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The Politics of Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4504 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 25 of 27 10 September 2014 at 10:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Scientists don't only do research. Part of the job of scientists is to communicate with those
outside their small academic realm, and the fact that many are incapable of doing so makes communication hard. Scientists also have a partial duty to explain science to non-scientists. Especially if you study nuclear energy. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6500 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 27 10 September 2014 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Try to find one single complete grammar for a language written by a transformationalist - it will almost be a miracle if you succeed in finding one. All the standard grammars used by language learners are based on the work of grey-haired old empiricists working before the Chomskyan revolution. The transformationalists have mostly written articles about minor problems (which is their right and maybe even duty), but it seems that it is too much to ask for something substantial that can be used in practical language learning. Another hint: you might imagine that translation software was built on transformational grammar (in one of its many versions), but it seems that Google Translate and its companions aren't even based on grammars, but just on statistical text comparisons. They might have produced better translations if the knowledge stored in traditional grammars somehow had been taken into account, but it doesn't seem that any fruitful collaboration with the world of academic linguistics has been established. How come? Third round: try to find anything written in the transformational jargon which has been useful for language learning. If nuclear physicists and geneticists and zoologists can find ways to communicate the results of their frontline research to the general public, why can't linguists then?
Actually this is a pity - the notion of transformations is very useful and it was NOT invented by Chomsky, but he just tried to use it in cases where other description methods would have been simpler. I have often referred to transformations in my own sporadic writings about grammar, but I see no reason to spend time on pseudo problems which only have popped up because a concept was used outside its area of relevancy. Aokoye writes "There is so much more to linguistics than Chomsky and to imply otherwise is showing ignorance of the topic at best and perhaps a hindrance to others' and your own learning/exploration of linguistics at worst." Yes exactly. The problem with Chomsky - which may not even have been his own fault at the onset - is that he has been elevated to guru status, and that his most ardent followers have succeeded in forcing his tentative and sometimes contradictory statements and methods down the throat on linguists in general, and the result has been that the whole business has lost sight of methods that could have yielded more immediately useful results. Btw. I have left the academic world long ago, but actually I do have a university degree in French and Literature with grammar as my main sphere of interest, so it is not like I haven't seen linguistic research from the inside of the ivory tower. Edited by Iversen on 11 September 2014 at 2:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aokoye Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5338 days ago 235 posts - 453 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese | Message 27 of 27 10 September 2014 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm goingoing to have to disagree with both points. There are plenty of scientists who only do research. Are the researchers at Intel doing much other than researching? Not really. Additionally there are are people who do research - as in it is in their job title. Heck right now the bus I'm on is stopped right outside a research center at the moment. Being a scientist doesn't make you a professor or a teacher and it in no ways automatically means you are a good communicator. That is perhaps one of the reasons why technical and scientific writers exist. Again, participating in academic discourse is a skill that requires critical thinking skills and often a set of vocabulary unique to the disipline as well as prior knowledge. It seems like you're expecting people to be hand-held through everything which is neither realistic nor conducive to learning. There are reasons why courses and texts that are intros to subjects exist. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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