Speculative Grammarian Podcast

The Necessity of Sound Theoretical Frameworks in Linguistic Education; by Noah McMosky; From Volume CLXVI, (166) Number 2, of Speculative Grammarian, January 2013 — Theoretical Linguistics has the loftiest of goals, namely the creation of a theoretical framework that can explain the features of all languages. Lamentably, however, the pursuit of this goal is often frustrated by the activities of field linguists, who seem to take perverse delight in presenting data that apparently contradicts whatever theory seems most promising at the time. Sometimes, the data can be reanalysed in a more reasonable fashion, but to this day I remember my bitter disappointment as a young postdoctoral fellow when no amount of analysis would make Welsh and Hebrew yield to the perfectly straightforward prediction of Metasyntactical Heuristics that all VSO languages should be ergative. (Read by Pete Bleackley.)