170%20-%20Koster2.pdf" rel="nofollow">here</a>) sums it up, I think: <br /><br />"Many linguists immerse themselves in technical detail, which is necessary but always runs the risk that the field degenerates into a continuation of philology by other means."Pedro Tiago Martinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04293569490494350310noreply@blogger.com