Don’t take money from the John Templeton Foundation. They backed the murderous Chicago School economists, the genocidal architects of the war on Iraq, and are among the largest contributors to the climate change denial movement. That’s all.
Month: October 2021
Linguistics has its own Sokal affair
The Sokal affair was a minor incident in which physics professor Alan Sokal published a “hoax” (his term) paper in the cultural studies journal Social Text. Sokal’s intent was to demonstrate that reviewers and editors would approve of an article of utter nonsense so long as it obeyed certain preconceived notions, in this case that everything is a social construct. (It is, but that’s a story for another blog.)
The affair has been “read” many ways but it is generally understood to illustrate poor editorial standards at top humanities journals and/or the bankruptcy of the entire cultural studies enterprise. However, I don’t think we have any reason to suspect that either of these critiques are limited to cultural studies and adjacent fields.
I submit that the Pirahã recursion affair has many of the makings of a linguistic Sokal affair. But if anything, the outlook for linguistics is quite a bit worse than the Sokal story. By all accounts, Sokal’s hoax article was a minor scholarly event, and does not seem to have received much attention before it was revealed to be a hoax. In contrast, when Everett’s article first appeared in Current Anthropology in 2005, it received an enormous amount of attention from both scholars and the press, and ultimately led to to multiple books, including a sympathetic portrait of Everett and his work by none other than the late Tom Wolfe (bang! krrp!). Finally, nearly all of what Everett has written on the subject is manifest nonsense.
I believe many scholars in linguistics and adjacent fields found Everett’s claim compelling, and while I think linguists should have seen through the logical leaps and magical thinking in the Current Anthropology piece, it wasn’t until a few years later, after the exchange with Nevins et al. in Language, that the empirical issues (to put it mildly) with Everett’s claims came to light. But the key element which gave Everett’s work such influence is that, like Sokal intended his hoax to do, it played to the biases (anti-generativist, and particularly, anti-Noam Chomsky) of a wide swath of academics (and to a lesser degree, fans of US empire, like Tom Wolfe). In that regard, it scarcely matters whether Everett himself believes or believed what he wrote: we have all been hoaxed.
What phonotactics-free phonology is not
In my previous post, I showed how many phonological arguments are implicitly phonotactic in nature, using the analysis of the Latin labiovelars as an example. If we instead adopt a restricted view of phonotactics as derived from phonological processes, as I argue for in Gorman 2013, what specific forms of argumentation must we reject? I discern two such types:
- Arguments from the distribution of phonemes in URs. Early generative phonologists posited sequence structure constraints, constraints on sequences found in URs (e.g, Stanley 1967, et seq.). This seems to reflect more the then-contemporary mania for information theory and lexical compression, ideas which appear to have lead nowhere and which were abandoned not long after. Modern forms of this argument may use probabilistic constraints instead of categorical ones, but the same critiques remain. It has never been articulated why these constraints, whether categorical or probabilistic, are considered key acquirenda. I.e., why would speakers bother to track these constraints, given that they simply recapitulate information already present in the lexicon. Furthermore, as I noted in the previous post, it is clear that some of these generalizations are apparent even to non-speakers of the language; for example, monolingual New Zealand English speakers have a surprisingly good handle on Māori phonotactics despite knowing few if any Māori words. Finally, as discussed elsewhere (Gorman 2013: ch. 3, Gorman 2014), some statistically robust sequence structure constraints appear to have little if any effect on speakers judgments of nonce word well-formedness, loanword adaptation, or the direction of language change.
- Arguments based on the distribution of SRs not derived from neutralizing alternations. Some early generative phonologists also posited surface-based constraints (e.g., Shibatani 1973). These were posited to account for supposed knowledge of “wordlikeness” that could not be explained on the basis of constraints on URs. One example is that of German, which has across-the-board word-final devoicing of obstruents, but which clearly permits underlying root-final voiced obstruents in free stems (e.g., [gʀaːt]-[gʀaːdɘ] ‘degree(s)’ from /grad/). In such a language, Shibatani claims, a nonce word with a word-final voiced obstruent would be judged un-wordlike. Two points should be made here. First, the surface constraint in question derives directly from a neutralizing phonological process. Constraint-based theories which separate “disease” and “cure” posit a constraint against word-final obstruents, but in procedural/rule-based theories there is no reason to reify this generalization, which after all is a mere recapitulation of the facts of alternation, arguably more a more entrenched source of evidence for grammar construction. Secondly, Shibatani did not in fact validate his claim about German speakers’ in any systematic fashion. Some recent work by Durvasula & Kahng (2019) reports that speakers do not necessarily judge a nonce word to be ill-formed just because it fails to follow certain subtle allophonic principles.
References
Durvasula, K. and Kahng, J. 2019. Phonological acceptability is not isomorphic with phonological grammaticality of stimulus. Talk presented at the Annual Meeting on Phonology.
Gorman, K. 2013. Generative phonotactics. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Gorman, K. 2014. A program for phonotactic theory. In Proceedings of the Forty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: The Main Session, pages 79-93.
Shibatani, M. 1973. The role of surface phonetic constraints in generative phonology. Language 49(1): 87-106.
Stanley, R. 1967. Redundancy rules in phonology. Language 43(2): 393-436.