A Cyclical Progression

As I was walking around yesterday, randomly taking pictures of things in the background with other things out-of-focus in the foreground, I started thinking about whether I am approaching linguistics correctly.

Early linguists did descriptive linguistics, and the whole field up to the Chomskyian revolution was, by and large, a bunch of people pointing out different neat language anomalies to each other and saying "Well, isn't that neat?", without any major theoretical framework emerging. Kind of, in my opinion, a waste.

Then along comes Chomsky to introduce some rigor to the field, and it worked. Suddenly people were combining grammar, logic, math, computer science, set theory, (a teensy bit of) psychology and cognitive science, and a bunch of other jazz together and actually getting a pretty nice little theoretical framework out. A lot of the success of this revolution came from abstracting away from language and reducing all of the beautiful neat idiosyncrasies of language to categories, rules, and various cleanly-defined abstract concepts. It worked.

But not perfectly. The problem is that language isn't quite the same as logic. Our linguistic theories work really well on these abstractions, but the problem is that these abstractions don't really translate back into real, observed language so well. Take, for instance, the abstract category verb. There are tons of things that are sort of verbs, like passive participles, gerunds, nominalizations, etc., that vary in how verb-like they are from language to language. Likewise, as my current attempt to label corpus subjects as singular/plural/mass nouns is showing me, there're some grey areas even in abstractions that aren't all that abstract (it's usually pretty clear whether there is one or more of something, but for abstract and mass nouns, it can be unclear whether something is countable). This is the sort of thing that has been shunted off for years with the old refrain "We'll let pragmatics take care of that."

But pragmatics has not taken care of these problems, which is why a lot of linguists are switching over to what is, in some ways, a less abstract approach to linguistics. I am in this camp, but the question that bugged me as I was walking yesterday was whether this is justified. Basically, we're turning back toward descriptive linguistics. We're not going all the way back there, but at the same time (and perhaps with a twinge of guilt in my math-major heart), I worry that we shouldn't go back toward descriptivism at all.

I think the loss of abstraction is justified, for two reasons: 1) the lack of progress in connecting real language usage, the sort that humans use so effortlessly, to the abstractions that are becoming increasingly tenuous and complex, and 2) we have the computational tools to make something of consequence out of a more descriptivist, less abstract approach now. We can say with confidence that animate subjects prefer certain constructions, or longer subjects favor others. I think that even if we ended up back at truly descriptive linguistics, we'd still be way ahead of the game by being able to state statistically significant tendencies and such. At worst, we'd pave a better road for a new Chomskyian revolution.

I feel much better now.