From: amunn@macbeth.umd.edu (Alan Munn)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Method of learning 17 languages
Date: 8 Apr 92 12:14:49 GMT
Distribution: sci
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park

In article <35012@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> daj@reef.cis.ufl.edu (David A. Johns) writes:
>In article <2786@sersun1.essex.ac.uk> tysoj@essex.ac.uk (Tyson J R) writes:
>
># As to the questions of linguistic theory and ethnocentricity I
># differ again from the judgement I am imputing to Scott: I am afraid
># that I agree with Chomsky on the relative value of the narrow but
># insightful versus the broad but superficial.  I wish that we saw
># more work like Jelinkek's recent studies of Salish and recent
># studies by Evans in Mayali, but there is also little doubt that
># Universal Grammar proceeds best from people delving deeper and
># deeper into what they know well (language wise).
>
>I have trouble grasping how this could possibly be true.  Unless you
>believe some specially gifted researchers have access to their own
>underlying abilities independently of the language they speak, there
>is no way for a specialist to distinguish what is universal from what
>is peculiar to his own language, is there?

OK, I'll bite on this one.  Noone is claiming to be able to
distinguish what's universal from what's not a priori, but a
superficial examination of a whole bunch of languages you know little
about is unlikely to tell you much at all -- there's just too much
room for misanalysis (since even a statement such as 'Language X has
Construction Y' or 'Language X doesn't have Y' ususally involves some
analysis.  On the other hand, if you are a native speaker of a
language, you are able to make quite fine distinctions about data even
if they're just on the level of a hunch that says X is different from
Y. If you've tried to do syntax on a language you don't speak you
probably have an idea of how hard it is, and how little confidence you
might have in your consultant's intuitions.  (I'm assuming that all
the quantitative work in the world won't tell you about ungrammatical
sentences.)

Now let's assume that you find some property to hold of a wide range
of different construction types in a particular language.  Take for
instance the fact that comparatives seem to behave similarly to
questions, relative clauses and topicalisation structures in English.
If you have a working hypothesis that English is a reflection of
universal grammar, then you might reasonably suppose that a property
which manifests itself in a number of constructions would do so in
other languages as well.  This can then be tested by looking at
another language or two *in depth*.  If the results converge, then you
may be in a better position to claim that the property is universal.
You won't know for sure, but that doesn't matter since no matter how
many languages you look at, you still won't know for sure -- the next
one you find might violate the universal.  So how many is enough?
Well the joke goes in the GB world that if it's true for English,
Italian and Japanese it's true for all languages, but thats all it is
-- a joke.  

The point is that in depth analysis of individual languages provides a
better means for comparison among languages.  In this respect, the
flurry of activity on Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, German,
Dutch and English in recenttimes has probably yielded more real
generalisations about universals than wide ranging surveys of lot's of
probably misanalysed languages.

>I'm reminded of Ivan Derzhansky's remark about a theory of biology
>based on an exhaustive study of bees, with the results cross-checked
>against wasps and hornets.

To talk of a theory of biology strikes me as bizarre.  I don't really
know what such a theory would look like.  On the other hand if we
wanted a theory of cell metabolism, we might get a long way looking
just at bees.  This is closer to the correct analogy for a theory of
UG.

Alan 
<amunn@umd5.umd.edu>

>
>David Johns