In general, I’d beware of taking rockstar science popularizers as the last word on a given scientific field. I just saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson get his ass handed to him by an atmospheric physicist on the topic of the generation of lightning. Turns out NDGT doesn’t know jacksquat about lightning.
The linguistics buzz from popularizers these days pits descriptivists against prescriptivists, thanks to cats like John McWhorter and Steven Pinker writing op-eds to attract eyeballs and clicks. There’s gold in them thar eyeballs. Their presentation of the debate is a 60 Minutes sort of reportage on a conflict.
I’m saying it’s a sideshow that pulls in a crowd, is all. It’s showbiz. I want to let you in on the difference between that and what linguists really do at work all day.
Scientists want their work to have a predictive value. This is true of linguists no less. You know the drill: formulating a hypothesis, gathering data, analyzing it, making predictions, running experiments, and back to gathering more data, etc.
It turns out that “correct” vs. “incorrect” is just not a usable paradigm for doing predictive science in linguistics. In that sense, the descriptivist bomb-throwers have reason excluding prescriptivism from modern linguistics. Because it just isn’t useful. The topic has long been so settled nobody even needs to recall it any more.
But working linguists have way more important and interesting things to study, plenty of questions they want answered, using science that has a predictive value. Very few of them give a rat’s ass about prescriptivism at all. It just isn’t relevant to the real work, outside of a footnote to sociolinguistics and pragmatics (the science of how people talk to each other). It’s red meat for the popularizers, though.
First thing is to get the audience to believe (or at least understand somewhat) our field is actually a science; it’s just not a hard science such as chemistry or physics.
Then the next bit, as you say, is for those who enter the field to operate using its methodology so there will be, as you say, predictive value.
Prescriptivism does have value, though, even among us descriptivists. You basically said that with your commennt about sociolinguistics and pragmatics.
There are very many fascinating things in linguistics. Some of those things are open questions, and among those are questions within prescriptivism (sounds like an odd assertion, doesn’t it?). I’m with you, though, that the more fascinating and the more important–at least to me–open questions are outside of prescriptivism.
Of course there has to be some chum chucked out to the audience if someone wants to get a member of that audience excited about the field if none of the audience has an inkling of what the field even is.
My view is: hey, if it gets someone who turns out to be good at it into the field, chum away!
IANAL, although I have studied it somewhat and even have a paper in a linguistics journal.
I am with the descriptivists on this one. Every linguistic innovation was originally considered a mistake. When I was in HS one the latest nonos was the use of contact as a verb. I still cannot figure out why. AFAIAC, and noun can be verbed and any verb can be nominalized.
I read McWhorter’s Times column regularly and I respect him. I don’t know too much about Pinker even though he is a McGill graduate and one of my colleagues taught him his first course in linguistics.
Oh, of course. Popularizers have their niche in the intellectual ecosystem, no denying that.
If pressed, I will tell you of course descriptivism is true, but in itself it’s a trivial truth. It’s taken for granted, just like the fact that phlogiston doesn’t make things burn. We don’t need to rediscover oxygen to do chemistry.
I just wanted to tell the public that working linguists, in general, don’t really spend any of their time on the subject, lest they get the idea that it’s a big deal from the likes of McWhorter and Pinker.
Pinker wrote an entire book decrying the rampant belief of tabula rasa in science (which is a horrendously untrue strawman depiction modern science research), so now there emerged a generation of science readers who advocated and defended any wild genetic deterministic claim about any aspect of human behaviour.
Everything became “evolution didn’t stop at the neck”, or “we are not all genetically identical” in any public discussion about human behaviour, and worse, opened the door to wild claims on the innateness of certain behaviours among racial groups, the poor, or any identifiable groups (Swedes, southerners, etc.). An immensely frustrating thing to have to repeatedly explain how extreme a position genetic determinism is, given that
we do not have a functional understanding of how human behaviour is driven on a genetic level or
how such claims the innateness of human nature have a VERY high bar of they need to pass (multiple rigorous studies, not just conjecture and assumptions) as they have served as the basis of almost every single atrocity in our history and continue to be used as an excuse for discrimination both legal and informal. (I mean, for example, its easy to claim “Men are A, Women are B,” but are they? Are they really? And if so, why? Is it really genetic? Is there nothing else that factors into this? etc…)
Thank you for that. My gripe with Pinker is also his being a male chauvinist pig. The Language Instinct was a good book. He should have quit while he was ahead.
I think all fields of science have things like this, because science journalists want drama and conflict. Often times it just isn’t there at macro levels. Sure, we scientists fight like crazy about all kinds of details that take a very in depth knowledge of the field to even understand what we’re fighting about.
For example, the fact that genetics is involved with behavior is completely non-controversial among anyone who actually studies it.
Which doesn’t matter one bit in determining that genetics is involved. Genetics and environment are both involved in almost everything anyone looks at, be it disease, physical characteristic, or behavior. None of that is in anyway controversial. The details may be very controversial, though.
In my experience, geneticists only talk about genetic determinism when non-geneticists bring it up, because that is far too broad of a level to think about things. Probably like the proscriptivism in linguistics. It just doesn’t come up.
This quoted bit is mundanely true. This is not what Pinker wrote an entire book decrying. We must be first honest in Pinker’s thesis " The Modern Denial of Human Nature". It was about how Genetics is being denied by Blank slatists. Such an over reaching alarmist claim (not Pinker’s first nor last) that utterly makes a mockery of what geneticists actually write and research.
Its out right irresponsible to imply any link between things like crime levels and innateness without having the causal links firmly established. Yeah, those details. Pinker was no where near as mild as claiming “genetics have a role in behaviour” which, again, is so mundane an observation as to be readily accepted by anyone (probably BF Skinner himself). Pinker draws a hard line by leading the reader to the conclusion that almost everything that could be claimed as human behaviour is rooted in genetics and you, dear reader, are a filthy science denying blank slatist if you do not stake you flag on that.
I, too, enjoyed the Language Instinct, but I have never been so angry reading the Blank Slate’s bullshit (except when it was to discuss behaviour with Pinker’s admirers)
IANAL (or a L) but I am wondering about this. Is this literally true? Or do linguists feel that some changes are mistakes but other changes are just new usages?
For example, take the term goat (or GOAT) which has entered the language as a word for the greatest of all time. It’s etymologically distinct from the word goat used to describe an animal so it’s not a mistaken use of an existing word. Instead it’s an acronym which has caught on, which means it’s essentially a new word.
Are there linguists who consider that this is a mistake and that we shouldn’t be using this word?
Twenty-three years later, it’s downright bizarre how much space he devotes to tearing down modern art and literature, as if society was going to fall apart at the seams because novelists weren’t writing linear narratives.
You ask about “mistakes.” For “mistake” to have any meaning in terms of linguistic science, we’d have to speak of a mistake in methodology, a mistake in using data, drawing a wrong conclusion from data, etc. by a fellow linguist, in peer reviewing.
I already said in the OP that correctness or incorrectness of general usage is not a very helpful paradigm with which to do linguistic science. Those passing judgments are prescriptivists, and frankly linguists take little notice of them, because they aren’t relevant. The prescriptivists’ proper sphere of activity is, frankly, copy editing. Now copy editing is a noble career, and I’ve done it plenty myself. There’s no chance of confusing it with linguistics, though.
Was it written in the 60s? I know Pinker’s name, but I’ve never read any of his stuff. Blank slate always seemed to me the kind of theory that could only be invented by men who never bothered to spend anytime with their own babies.
Genetics does have an issue with racists latching onto it to science up their abhorrent beliefs. To keep this mildly on topic, I guess that occasionally happens in linguistics with racists claiming that variations in usage and pronunciation between groups means that some groups are obviously extra dumb.
The genetics claim would be that some of the reason why one person commits a crime and another does not is because those two people also have different genetics. It’s not a group difference, it’s an individual difference.
I don’t know enough about linguistics to even ask intelligent questions, which gets to the point that you’re going to need a collaboration between linguists, brain scientists, geneticists, and biostatisticians to investigate the genetic underpinnings of language in humans.
I feel there are genuine mistakes in language usage. If, for example, a person said “I’ve always loved words so I think I would have been a good entomologist,” than this person is confusing the words entomologist and etymologist. This is a mistake not an alternative usage.
OK, in that sense, yeah I see what you mean. Which leads to…
I could write a whole big rant on what grammar really is and what it is not. It is not what you were taught in school. Grammar is what you learned from your parents (and others around you) when you first began to speak. The true “rules” of grammar inhabit a deeper than conscious level within the brain neurons.
Prescriptivism is just the linguistic manifestation of a more general human tendency to want to impose rules, especially upon others. Prescriptivists bash people over the head with dictionary definitions. Dictionary Karens. They’re looking for a way for you to be wrong. Hoping to find you wrong.
But the process of creating a dictionary is descriptivism.
A Chomskyan might turn that around and say that we don’t impose rules on language; rather, the rules impose us on language. They are structures within the brain neurons.
