Re: The amazing Dr. Smith (was Re: Active case-marking natlangs)

J Matthew Pearson <pearson@...> writes:

> Joerg, what is wrong with you these days?  I'm used to thinking of you as a
> reasonable guy, but lately you've been doing an awful lot of flaming (first
> Brian Phillips, and now Marcus).
This is a psychological problem on my behalf that I am very aware of and
trying to get out of.  I tend to be quite reasonable usually, but on a
bad day I tend to snap out of it quite badly.  I also tend to take
things more personally than I should, sometimes.  I apologize for that.

> I don't see how you could construe Marcus's posts as condescending or insulting.
> He's simply defending a particular usage of the term "active".  If you disagree
> with that usage, fine, but that's no reason to go accusing Marcus of
> intellectual elitism.  Please calm down, OK?
You are right, Matt, that my comment on "the amazing Dr. Smith" was
inappropriate. There is no sense in acting up like that.  I prefer a
constructive, open-minded discussion by myself, and so let's return to
it.

But let me state my problems with the way Marcus argues against my
position in a more sober manner in order to give you all an idea how it
all happened.

The "active case-marking natlangs" thread wasn't the first time I got
at odds with Marcus.  This thing has been going on for months,
practically from the days of the legendary "Degrees of volition in
active languages" thread.  Almost from the first time I dared calling
Nur-ellen an active language in public, Marcus tried to punch holes
into that assertion, seeking reasons why Nur-ellen could not be
active.  That time, it was the way cases are marked on the noun at
which Marcus took exception; now it is the way I use cases to mark
degrees of volition.  Back then, the argument moved off the list into
private e-mail after a while, and then died away as I found that it
was not worth the trouble replying on his comments, until it
re-ignited when it came to whether Tokana is active or not.

In both incarnations of the argument, I noticed several flaws in
Marcus's argumentation.  I don't claim that my argumentation was
flawless, but what Marcus did gave me the impression that he was not
so much about to contribute meaningfully to the discussion, but to
baffle amateurs like me out of the field.  The impression I got may be
wrong, but it seemed like that to me, and it was slowly but steadily
driving me nuts.

What he did was to start the argument with...

1. Weak typological arguments.  The reasoning goes as follows:

   "You claim that language Y has feature A.  However, it shows
    feature B, and natlangs with feature A typically do not show
    feature B.  Hence, your claim is faulty."

   This, of course, proves nothing.  Unless, of course, the
   combination of the two features is logically inconsistent,
   which, however, is not the case either time Marcus used the
   aforementioned argument pattern.  In both cases, "A" was the
   languge being active; "B" was case marking on nouns in the first
   case and the usage of noun cases for marking degrees of volition in
   the second.  If the co-occurence of two features is not observed in
   any language, all this means in the first place that the pattern
   does not occur in the sample being considered.  If the sample is
   big enough, one might conclude that there seems to be a tendency
   against co-occurence of both features.  It doesn't prove,
   though, that the co-occurence is impossible.

   In fact, I presented natlang counterexamples to the alleged
   non-co-occurence of active alignment and noun case marking.  The
   way Marcus turned them down takes us to the next point:

2. Terminological sophistry.  Marcus never really falsified my
   counterexamples (Georgian and Middle Welsh).  What he did was
   excluding them from consideration by pointing out that the active
   alignment was restricted to particular verb forms, and explaining
   away by "unergative verbs".  This seems more like relabelling
   awkward counter-evidence in order to get it out of the way of one's
   argument than anything else.  He never made clear exactly *why* my
   counterexamples were invalid.  The same happened later when I asked
   him why the volition marking in Tokana and Nur-ellen rendered these
   languages "not active".  But whenever I asked him to elaborate on
   his comments, all I got out of him was...

3. Equivocation.  When asking him to explain why (a) the features he
   observed in my language contradicted my claim of it being active
   and (b) my counterexamples were invalid, he did not give a clear
   answer, but responded with cryptic comments I could not
   comprehend.  Repeated requests for clarifications on his replies
   yielded no results.  He left me in the dark on the question why
   Nur-ellen was not active.  I wondered what was "active" to him, so
   I asked him for examples.  And what he gave then were...

4. Weak examples.  Marcus resorted to obscure (to me) Amerindian
   languages such as Mohawk and Chickasaw which show alignment
   patterns that are so odd (and seemingly arbitrary) that I did not
   understand why they are called "active".  When I pointed out that
   the examples seemed too idiosyncratic to me to be of any use
   elucidating the concept, he took final resort to...

5. Imputation of faulty theory/terminology.  This is certainly the
   worst thing he did in the argument.  What he slammed in my face was
   the bold claim that I don't really know what an active language
   is.  He told me that "my definition" of an active language was
   faulty and meaningless.  Of course, what he called "my definition"
   had virtually nothing to do with the way I understand the concept.
   I openly admit that I am not an expert on the matter, and my
   concept of it is certainly somewhat simplistic and misses a number
   of details, but I *never* said that the presence of case marking on
   nouns, the exclusion of inanimate nouns from the agent role or a
   system marking different degrees of volition in the agent were
   vital in an active language.

   He explained his concept of active languages to me, and I found
   that his definition seemed pretty much to match mine!
   He refused, however, to clarify which verbs are "active"
   and which are "stative".  The definition he gave reeked of:

6. Circular reasoning.  It is not very meaningful to say that an
   active language is one that marks the subjects of active verbs like
   transitive subjects, and those of stative verbs like transitive
   objects, when in the next paragraph, you define active verbs as
   verbs that mark their subjects like transitive subjects, and
   stative verbs as verbs that mark their subjects like transitive
   objects!   That way, you could come to the conclusion that Latin
   and Basque are active languages, though quite idiosyncratic in
   Latin having only active and Basque only stative intransitive verbs
   ;-).  Obviously, such a "definition" is entirely meaningless.
   This way of inflating the definition of "active languages" to
   the bounds of meaningless is also a case of terminological
   sophistry, and it also bites the tail of the whole argument which
   was to "prove" that Tokana and Nur-ellen are not active!

So I thought, "What is that guy trying to tell me?  That my language is
not active for some reasons way too obscure to understand, or that I
should shut up and leave any business with active language to the
professionals?"  I mean, he boldly stated his position, but failed to
underpin it with arguments I could follow.  And when he started making
assumptions on how far my idea of active languages was off the mark, it
seemed clear to me that he was playing a game, though, when thinking
again of it, he apparently had misunderstood me (I admit that I am not
too firmly saddled in theory and terminology, and might have phrased
some things in a not so clear way), as I had misunderstood him.  I still
don't understand what Marcus's position is, but heck, why do I make a
problem of it?  I find it somewhat irritating, however, if someone uses
terminology and one doesn't know what he means by it.

Well, let's end this unproductive matter and return to more productive
discussions.

Jörg.

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