Saturday, March 25, 2017

Why Formalize?

This post orginally appeared on the Faculty of Language blog (February 10, 2014). http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2014/02/where-norbert-posts-chriss-revised-post.html

Canalization

A huge issue in linguistic research is what I will call canalization. The basic problem is that whatever set of data and set of generalizations that have been uncovered so far, it is very difficult to get off of that track.

Fear of Syntax

Fear of Syntax
A leitmotif in the history of linguistics is Fear of Syntax.

What Kind of Syntactician Are You?

Syntacticians are not a uniform bunch. There are different different ways of looking and theory and data that define them. Here is a sample of what is out there. These may not be the most appropriate or interesting of names. If you have alternative names for the categories, please let me know. Of course, a person's personality might be composed of several of these basic types. This categorization is not meant to be offensive. All of these categories of people are immensely valuable, in my opinion.