Linguists: What have you done for me lately?

MAubrey
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Re: Linguists: What have you done for me lately?

Post by MAubrey »

mwpalmer wrote:I would like to address something Jonathan Robie wrote, assuming a difference in perspective between Mike Aubrey and myself. I failed to address his question at the time, as I should have done. I could make excuses, but they wouldn't help. :-)

Jonathan wrote:
Mike Aubrey tells me that Chomsky is just plain wrong, models based on his work are not even to be treated with respect. Michael Palmer tells us Chomsky's government and binding theory is the right place to start.

Did I get this right?
No. You did not get the part about my perspective right. I would definitely not suggest that Chomsky's government and binding theory is the right place to start. Chomsky's government and binding theory, while it did influence the later work of a number of linguists, has since been superseded, and not even Chomsky accepted it as adequate by the end of his life. Besides that, it was never intended as a framework for writing a grammar for language students. It was one stage in Chomsky's developing attempt to explain what was going on in the "language faculty" of the human brain, though he took pains to say he was creating an abstract "model" that was not based in biological study of the brain. (It reminded me of the old mind vs. brain debates in philosophy,)

My view is that *we* (students and teachers of Hellenistic Greek—the people involved in this forum) need to listen for insights from a variety of approaches to linguistics, taking what is helpful, rejecting what does not contribute to a better understanding of Ancient Greek, and negotiating our own terminology. We should work to make sure our terminology is intelligible both to students learning Greek as well as linguists studying Greek, of course, but we should not try to force Greek into the mold provided by any one approach to linguistics. When those of us with studies in Linguistics write about Ancient Greek, we will inevitably use the terminology that we know and find comfortable, but we need to be challenged when that terminology leads to confusion, and we need to negotiate terminology so that we are all "speaking the same language."

Mike and I have had at least one discussion (on our own blogs, not on this forum) in which it became clear that we were looking at the same problem through different lenses because of our familiarity with different Linguistic paradigms, but the result was not competition or an attempt to argue that either paradigm was "correct," but a search for what would be beneficial in explaining what we find in the Greek texts to people who do not share either of our backgrounds in Linguistics.

I greatly appreciate Jonathan including the following paragraph in his earlier post:
I suppose part of my problem is that I would like linguists to teach me their insights, but I often find myself pulled into a dispute between very smart linguists instead, I have to first figure out what they are disagreeing about, then figure out what ramifications it has for the language as I know it, which requires me to learn multiple models and figure out what they are arguing about. At the end, I rarely feel like I've learned much about Greek.
I would like to encourage you, Jonathan, and any other readers of this forum to speak up about this whenever you feel this way. Doing so will keep those who have advanced studies in Greek, Linguistics, or both rooted in the real world. It will make the linguists and grammarians do the necessary work to negotiate our terminology and clean up our explanations so that they are beneficial for real users of the texts we all value.
Precisely.

None of Chomsky's theories were designed for grammar writing. They were designed for the study of the human brain and its relationship to language. We can, in a sense, see this in Chomsky's level's of adequacy:

Here's the summary from Wikipedia:
Observational Adequacy
The theory achieves an exhaustive and discrete enumeration of the data points.
There is a pigeonhole for each observation.
Descriptive Adequacy
The theory formally specifies rules accounting for all observed arrangements of the data.
The rules produce all and only the well-formed constructs (relations) of the protocol space.

"...the grammar gives a correct account of the linguistic intuition of the native speaker, and specifies the observed data (in particular) in terms of significant generalizations that express underlying regularities in the language." [3]

Explanatory Adequacy
The theory provides a principled choice between competing descriptions.
It deals with the uttermost underlying structure.
It has predictive power.

"A linguistic theory that aims for explanatory adequacy is concerned with the internal structure of the device [i.e. grammar]; that is, it aims to provide a principled basis, independent of any particular language, for the selection of the descriptively adequate grammar of each language."
Most of the time, old grammars of the 19th century rarely got beyond observational adequacy and their grammars were little more than collections or organized data points. Only rarely, did they come close to descriptive adequacy.

Conversely, Chomsky was only really interested in explanatory adequacy, which is fundamentally not actually interested in descriptions but rather in deciding between competing description. He's has no interest in describing an individual language. In terms of grammar writing, we need to exist primarily in the middle. We still need both observational and explanatory adequacy, certainly. Both are still hugely important for the task of writing a grammar--we need organized data and we need to be aware of our general assumptions of the nature of language that are inherently involved in explanatory adequacy, particularly in making decisions between alternatively analyses, but only as much as we're interested in the best description of Greek rather than language in general.
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
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