J Matthew Pearson wrote:
>
> Robert Hailman wrote:
>
> > Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> >
> > > Never fear, your friendly neighbourhod theorist will tell you that the
> > > singular is the underlying form --- which he knows because he writes
> > > it as -plural --- and thus unmarked, so that the universal holds.
> >
> > Good ol' theorists. Always proving their theories by using the theories
> > in question.
>
> What's with all this bashing of theorists? As a theorist myself, should I take
> offense at this?
I was entirely joking. I like theories & theorists, personally.
> Linguistics is the only field I know where theoretical work--and even the idea that
> there should *be* theories--is routinely dismissed. Nobody would seriously suggest
> that physicists or chemists or psychologists or economists should confine themselves
> to the collection of data and avoid positing theories to explain that data. Why
> should linguistics be any different? If you don't make theories, you're not doing
> science. Isn't linguistics supposed to be a science?
As someone with no linguistic education, I'll spare your all any failed
attempt to answer this.
> Anyway--as somebody said the last time this issue came up--it's impossible to talk
> or think about language without assuming some sort of theoretical framework, however
> rudimentary. Even everyday notions like noun, verb, clause, morpheme, singular &
> plural, etc., are theoretical constructs.
I agree with you entirely on this. I never got the theory-bashing
either.
> Sorry to respond to a couple light-hearted jabs with a serious rant, but sometimes
> the anti-theory bias on this list really gets to me. I'll shut up now.
It's allright. It's good to hear a theorist's view on theorist-bashing.
--
Robert