This is the second of a two-parter on generativism, the linguistic school of thought originated by Noam Chomsky. This time, it’s from the perspective of early-career researchers. How is generativism relevant to them, and how do they regard its claims?
We ask our guests:
- What importance does linguistic theory have on your day-to-day research?
- How does generativism relate to nativism, the idea that at least some language is innate?
- Do you think there is a conflict between generativism and functionalism today?
- What do you think is the next step in the generative enterprise?
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
“You’re wrong as the deuce, and you shouldn’t rejoice. If you’re calling him Seuss – he pronounces it Soice.” (But then changed it to Seuss, so…)
http://blog.tavbooks.com/?p=2165
What if our history was written in our grammar? | PhysOrg
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-history-written-grammar.html
Matsumae et al: Exploring correlations in genetic and cultural variation across language families in northeast Asia
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd9223
out of pocket | Green’s Dictionary of Slang
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/mrgbfni#p67tony
Bosses turn to ‘tattleware’ to keep tabs on employees working from home | Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/05/covid-coronavirus-work-home-office-surveillance
High potency weed linked to psychotic episodes, mysterious vomiting illness in young users | NBC News
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/high-potency-weed-linked-psychotic-episodes-mysterious-vomiting-illness-young-n1273463
cryturbate | Urban Dictionary
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cryturbate
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Hedvig: If there’s anything going on at your end, if anyone says something at your end, we can mute you and we– [crosstalk]
Daniel: Yeah, we can take that out.
Hedvig: We’ll get separate tracks, so we can mute out, if you–
Adam: Oh, I see. Yeah, that makes sense.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] -or something or whatever.
Ben: There’s a particularly spirited dog just having a great time.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Adam: No, I don’t think it’ll be that. If I sneeze, you’ll be able to mute it out?
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly.
Daniel: Sneeze away.
Adam: Or, maybe you just want to keep that.
Ben: We’ll listen and reserve judgment until we hear the quality of the sneeze.
Adam: Yeah, exactly.
[laughter]
[Because Language theme]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. She’s someone without whom you wouldn’t want to mess with. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
Ben: I’m just trying to unpack that one.
Hedvig: Yeah. [chuckles] What is it referring to?
Ben: If we don’t have Hedvig, people will want to mess with us, was that the implication?
Daniel: It’s the opposite of what you think it is, even when you think it’s the opposite.
Ben: Oh.
Hedvig: Daniel is just being willfully silly, because we have a syntax episode once again. [laughs]
Daniel: Tell me why that sentence doesn’t make sense.
Ben: I think what happened is you talked about Žižek jokes in the last one and now it’s– [crosstalk]
Daniel: It’s all on.
Hedvig: No, I’ll take it. It’s either that people shouldn’t mess with me or that they shouldn’t mess with other people without me, which both seem good for me.
Daniel: I think there’s no wrong way to take this. It’s all good.
Hedvig: Yeah. No, thank you.
Daniel: I’m going to go on. Okay.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: My turn.
Daniel: He’s a man of few words to live by. It’s Ben Ainslie.
Ben: It’s like if Dr. Seuss got drunk, and if he was drunk, he was also a talentless hack. if those two things were true, it feels like he wrote this [chuckles] introduction.
Daniel: By the way, his name is supposed to be Dr. Seuss [pronouncing it as Soice].
Hedvig: Oh.
Ben: And the more you know.
Daniel: Mm-hmm. He even wrote a poem back in the day. “You’re as wrong as the deuce and you shouldn’t rejoice in pronouncing it Seuss, he pronounces it Soice.” But eventually he relented and called it Seuss, just like everybody else.
Hedvig: Wow.
Ben: Sometimes people do the branding, and you’ve got nothing to do about.
Daniel: Hey, good to see you two Again. This is the second of a two-parter on the school of linguistic thought known as generativism. And to help us, we have two very special guest hosts. We’ve got Taylor Miller, who is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Linguistics at the State University of New York, Oswego. Adam Tallman. Adam is a postdoctoral researcher at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, and research affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Hello to both of you, thank you for coming on the show.
Taylor: I’m really happy to be here.
Adam: Thanks for having me.
Daniel: Excellent. Tell us a bit about your work. What do you do?
Taylor: I’m really excited to be here. I don’t have much of a voice, so your podcast listeners get to hear me in my gravelly jazz version of myself. I don’t typically sound like I’m vocal fry walking, but here we are.
My research program has two different prongs. I work in linguistic theory, looking at issues of wordhood and the phonology syntax interface. I also work in language documentation and reclamation. I often argue that understudied languages are the key and crucial test to linguistic theories, and they’re often overlooked and ignored. So, then we get into a situation where ideas are being recycled, and there’s no real scientific progress being made. So, that’s the kind of question that I’m working on. I do community-based fieldwork in the meantime to answer those questions, and work in documentation and reclamation.
The two languages that I work closest with are Kiowa, a Tanoan language spoken in Southwestern Oklahoma. And Saulteaux Ojibwe, which is spoken in Manitoba. I do fieldwork in both communities. Though, I do work closer with the Kiowa community at this point, because I co-lead an online dictionary project that takes place over multiple sites with a few people that I’m happy to talk about. I get the honor of being included in those communities that I’m not originally a part of. They welcomed me to help the language and the reclamation process.
Hedvig: Super cool.
Daniel: That is so great. Do you mind just telling me a little bit about how you managed to do that, to find that acceptance and find that space in the community?
Taylor: Well, it’s an ongoing kind of permission. In 2016, I did field work for my PhD thesis, and I went to both communities. I went to Carnegie, Oklahoma, to be at the tribal complex for the Kiowa tribe. And then, I also went up to Winnipeg, and worked with community centers in the city that would have Saulteaux speakers who are there. I did it the exact opposite that most linguists do. Most linguists go to places where their advisor has a set relationship with the area, and everybody already knows everybody. I am apparently an overachiever and a glutton for punishment, because I just went. I got a grant and just drove, and showed up in Oklahoma emailing like two people ahead of time like, “Hey, I want to work on the language.” And they were like, “Who is this crazy white woman,” from Delaware at the time, “showing up in Oklahoma?” I just moved in for a month in each place.
It was a little bit rough at times. There was an elder in the Kiowa tribe that said that she saw this confused white woman show up in the elder center, and she just knew she needed to help her.
Daniel: [laughs]
Taylor: So, that was how I started forming those relationships. I’ve been back to Oklahoma in the past years, like I went back in 2019. I work with certain activists online primarily since I’m obviously not there. With the pandemic, it’s definitely not been possible to go work with elderly speakers of the language. But I have a special relationship with both communities, just because of the sheer ludocrisy of me showing up and saying, “Hey, I want to talk about your language.”
Hedvig: How incredible kindness from those communities that they’ve shown you, that’s–[crosstalk]
Taylor: Yeah. I am forever honored, especially with the Kiowa community that they have accepted that I am going to be part of this dictionary project. Both of the co-leaders are white and not Kiowa, were two researchers. We were very concerned about that, especially since the community had asked for a dictionary, but we were concerned about us being two outside people being trusted with that kind of information. Sometimes, the work involves like a PR campaign to make sure that everybody’s okay, and to give everyone an opportunity to be heard if they don’t like something or if they want something in particular. I just remind the Kiowa language program at the tribe, or my co-PI, Amber Neely, who’s a linguistic anthropologist at Kansas State. We work together just to make sure that they know that we’re going to mess up or not understand some cultural, something of importance. And so just to bring it up, and tell us that we’re wrong, and not have it be the end of the project.
I’m working on that, and working with the community right up until the time that they don’t want me to do it anymore. That’s always the way I explain it, is that, well, they want my help, I love giving it. I am in love with the community, and that comes with complications of being an advocate and an ally who’s outside of the community. But I love it, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Hedvig: That’s super cool.
Daniel: I like the cut of your jib, Taylor.
Taylor: [laughs] Great.
Daniel: All right. Adam, tell us about your work. What are you doing?
Adam: I do what’s called documentary and descriptive linguistics. That’s just what we call it at UT, but it could be called the same thing. I don’t think I’ve ever referred to it as reclamation, probably because I’m not working in North America. But it could also be called that. A lot of the work does involve working with communities and figuring out what they want, what type of technical help they want. Usually, in the case of the Chácobo and Araona, the groups that I’ve worked with, since they still speak the language and it’s fairly vital, what they don’t have our educational materials in their language. Everything that’s been produced has been by missionaries, but they have a rich folklore. So, they want that to be transcribed and translated, and some training on how to use computer programs to do that themselves.
At the same time, like Taylor, I work on the grammar. For me, documentary and descriptive linguistics, it’s a field of study which is primarily concerned with creating documentary records of language for a variety of purposes. It can be for the community, it can be for scientific purposes, but to make those records really good and last for a long period of time. I’ve done most of my field research in the Bolivian Amazon, so in Northern Bolivia with Panoan language called Chácobo, in the Department of Beni. Another language called Araona, which may be distantly related. It’s Tacanan language, spoken in the department of La Paz, and if people know about Bolivia, they might think La Paz is the Andean part, the part in the mountains, but actually a larger part of La Paz is in the Amazon. It’s just very hard to get to. One of the reasons people don’t know much about these languages is probably because it’s hard to get to and not very accessible.
I also actually did work on Saulteaux Ojibwe too, in Long Plain reservation because I’m from Winnipeg. That’s what my master’s is on.
Taylor: That’s true. That’s how Adam and I really know each other.
Adam: That’s kind of how we know each other.
Ben: Oh, wow.
Taylor: I was like, “Oh, hi. You’ve written stuff on Saulteaux Ojibwe. Can we be friends?”
Hedvig: [laughs]
Adam: Yeah, sure.
Daniel: [laughs] And you are friends.
Hedvig: That’s a good way to make friends.
Adam: We’re friends.
Ben: [crosstalk] -Winnipeg, “Oh, yeah, sure.”
Adam: Yeah.
Hedvig: I’ve also been to Winnipeg.
Adam: Yeah, that’s where I’m from. I do language comparison, because I think it helps the documentary and descriptive record. If you think about what other languages have, you go, “Oh, what– Maybe these languages have this too. Maybe I should look for that.” I think there’s a relationship between language comparison and description and documentation, and I explore that. Those are kind of my primary research interests, that’s primarily my background.
Daniel: Wow.
Hedvig: Thank you.
Daniel: Thanks for bringing all this expertise to our show today. Now, our last Patreon bonus episode was a Journal Club episode with me, Hedvig, and Steve, Hedvig’s partner. I guess he’s approaching unofficial cohost status, has he not?
Hedvig: He may be. Yeah.
Ben: Being Hedvig’s partner, though, I think we should give him a say in that, like normally when people are on the show full time, we just tell them that they’re a cohost. And they don’t really–[crosstalk]
Daniel: They’re conscripted.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Ben: [crosstalk] -we often need to be like, “Do you want to be?”
Daniel: [chuckles] Well, maybe. It was a fun episode.
Hedvig: It was a fun episode. I enjoy Journal Club a lot. Besides having lovely guests, my second favorite part of the show is covering the research news.
Ben: Because you’re a nerd.
Hedvig: Aren’t we all?
Daniel: One of us, one of us. So, if you want to hear those Journal Club episodes, and a lot of other bonus episodes the minute they come out, then become a patron at the listener level. You can find us on patreon.com/becauselangpod. You’ll put yourself in line for special rewards, like hang with us on Discord, our yearly mail out. And, of course, supporting the show, which gives you warm and fuzzy feels. So, thanks to all of our patrons. Shall we?
Hedvig: One of them is in this call, right now, I believe.
Ben: Oh.
Hedvig: Adam, is this one you want to–
[crosstalk]
Adam: I am a patron, but I’m not a very high-paying one.
Ben: Conflict of interest. That’s it. [crosstalk]
[crosstalk]
Hedvig: Okay, cut that if you want.
Ben: Clearly, we’re no better than Fox News. This is just a paid puff piece.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Adam: Yeah.
Hedvig: I actually didn’t know he was until–
Daniel: [laughs] [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah, I didn’t know until just the other week.
Taylor: Well, I was listening to one of your older episodes, because I had never heard the podcast. I was listening to the one that you did recently about decolonizing linguistics, focusing on Australian languages. I was like, “Oh, I like this, I’ll become a patron,” so it’s going to happen soon.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Oh, sweet.
Taylor: [crosstalk] your podcast, don’t worry about it. [laughs]
Daniel: You start out as a patron, then you end up on the show. You could be surprised who’s in our lists who we hang out with. Once again, thanks to all of our patrons.
Ben: Righto, Daniel. Enough of this shameless spruiking, you vagabond. Let’s move on to the news.
Hedvig: So, if I asked all of you lovely people who are on the call today, how many languages do you think there has ever been in history? How many things that we call languages have there ever been, what would you guess?
Ben: Nine.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Ben is our non-linguist on the show. So, let’s maybe start with a basic question for Ben. How many languages are in the world today?
Daniel: What just happened was that Ben googled it, and that’s the answer that Google gave you, at least nine.
Ben: No, I’m going to guess. I know that off the top of my head, the number is not certain, but somewhere over 4000 languages exist on Earth right now.
Daniel: About 7000 secretly.
Ben: Okay, a range, 4000 to 7000. I thought we were doing the layperson thing, shut up.
Hedvig: 7000 is more than 4000.
[crosstalk]
Taylor: [crosstalk] -at least 4000 though, and there are at least 9000 too.
Daniel: Mathematically, you’re quite correct.
Ben: 4000 to 7000 now times by, let’s say 10,000 years. Okay, let’s go with 100,000 languages in the history of–
Hedvig: 100,000 languages, okay. Decent guess. Anyone else want to pitch in?
Taylor: Well, I cheated and I looked at this ahead of time.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: Oh.
Daniel: I saw the tweet as well, but I didn’t peek. It’s from Sverker Johansson, who’s done some provocative– I don’t want to say back at the envelope calculations, because I think this is much more sophisticated. I think this would require many envelopes, but it’s a talk from the Protolang Conference and he’s tweeted it as well. So, we’ll put a link on becauselanguage.com.
Ben: None of that is a guess still. Start making the guessing.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. None of those are guesses. So, Daniel hasn’t looked, what is your guess?
Daniel: Okay. First of all, languages, common languages go, and I know, the usual problem with defining what a language is–
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Number, number.
Ben: All right, so much more stalling. So much more stalling.
Daniel: I’m going to say that a language completely replaces itself on average of maybe 1000 years. There are 7000 languages now, there might have been 7000 languages before. So, I just keep multiplying by 1000 depending on how many 1000-year chunks there were since humans started speaking.
Hedvig: Yeah. You’re in the right direction. This is the similar direction that he goes in, yeah.
Daniel: Is it? I’m thrilled. Okay. But then, I’ve got to say the first group of humans, we’re talking 150,000 years ago? Probably didn’t speak 7000 languages, they probably spoke one and then it branched out. So, there’s a cone. Let’s just say that there’s 100 chunks of 1000 years. There’s 7000 languages now. Let’s say seven million.
Hedvig: Seven million? Okay.
Daniel: Sorry, sorry. No, I added a zero.
Hedvig: No, seven million is your guess. Adam, do you have a guess?
Adam: I’m guessing what this other dude says. That’s basically–
Hedvig: Well, you’re giving your guess and then what this guy says, and then who’s right, who’s to say.
Adam: I think the problem with basing it on the current number of languages is because there’s been massive amounts of linguicide in the last 400, 500 years because of European-
Taylor: White people?
Adam: -because of the–
Ben: Colonialism.
Daniel: White people.
Adam: Colonialism.
Ben: [crosstalk]
Adam: It’s not totally clear to me. Maybe it’s not totally clear to me, whether that type of process of massive linguistic extinction is something that’s repeated itself over and over again or not throughout history. That’s the tricky part for me. But assuming it’s not, I’d put the number probably even higher. So, if you start off with– if you try to subtract away from colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, how many would there be? I think there’d probably be at least triple. And then, you go back from there, I’ll do the same logic and I’ll say 210 million.
Ben: Oh.
Hedvig: 210 million. Wow. So, Taylor, did you also guess?
Taylor: I did read the Sverker Johansson tweet.
Hedvig: Oh, yes, you read it. You’re discarded.
Ben: Discarded? [chuckles] Do you mean disqualified?
Taylor: Don’t discard me, but I was–
Ben: [laughs]
Taylor: I looked at the pictures, but I was shocked at the number he came up with because I think in my head, I was being much more conservative than the math would show up. I like how everybody’s like, “Oh, and then we’re going to do all this math and take this out.” I was just thinking like, “I don’t know, a couple 100,000?” I wasn’t doing the math. [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Secretly, the answer all along was nine.
Taylor: [laughs]
Ben: This is some slides I’ve been shared on Twitter by Jonas Nölle from Sverker Johansson’s talk at Protolang. And he comes up with 3.4 million different languages. Different languages, but hold on, he says that only 25% of the ones are spoken by homosapiens. So, he clearly has a bit of a different definition of language than I think most of you. 25% of 3.4 million, I went and asked my math husband, and he said it’s 850,000.
Ben: Ooh.
Taylor: So, that’s closer to my number in my head. [chuckles]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah, because I mistakenly said 7 million because I added a zero, but I actually meant to say 7000 times 100, which is 700,000. So, I was pretty close.
Hedvig: There you go.
Ben: That’s a very convenient retroactive modulation.
Taylor: That’s how we prefer to do it.
Ben: [crosstalk]
Adam: I’ll retroactively go back here as well with my–[crosstalk]
[laughter]
Ben: We’re just paint those targets around where we shoot, how is that?
Adam: Yeah.
Hedvig: For this calculation, he did similar things to you guys like estimating that maybe the lifespan of a language is about 1000,2000 years, but he looked at modern-day populations that we know about in Australia and in the Americas that are classified as hunter gatherers, assuming that that is what is more common for the back in time for our species. And then, looks at what population numbers they have per community group and then looks at population stats backwards in time and various bottlenecks and things like that, and then he comes up with this number. We’ll put the link to the tweet in our show notes. I can really recommend flipping through the little slides. It was good fun. So, 3.4 million different languages ever, and about half of those are what he classifies as protolanguages. So, maybe we would say then– oh, now I have to do 3.4 divided by 2.
Daniel: Oh, 1.7.
Hedvig: My math brain. 1.7, thank you. Yeah, of course, sorry. [laughs]
Daniel: I redeemed myself to my order of magnitude error.
Hedvig: That are what we might call languages, and then 850,000 of those spoken by homosapiens. So, yeah, pretty neat, I thought. It’s good to think about. It certainly puts in perspective, how many languages are alive now. Besides what Adam already brought up with that, there are probably many more languages about 400 or 500 years ago before white people colonization of the planet. If we go further back in time, there must have been even more, and it tells us something about what are the specimens of our language capability that are alive today and what might we have lost backwards in time. We can only really say something about the languages we know about now. Maybe they’re outliers, we don’t know. Let’s hope not. But, yeah, I thought that’s pretty neat.
Daniel: That’s a cool question. I like just digging into weird little questions like that. So, that’s cool, thanks.
Let’s see, this next one was suggested by Diego on Patreon about the history of language and how we can tell what it was like. This one comes from a huge team of people including lead author, Hiromi Matsumae, Damián Blasi, hello, and Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich. It was published in Science Advances.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Let me just pitch for this one and then, Hedwig, I’m going to hand it off to you in a bit because you, you’re more well versed on this. But let’s just say that you wanted to figure out how people in a certain area were related to each other. And you can obviously use genetics and we do. But which linguistic factor would you want to use? Would you want to look at the words that they had in common? Would you like to look at the sounds they had in common? Would you like to look at the grammatical features they had in common? Or, would you like to look at music, like the song structure that they have, or the performance style that they have, which would be the most indicative of shared heritage, shared–
Taylor: Ancestry, I guess.
Hedvig: Shared history.
Daniel: Shared history, and–
Ben: Well, I can always speak from my experience. Anyone that I have shared history with usually just hates me. So, maybe you just look for who hates who and then you’d be like, “Well, they’re clearly [crosstalk] each other.
[chuckles]
Taylor: That’s a legitimate method, I suppose.
[laughter]
Hedvig: At least for shallow time.
Ben: I would have thought art and performance would rate fairly highly. Obviously, we’re talking in somewhat abstract terms. We’re not saying the art in one place in the other place have to be exactly the same, and that’s the only way you– if you can make linkages between art, I would say that would– for instance, if one tradition is 2D figures on earthenware, and then in the other tradition, you see 2D tapestries, but the kind and the style of the 2D representations of people is vaguely similar, I would say, “Oh, yeah, that’s pretty good,” there’s probably a pretty good chance those people are related in some way.
Hedvig: But maybe the problem there is that maybe people borrowed from each other and influenced each other in a much more shallow time depth. So, maybe they’ve been in contact with each other in, say, the last 100, 200 years, and they’ve copied each other’s artistic styles.
Ben: So, then we need to look for the thing that is least copyable, right?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: [crosstalk] -we can copy words a lot.
Ben: Like the thing that would only possibly push through. Words is a terrible one, because we learn words all the freakin’ time. Just ask people who speak AVE and have to hang around white people. I’m thinking of probably grammar then. Grammar doesn’t seem like a thing that you just interact with someone who has a vastly different grammar from you and then go, “Hmm, I like the way you put all your words together. I’m going to do that.” Instead, we go, “Oh, I like your word for hamburger. I’ll have that, please.”
Taylor: Yeah. We talk about the intensity of contact and it takes a very long intense amount of language contact to transfer grammar. We do loanwords really easily. We can borrow sounds even when we need to do that. English took the [ʒ] sound from French. So, you can have your sounds, your words, those are fairly easily borrowed but it takes a lot to make grammar change or to get full idioms to transfer over. So, yeah, I would think that grammar would be rather stable too.
Ben: I’ve been on a linguistics podcast for six years now and I’ve known many, many, many people who speak French, German, and Italian. I still whenever someone explains to me that they say, eyes blue, instead of blue eyes, I’m like, “Well, that’s just dumb and wrong, obviously, that can’t be a thing.” Because that just sounds so completely, unbelievably unnatural. It doesn’t make any sense to a person. When grammar switches, your brain’s just like [fake cough] “I don’t understand.”
Taylor: That’s a very special feeling that I try to get my students to feel, too. [laughs]
Daniel: [chuckles]
Ben: I want to break the brain now.
Hedvig: Grammar is a feeling. We’ve talked about this before. We’re going to get more into grammar later. But in many ways, I would argue that grammar is a feeling because when you hear something ungrammatical, you feel it.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: Hmm.
Hedvig: So, the answer is in this paper, they compared– they had 14 languages spoken in Northeastern Eurasia. So, we’re talking mainly Russia and parts of Japan and Siberia. West Greenlandic was also in the study. They had 14 languages. They had 10 different language families or isolates, languages that don’t have any known relatives. They used a bunch of grammatical traits from logical trades. They analyze 283 songs into 41 musical features, and they used 40 lexical concepts. They compared that with the history that they can derive from comparing the genome of these populations. And they found that there was very strong support for the idea that grammar is reflecting the population history of these communities better than lexicon.
Ben: Where did art sit?
Hedvig: Not very good. I think it was worse than– I’m just going to click my way to the paper.
Taylor: I actually tried to read this paper last night, like a crazy person, and went and found the actual paper. I have my notes, I’m just like, “I don’t get this at all, but cool.”
[laughter]
Ben: [crosstalk] -Journal Club.
Taylor: Because I was trying to figure out how they were calculating distance in relation on all these things. I understand music theory to a certain extent, almost went to school for music. So, how are they calculating distance from each other with these musical features? But I couldn’t find it easily.
Hedvig: Yeah. They do a bunch of interesting things that are a little bit complicated maybe to go through. But basically, they derive distances from all of these different features, so they quantify the music and the grammar things into the different features. For grammar, it’s things like, “Do you put your adjective before after the noun?” Actually, Ben was one of them, does your adjective agree in gender with your noun, 25 of those types of things. And then, 40 concepts that are supposed to be basic vocabulary, so supposed to be slow changing. The idea is that while the basic vocabulary was able to trace the medium time distance, so the ones that are known in the language families fairly well, it was not able to connect the language families with each other.
So, if you imagine that you’re constructing a language family, you get to a point where it’s just like I have no more information, this is the top-level node in this tree. And they argue that, at that point, grammar is able to connect things, and that the correlation of the association with the genome supports that. So, it’s a pretty cool paper. It is in contrast to a paper that came out a while ago called the Dynamics of Language Systems by Greenhill et al, where they argue that grammatical features change faster than basic vocabulary features. We currently have– this is a hot topic, and I expect we’ll see more papers of this style coming out.
I should also say that when people talk about grammatical features, they’re using different databases and different ways of quantifying the grammatical features. So, that could be a source of the different results as well.
Taylor: For sure.
Hedvig: Some people are doing maybe– when people think of grammar they might think of words, like the words in a pronoun system like I, me, you. Whereas most typologists, I am one, think about things like do you have this thing, yes or no? And those are quite different type data. But anyway, it’s a fruitful and fertile– Yes, fertile area of research that [crosstalk] expect we see.
Ben: Yes, fruitful and fertile were both appropriate.
Hedvig: Fruitful and fertile.
Taylor: [laughs]
Daniel: Are those doublets? Never mind, anyway. Thanks, Hedvig.
Sponcon alert, give us one minute 30 seconds. If you love language, and we know you do, there’s a podcast that you should be checking out. It’s Spectacular Vernacular on Slate.
Ben: Yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s two people that we have had on the show so many times that they are kind of honorary presenters, but clearly, they decided to just like quit the band and start their own band, which is actually really good. I’m super jealous.
Hedvig: Rude.
Ben: Yeah, so rude.
Hedvig: No, it’s rude.
Ben: Also, I hate when people go off and make good art without me.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Ben: And that’s exactly what they’ve done Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer smashing it over at Spectacular Vernacular, so you should check it out.
Daniel: What I love about the show is that not only do they have great interviews and they do a bit of news, but they also, at the end, have a bit where they’ll spring a language game on listener and on you.
Ben: Oh, I want me and Hedvig to go on the show and so we can do the thing that I love the most, which is get unbelievably competitive for no real reason.
[laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Check out Spectacular Vernacular. I’ve added it to my list of regular linguistic podcast listens. They do new episodes bimonthly.
Hedvig: Bi– No, don’t. They release new episodes every other Tuesday. So, that is two episodes every month.
Daniel: Fortnightly, Daniel, you terrorist, you linguistic monster.
Hedvig: Bimonthly. Wherever you get your podcasts, whatever your dealer is.
Daniel: Bimonthly.
[chuckles]
Ben: It’s not bimonthly. It’s just that– Just stop it.
Daniel: Fortnightly.
[chuckles]
[music]
Daniel: We are here with Taylor Miller and Adam Tallman talking about the linguistic school of thought called generativism. Thank you both for being here.
Adam: Thanks for having us.
Taylor: Very happy to be here.
Daniel: You’ve told us a bit about your work. So, thanks for that. We’ve already had a discussion with John Goldsmith and David Adger about how generativism got to be this way. One of the takeaways that I got from that was, we asked, what is generativism? How would you describe it? What is the goal? John’s answer was to make a grammar or a machine or a computer program or some contrivance to distinguish the grammatical sentences from the ungrammatical sentences. If you did that, then you’re a generativist. David’s answer was to see what a possible language looks like and doesn’t look like because some things are very common, some things are not very common at all, and some things just never happen. Why? Do you feel either those definitions seem current or either those seem maybe not so relevant anymore?
Taylor: Adam, do you want to go first?
Adam: Yeah. The definitions or the ideas given by Goldsmith and Adger sounds about right to me, that’s how I understood it as well. The one thing I would add that I actually think as you pointed out was that one of the important parts of the history of generative linguistics is that this model is general. So, it’s accounting for all languages simultaneously in a way. Because you can imagine just doing a generative grammar of a single language and not being able to necessarily use that model on the next language.
One of the things that Goldsmith said that I found the most salient was this idea of distinguishing between ungrammatical and grammatical sentences and how that wasn’t necessarily a big goal before. But I would say that even amongst linguists who don’t consider themselves generativists, that’s something that they all are trying to do as well. So, if your goal is to just figure out a model of linguistic behavior in a way that accounts for speakers’ intuitions about distinguishing between ungrammatical and grammatical sentences, it’s fine in a way to say that, but it’s so broad that I think it pretty much encompasses everyone at this point.
Taylor: Yeah, true.
Adam: So, Adger’s idea about distinguishing between possible languages and impossible ones, I think, has this sort of problem too. But the problem comes in, I think, when you– there might be a different perspective, where you start saying, “Well, really what we should be doing, because we don’t know about these 3.4 million languages. The best we can do is probable versus improbable languages, and their theory maybe should be more concerned with that.” But the difference between possible and impossible and probable and improbable, there’s a limiting point where it’s very hard to distinguish between them. There’s points at which I would say the definitions they gave are accurate, but they’re not specific enough to allow us to understand how the distinction between generativist and non-generativist explanations are actually used in a field and how the conflicts emerge. So, yes and no, I would say.
Hedvig: I agree with Adam. I thought it was maybe a bit under-specific.
Taylor: Yeah. I had been thinking about this too, because I was trying to think if that was sufficient, and I don’t necessarily– I agree with Adam, that when you break it down like that, no linguist is going to say, “No, that’s not what we do.” That’s what you want to do, you want to find out more language that accounts for what is possible and impossible, what works and what doesn’t, you want to push the boundaries and see if you can break it. See what works and what doesn’t in whatever form of language that you’re working at. I think generativism really started with Chomsky’s idea of nativism and that there was this innate language faculty, and that was a specifically evolved capacity in humans. Then, he had this idea of treating language like a computer inspired by the Turing machine, and that you could generate infinite possibilities from a finite set of tools. So, you have a finite set of phonemes, a finite set of word formation rules, a finite set of phrase structure rules, what have you. And then, from those things, you get infinity where you have linguistic creativity and all these different languages. That’s what started with principles and parameters theory when it first formalized and started as standard theory, extended standard theory, and what have you throughout the history of it.
When it comes down to it, the biggest takeaway of generativism versus others, like functionalism or you can look at anthropology or sociolinguistics or whatever you have, is that this idea that there’s this innate language specific faculty versus not, versus it’s an evolutionary accident, that we have language. We had to develop fine motor skills in order to use tools, and so why not expand that usage to be about speech, and transfer it to the vocal tract? Or, we already use hand-eye coordination with a visual language that makes a lot of sense, which is why a lot of evolutionary linguists have argued that you had started with sign language and then it transferred over to spoken language. So, it has to do with the origin of language, which is the big question. Is it this innate idea, or is it like, we happen to have these skills and they got repurposed for language at the core of it?
Chomsky then had his little apostles. He had his group of students, and they were all like, “This is revolutionary. We need to take this idea and run with it.” And then they all ran with it, and that’s where you have the split. It’s like the generativist or the innatist versus other.
Hedvig: Right. We were talking earlier on the show as well about if it’s possible to describe yourself as a generativist without being a nativist, and some people were like, “Yeah, yeah. Maybe.”
Taylor: Yeah. I think it is now. Adam may disagree with me, but I think, obviously, in the 70s, when this was first taking off, a huge issue is that this idea of context-free analysis, looking at language in a vacuum, and just looking at the patterns and the puzzles, and to create this model that could generate grammar, versus looking at language in context, looking at the function of communication, the context of the conversation, the culture, all of that, that’s where everybody was splitting. How best to study language, to answer the big question of where it comes from. At this point, the year 2021, most people in our generation, like Adam and me, where we all came up in grad school around the same time and are now doing research, we just don’t care about that question.
Hedvig: [chuckles]
Taylor: It’s like a cool question, but it’s philosophical to me. It seems almost like a religion, where I cannot falsify that, I cannot tell you how it showed up, I cannot tell you if it’s an evolutionary accident or innatist. There’s certainly studies that we can do to try to expose that issue more, but we’re never going to know. We’re just not going to know. In my opinion, why are we taking the time to ask that question then?
Hedvig: [laughs]
Taylor: What we know is that regardless of the origins of language, babies come in ready to acquire language. There’s something in them that says, “I need to get a sound system, a word system, a sentence system,” and they do that. Whether it’s an epiphenomenon of all of these different processes or it’s this innate language faculty, who cares? They do it. So, let’s study it.
Hedvig: Wow. Taylor, we brought you on this show to be the more generative representative.
Taylor: I know.
[laughter]
Hedvig: I want to talk about this.
Adam: Surprise.
[laughter]
Ben: No one expects the Spanish generativism.
Taylor: I know. I was like, “Oh no,” because the way I always talk about it is that I’m a dirty generativist and I know it.
Ben: If you’re a dirty generativist–
[laughter]
Taylor: I cannot run away from it. My training is 150% generativist. I know that’s why you have me on the show because I went to Rutgers as an undergrad, I went to University of Delaware as a grad student. I actually took the time last night to tally up the number of professors that I’ve worked directly with who were Chomsky’s students, or worked indirectly with Chomsky as part of their advising committee or something. There’s this list of seven here that I have worked with that are either Chomsky’s advisees or– I’m his grandbaby in terms of linguistics. I am the most generativity you can get.
Hedvig: Ungrateful grandbaby, it seems a little bit.
Taylor: Well, yeah. It’s changed over the years. I remember being an undergrad and I thought functionalists were mythical. I didn’t think that they existed.
Hedvig: Oh. I should say I come from the different– I come from a very functional department. Adam, I would describe Winnipeg, University of Manitoba, as a fairly– well, not necessarily as generativist as for example, Toronto or other places in the US certainly. I was brought up to believe that Chomsky was not– I mean reading-
Taylor: The devil?
Hedvig: -between the lines– yeah, antichrist. I remember thinking, “They can’t be this evil.” [laughs]
Taylor: They can’t possibly believe that? I remember getting into grad school and I met someone that they said, “I don’t believe in universal grammar.” I was like, “I found you.” It was like you exist. I heard more that this was a real thing, but I didn’t know for sure. It changed. I know that I drip in generativism and it affects how I look at everything. My go-to lens is that, yeah, you take the Turing machine, you get Chomsky. Then, you get generative grammar, then you study that and the end. But over the years, I have certainly pulled back on it because I have gotten very anti-armchair linguistics.
Hedvig: Yes. Another reason we brought you two on the show is because you’re both field workers and I think you represent a new angle on the next generation of linguists through specifically that lens.
Taylor: Adam can certainly add his two cents in, but I have changed dramatically since I first started studying linguistics, much to the chagrin of a lot of people [laughs] that I studied linguistics with because I’m just, like, “It doesn’t matter. Just do the work. What’s wrong with you? Just be a good scientist and don’t be racist.” That’s kind of my life philosophy.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Yeah. Adam, what do you think? How much does this affect you?
Adam: Well, this is sort of getting into the second question-
Taylor: Oh, for sure.
Adam: -how are you introduced to the labels. So, I’ll try to answer the how I was introduced to this distinction between generativism and functionalism. Probably, correct me if I’m wrong, Hedvig. You said University of Manitoba is mostly generativist or that was your impression or–?
Hedvig: When I was there, there was Jila Ghomeshi who was generativist and then Terry, and many of the others. It felt like as a mix. Actually, one of the reasons I went to Winnipeg was because I looked at linguistics apartments for like, lots of places in Canada and US, and Winnipeg seem the least generative of the places I could go to.
Ben: Sure.
Adam: Yeah, it was a mix. My experience wasn’t like Taylor’s, but there were things that I was shocked when I left Manitoba. I think the thing I was shocked of, I was shocked about people who took a lot of specific hypotheses from generativist grammar for granted. Rather than seeing them as interesting things that we could study, they just thought they were true. I remember just being completely blown away, like meeting a student from MIT. And I was like, “Oh, I found some evidence for the VP-Shell hypothesis,” and he was like, “Why would you need evidence? We already know this.” At UT Austin, we were debating that. So, my experience there was a little bit different.
But going back a bit, I became aware of the distinction in syntax classes and in language acquisition classes, taught by Lorna MacDonald who was a functionalist, but the idea was that the classes would primarily teach you these things from the generative perspective. In the class, she taught both perspectives, which I was really confused by. We’re sort of sitting there, you’re talking about how we’re a science, but then there seems to be this huge dividing line. At the University of Manitoba, you had Jila Ghomeshi. Now, you have Will Oxford who’s more of a generativist, I think, overall. The people at Winnipeg, it’s one of these weird departments where it’s mixed, and you could go talk to professors about their opinions, and nobody agreed with each other. I realized that later that wasn’t normal. I think that normal-
[laughter]
Adam: -state of affairs is that you’re like UCSB, and Chomsky is the devil and or somewhere else, and the generativists are just completely insane.
Taylor: For sure. There’s been a couple times where I’ve thought about applying for a job, and I thought that my CV would just burst into flames when I entered the department. It would just be like, “Oh, no, the Chomsky’s bleeding off of it.” [laughs]
Adam: Yeah, I know. There’s that, and then there’s of course departments, University of Toronto, I think a little bit, obviously MIT where UCSB isn’t as bad I’ve found, but it’s still pretty in one camp. Actually, it’s much more homogeneous in terms of the perspectives and angles that people take. And then I went to UT Austin, and it’s similar, except that there’s a lot of people who believe a different brand of generativists theories, like LFG and HPSG that were talked about.
Hedvig: Lexical Functional Grammar and–
Adam and Daniel: Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.
Hedvig: Thank you.
Adam: For me, it was always at the forefront that there was this conflict. Over time, just because it became more like, look, there’s a good functional explanation or there’s a good formal explanation or good generativist explanation or good innate architecture explanation, because you can embed functionalist explanations within generative grammar, but I’ll put that aside for a second. It became really like, because so many hypotheses in our field seem to be untestable and unfalsifiable, which is what Taylor was talking about. I’m just like, “No, no, no. Give me a testable theory. I don’t care if it’s functionalist or generativist. I just want you to say something content full that isn’t just all languages are like this abstract thing that you can’t consistently identify and furthermore, need not have any empirical signal,” which is a very common thing that I think occurs across the discipline.
Daniel: I think this unfalsifiability thing, we need to zoom in on it, because it’s a major problem for me. Can you tell me why you think that generativism might in some way be unfalsifiable?
Adam: I don’t think generativism is unfalsifiable, and I don’t think that’s the issue because it’s a program. There’s a lot of hypotheses within generativism, and a lot of hypotheses within functionalism that aren’t falsifiable. To me, that’s one of the rubrics of what makes something scientific to begin with. So, Taylor, go ahead.
Daniel: Yeah, you’ve got to be able to prove this wrong.
Taylor: Yeah. For instance, there’s always a step where you have a hypothesis. Let’s go ahead and take universal grammar and just lean into the controversy. We have the universal grammar hypothesis–
Daniel: So, universal grammar is? Sorry.
Taylor: A hypothesis. The hypothesis is that everyone has this preprogrammed bioprogram that’s language specific and it can come in with as much detail or is not, depending on what you find. That was the whole purpose of principles and parameters.
Hedvig: Wow, that’s vague.
Taylor: Yeah. Okay. It was the whole purpose of principles and parameters then to define what were these principles that governed UG. What was something that was in the grammar that we could show that’s like universal across all languages so then we can show that that’s what we come in with? What principles and parameters learned over the next 20, 30 years with–? [chuckles] you can’t do it. Like you can’t do it there. You get so bogged down in these details, it turned into microparameters. It turned into, like, all of these things, like, I’ve done–
Hedvig: Circles on circles.
Taylor: Right. I’ve done some research on the polysynthesis parameter. I became really interested if there was a theoretically valuable way to define polysynthetic languages, in a way that it’s not just descriptive. So, these languages are–
Adam: Say what polysynthesis is–
Taylor: I’m getting there.
[laughter]
Taylor: Polysynthetic languages are languages which take the entire meaning of an English sentence, and then they plop it all into a single word. I just felt some people cringe, because that’s how I defined it but I’m simplifying in a way. But this has been a debate for– I think, the term started in 1831. I think it was Sergeant Whipple, did I make that up? Anyway, but it went back to 1830s, where this idea of these are these exotic languages that have these really long words that translate to a whole sentence. And so, they’re really weird, and that’s to contrast with languages like Mandarin that are very isolating and have one morpheme or meaning per word. So, it’s just like, word, word, word, word. As opposed to, in Kiowa, my favorite word translates to, “She forcibly sent him to go out rabbit hunting,” it’s all one verb complex, it’s all right there.
I remember learning about this in undergrad, and being like, “That’s the best thing that’s ever happened. I want to learn everything I can about these sentence words.” There’s a huge debate about this, about whether or not you can define this, whether or not, you can successfully define all polysynthetic languages to the exclusion of other languages, and you can’t. I went through and just looked at one principle or parameter, the polysynthesis parameter, and showed that both the weakest interpretation of it, that there would be any of these topics shown in a cluster maybe to define polysynthetic languages, versus all of the requirements, the strongest version where all the requirements would have to be present. None of it works. You can always find something that there’s a language that somebody considers to be polysynthetic but it doesn’t fit the definition that you have. So, there’s a lot of people–
Hedvig: [crosstalk] -category.
Taylor: Right. There’s a lot of people who tried to make that, but they don’t do so in a testable way. They just say, “Well, morphology does a lot.” And you’re like, “Okay, but what does that mean? And how can I test that?” At a certain point, you have to say, “Am I describing the situation or am I explaining the situation?” to go back to Chomsky levels of adequacy. Again, the dirty generativist coming out.
Daniel: [laughs]
Taylor: That’s what I’m talking about. If I can’t falsify it or test it, then it’s philosophy. And that’s cool, let’s talk about it. Maybe there’s a reason why we have an intuition that these languages are special. Let’s dig into that, but I don’t think that there’s a way that we can principledly and predictively talk about certain things.
Hedvig: It sounds like you’re saying is that a lot of the questions that used to really define the field of theoretical linguistics maybe 20, 30 years ago, are to you as younger scholars, not really affecting your day-to-day research that much.
Adam: Well, we have to interact with the older generation, and they believe those [chuckles] things so– [crosstalk]
Taylor: Every once in a while, Adam and I, and even other people that are our age, like I’ve worked closely with Hannah Sande at UC Berkeley, with Natalie Weber at Yale. Adam and I work together. All these people that were like, “Yeah, that’s a question.” But what I’m really interested is in the structure of grammar. What kinds of things are obviously interacting with one another? Things like, do we need a morphology? Or do we just go syntax only? I can ask that question and go really in depth with it and not care where it comes from. I’m just interested in the architecture of language as we see it now and what we can learn from that. If the answer to why we do certain things is, well, it’s a biological program that you can go back to biology and see this functional explanation for X, Y, and Z, awesome. Or if it’s evidence that maybe there is something that’s innate to linguistics or language, awesome, but it’s not my focus.
Ben: It sounds like Catholicism.
Taylor: Yeah.
Ben: It sounds like the younger generation of old people who grew up Catholic, and if asked, are like, “Yeah, I guess I’m Catholic.” But there’s always like, “What’s your opinion on the catechisms?” “I don’t fucking know.”
Taylor: Like, who cares.
Adam: I was wondering if I could take a step back and actually say what falsifiability is and where it comes from.
Taylor: Sure.
Adam: I think that’s maybe what Daniel was getting at. Falsifiability is this idea that comes from Karl Popper. Basically, the idea is that scientific conjectures can never really be proven right. People debate about–
Hedvig: [crosstalk] conjecture.
Adam: A conjecture is a guess about some — or a hypothesis about what something is true.
Daniel: So, you can have a conjecture that all swans are white. And no matter how many white swans you find, that’ll never prove that all swans are white. But, if you can falsify it, if you can find one black swan, that demolishes the entire edifice.
Taylor: I always use the swan example.
Adam: Sure. I think more important point for what me and Taylor are talking about is how it delimits a scientific versus a nonscientific hypothesis. One of the problems is that hypotheses can be formulated in a way that sounds like they’re testable. But then, when you look into detail about how the linguist or any of us would go about testing it, you realize that it’s actually circular, or that it’s self-referential, or that it’s referring to a whole bunch of theoretical concepts that aren’t clearly defined. So basically, the falsifiability is that you don’t have a theory unless you could, in principle, think of a way to show that it’s wrong. It’s basically the reason that if I tell you that I think stuff is going to happen in the future, you’re not going to think I’m a prophet. I have to be able to say something that’s contentful enough so that we could design an experiment to test it.
There’s a lot of caveats to this statement. The things about white swans and black swans, if you think about it from a Bayesian perspective, you might think, yes, you can have inductive evidence for things. There’s a lot written about this, for instance, by somebody like Ian Hacking or somebody like that. But the basic idea underlying everything is that if you cannot formulate a way that in principle would make you change your views, you do not have a scientific theory. And then, the added condition is also that we have to have methods that allow us to gather data in such a way that it would not just prejudge our theory to be correct.
Following along something David Adger said in his criticism of everything that he didn’t consider to be generativist, I guess, he said, “Well, my response to all of them is, why do we never see X, Y, Z?” And there’s lots of things like this that are stated, some of them I think, are on the table. But a lot of the statements that have been made about what’s universal, where they say, “Well, you never find this,” it’s because ‘this’ is defined in such a vague way, it’s basically a moving target. He actually mentioned a case with Bantu languages. I don’t know anything specific about this case. But he referenced a whole bunch of theory, internal notions, like coordination, which doesn’t have a clear definition. If I found something that looks like it might falsify what he was saying, I found a coordinate structure that maybe contradicted his hypothesis, you could shrug your shoulder and say, “I don’t think that’s a coordinate construction. I think it’s this other thing, and now it doesn’t falsify the theory.” If the methodology is constructed in a way that there’s always that type of escape hatch, it’s not truly testable.
So, when Adger says, “Well, why don’t you ever find this?” It’s like, “Well, we don’t find this because I know you analyzed this out of existence.” It doesn’t mean that it’s actually testable. You have to be able to clearly state making reference to things that you could observe based on the properties of languages that we can observe, what types of properties would make you test your hypothesis, and then develop methods that actually test them severely, methods that make it improbable that this theory would pass this test if it were false, for instance, but we don’t develop those methods. We just conjecture and that’s good enough, and then rationalize away counterevidence. And that’s true in both camps for me.
Taylor: It’s true across the board. Anybody’s going to get– they’re going to get defensive if they believe something, and you show them counterevidence to it. This is true outside of linguistics. We don’t like being contradicted. But the point of science is to put forward your idea and then welcome the discussion that says, “Actually, I do have counterevidence for that,” and to take it into to include that in what you do moving forward. I have made my entire research career at this point all about taking things that people take for granted and then breaking them. “This is a definition or a word that you use constantly? I don’t think it means what you think it means, let’s look at it.” Or, “This is a stress pattern in Ojibwe that you think is a tested across the board and has been for 150 years of Algonquian literature. Just kidding. It doesn’t. Look at these recordings and this analysis of this, that it doesn’t show up.” We need to not just recycle ideas throughout the decades and actually go back and retest things.
Adam: I just have one thing to add. The one thing I would say in response to this, is a typical response to you showing counterevidence is to say that’s not real counterevidence, and then to reanalyze it in such a way that it ends up corroborating the theory. That’s really common. And then when you get that situation, that’s even more frustrating than somebody who basically just ignores the evidence in a way because they basically have a theory that sounds like it’s testable but when you look at it in relation to data, you’re like, “Wait, actually, this isn’t saying anything, because anything could potentially be looked at from a different perspective and now it works.” That’s actually really common as well. Anyways, I just wanted to clarify that point and continue.
Hedvig: Yeah. How much of these conflicts are juggling terminology?
Taylor: A lot. A lot of them. My entire PhD thesis was looking at the phonology syntax interface. So, how do sounds pattern in different kinds of structures. Syllables, words, phrases, clauses, that kind of thing. There are a couple current theories that are very popular in the literature at this time. You’ve got an older theory called Relational Grammar, which comes from Nespor & Vogel 1986, and is a very generative look at what’s going on. And then, you’ve got Lisa Selkirk’s work on MATCH theory and related other kinds of theories. You’ve got the Cyclic Spell-Out approaches to syntax. You don’t have to worry about all of these different kinds of things, but there are these theories that people will advocate for. And if you offer them counterevidence, they’ll just say, “No, no, no,” and put like a band-aid on it. They’ll go, “That’s not actually counter evidence. I’m going to look at it slightly differently and just go, “It’s fine.’”
What I was able to do is say that none of the current theories asked the right question. None of the current theories asked the crucial question, which is if I’m looking for a theory about how sounds pattern out words, and phrases, and clauses and all that stuff, you’ve got to go look at a language that blends all those things together, and breaks all your definitions, and then see if your theory can account for them. A lot of people will do a theory and look at Japanese and English, and maybe Chinese, these majority languages, and then just explicitly, whether intentional or not, ignore these languages that do blend the lines between words, phrases, and clauses, that do have extreme morphosyntactic complexity that would be the actual test for these kinds of ideas.
In my thesis, I took two such languages did a side-by-side analysis and showed that none of the current theories work. And I said, rather than ascribing to a theory, because it’s what I like, or what I started, I looked at the data and went, “This doesn’t work. We have to start over.” We can take good from all of these ideas that have kernels of truth in them, and then put something together that works. I’m always the pain in the butt at a conference.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Taylor: There’s an older linguist who always comes up and goes, “Oh, Dr. Miller, what prized idea are we breaking today?”
[chuckles]
Taylor: I’m just like, “It’s what we do.”
Adam: Is that Professor–?
[laughter]
Taylor: Yeah. [laughs]
Adam: We can cut it, it doesn’t matter.
Hedvig: Is the answer that we should just burn all the old books and just–?
Taylor: No, you can–
Ben: Hedvig, what do we know about burning books? [crosstalk]
Daniel: Is the answer we’ve got to do the work and we don’t worry too much about the big questions? Which is super depressing, because I love the big questions.
Taylor: I love the big questions, too. But at a certain point, if it’s not something, like, we can sit there– this is how I consider the different questions is, do you want to like sit around a table and ask those big questions and pontificate, which is a valid use of time, but don’t market that as science. That is philosophy that leads to these cool hypotheticals of what language is and how it behaves and how it has changed over time or the origins of it. I’ve taken entire classes on those big questions, and I love it. But at the same time, when I’m doing my research, that’s not what I’m going to be writing about. I do not claim to have authority to tell you how language came about, because I can’t know. But I can tell you how phonology and syntax are interfacing, and if there’s evidence that we actually need a separate morphology. Those are things that I can go in and look at.
Daniel: I guess this leads us into one of our questions. We’ve talked about some ways in which generativism doesn’t help your work, but how does it help your work? What does it help you to do that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise? Do you need it?
Taylor: Absolutely. I have this answer. It’s hugely important. Linguistic theory and the way that I think about it helps everything that I do. I largely publish in theory, and I’m working on a new model of the phonology syntax interface. It’s called Tri-P Mapping, if anybody’s really interested. But it’s prismatic phonology by phase. So, I talk about a different way of looking at syntax and phonology. I’m collaborating with Hannah Sande at Berkeley for a few papers on looking for the definition of the word and how to apply this new interface approach, it’s called phonology– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Ooh, definition of the word.
Daniel: Definition of the word.
Taylor: Yeah. I love digging into that, and spoiler alert, words are not things. Anyway, we look at these idiosyncratic phenomena that have largely stumped theories in the past, and we’re trying to account for them. So, there are ways that we can do that. Also, I try to keep in mind the scientifically sound questions in my language documentation work as well. I want materials to be easily understood to a non-linguist. I want them to be able to be used in a community who’s trying to reclaim their language, for instance. I want to make sure that I can take these complex linguistic concepts that have frameworks involved, or theories used as tools and be able to be like, “But let me explain what language is doing just on a basic level so that you can understand it. Let me explain what a phonological process is, and how that affects how you speak the language, and so this is why you need to pronounce it this way or it’s systematic. Did you want to know or do you want to memorize?” These are things that you can teach language learners.
The way that I always explain my thought process is that I think that language can and should be studied context free, but that the speakers of language are not in a vacuum. Your job doesn’t stop there. Study language in a vacuum as its own system and puzzle, but then recognize that the people who are using this language are not, and that there are social pressures that affect things, like historic mistreatment, racism, social justice issues, the pressures that people would have to give up their language. Why the language is in trouble in the first place? You can’t divorce them from that. As an undergrad, people would tell me, “Just give me the data. I don’t want to talk to the people.” This is a real thing that generativists have historically said. That’s why Chomskyans are often called the devil, because I’m stripping away all of reality, and I’m just looking at a computer. They could be speech sounds or numbers or symbols, or what have you. I’m just finding patterns.
There is a beauty to that. I really do think that there is, because then you are asking hypotheses, you’re testing them, you’re seeing what’s logically possible, what’s not. And that can help you learn about language, but that’s not the end. The next step is to realize that you have an obligation to both the language itself and the people who speak this language, to make it accessible in both the way of understanding it, but also having them physically be able to get their hands on the stuff.
Hedvig: Yeah. This is something we’ve talked about before on the show that there’s a new wave of linguists doing fieldwork today where they are much more– this goes for people who subscribe to generative linguistic theory and who don’t subscribe to any theory and who subscribe to another theory, that there’s a sense that we should be giving back to communities. But I was wondering about the first thing you said, which is studying language without context, because some would argue and maybe that’s where the word ‘functional’ comes in the term ‘functional linguistics’, is that we shouldn’t even do that. It matters if you want to say something very often. It matters what kind of semantic connotations you have has an impact on your language as the structuring themselves.
Taylor: Absolutely. I think that’s where I would say that I’m still a generativist, and terms of that opinion, and I will get into arguments with people on Twitter. I do it all the time. It is possible to be a generativist and not be an armchair linguist who’s pontificating and ignoring things like the historic classism and racism of generative grammar. The fact that we started studying language in a vacuum gave a lot of white men, the power to sit there and wonder about these tiny Amazonian languages or to discount entire languages because, well, if you just study English, you can get generative grammar, and you don’t need to work that hard. You don’t have to go into the field. You don’t have to go work with communities. There’s this idea that, “I’m not working in a people facing field. I can just sit here and think about language.” And that is where I fundamentally have changed.
I have said it before, like, “Just give me the data, I’ll do the data.” And don’t get me wrong, I love working on language puzzles, and I will do it all the time. But I could not go into the field, and do work on languages and not feel something needed to be done. I felt an obligation that comes from being someone who has the skills that I have, who knows about how language is working, and how to study it. And who knows how to take those linguistic concepts and boil them down into something that someone can understand that it’s an obligation and a duty to do that. I don’t necessarily think that everyone needs to drop everything and do that. There’s a phrase in the linguist documentary, where he says, like, “I don’t understand how someone could just study French forever. French syntax forever taking a jab at a particular linguist, and not go and do field work and do documentation work.” I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I do think that it is on every linguist to make sure that the data that they have is accessible to the people who need it. Whether that’s making sure that a linguist translates it into lay person English, for lack of better term, or like usable language knowledge.
Hedvig: I think a previous guest on the show, Lesley Wood, used the term ‘plain language grammar’.
Taylor: Plain language, that’s a very good one. I’ve actually been working on this idea with a woman named Maura Sullivan, who’s at Tulane University. And we had started the process and then the pandemic hit. So, it’s delayed, but we’ve been working on this idea of starting a nonprofit called, The Coalition on Restorative Linguistics, which is the idea that linguists would be put into contact with community members who are interested in working with their language, either study language classes are reclaiming it or whatever, and there is a grammar on the language or there is published work on the language, but they can’t understand it.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm. But it’s not.
Taylor: I remember being at a conference in 2019, that was on the Year of Indigenous Languages, this was an Indiana and it was like two generativists, and then a whole bunch of like community linguists and indigenous awesome people who have been going back to school to learn how to do their language, and I’m like, indigenous people, or people whose language has been historically mistreated, should not be in a position where they have to take 10 years of schooling in order to read a book about their language. If they want to do that, awesome. I want to make that more easy for them, and there are organizations that do that, that give scholarships or have opportunities for indigenous people to work on their languages. But that does not change the fact that it would take me a half hour in the afternoon to read a part of a grammar and explain it to someone.
It’s a service that in this rush to document languages, because of the fact that languages are threatened and are sleeping after so many years, there’s this rush, this emergency to document, document, document, which was great. But that documentation was done at the expense of the communities. It did the exact opposite of what we wanted it to do. The fact that now you have all of this material that as a linguist I have access to, but the community members themselves have never seen it. They don’t have copies or it’s in an archive that you have to be a researcher in order to access. These are the kinds of things where we want to start this organization that pairs linguist volunteers, who will work with community members and just help translate materials and help them get those ideas.
Daniel: Okay, I want to throw it to Adam. Adam, what does generativism help you to do? Can you give me something concrete that it helps you to do in your work?
[chuckles]
Hedvig: Or is there any value to it?
Adam: I mean the question here is [crosstalk] does linguistic theory have in your day-to-day research, but I can answer the question about generativism specifically.
Daniel: I love it.
Taylor: Or if they’re different.
Adam: I wouldn’t say it’s specifically generativism. I think that basically, when you start analyzing language and when you document the language, it’s a big task. I think that when you’re learning a lot of languages that have curriculums that have been developed for years, you take this for granted that, “Oh, and this chapter is going to teach you how to decline adjectives in German when they have an indefinite article. And then, this chapter is going to do this, and it’s got this structure to it, that helps organize the grammar.” You might take for granted that it was like easy to organize a grammar, easy to even figure out what all those properties and rules are, or what the language even has and can do, and whether it has this. The problem with language description and documentation is the task is insurmountably hard. So, you start off basic– you need some sort of guideline. Sometimes, in my own experience doing field work where my primary concern, like Taylor, is being faithful to the language really and the community, I’ve just borrowed from everything. So, I’ll take a generative theory and see does this theory make sense in the language? Can I test it? Can I use it to even learn something about the language? Often with generative theory specifically, the experiences roughly, “Oh, I could try to look at this in the languages we’re working at,” and so we’ll ask a bunch of questions. I’ll get more data and a bunch of different things that I didn’t know about the grammar before that will help me learn about how it works. But then, when I ask the question–
Hedvig: [crosstalk] -good scientific theory that it’s making you ask questions that you wouldn’t have thought of elsewhere. That’s what we want them to do.
Adam: Sure, exactly. But then the other step is, is the theory corroborated or not in the language? Invariably, [chuckles] the answer is always, “I don’t know,” because the theory actually isn’t clear enough. It’s a relationship where theories have an important exploratory role. It’s like okay, I could take an idea from Taylor’s dissertation and see if it works in Chácobo. Then it might make me ask questions about the grammar that I hadn’t asked before. And then I’ll get a bunch of new data, but I might also just be, actually, there’s a problem here, because there’s this term it’s not actually clear how this should apply in the grammar, can be applied in four or five ways. And so that’s the relationship between what I would generative theory in my research. But I also find the question, like, a little bit strange, because I don’t know how you can do research without theories.
Taylor: True theory neutral research is not a thing.
Adam: That’s not a thing. The interesting thing about linguistics, I’ll just put this in as an aside, sort of following up on what Taylor said about a lot of armchair linguists, is that the word ‘linguistic theory’, at least amongst a lot of people I’m around has developed a pejorative sense. You have to say it with a certain intonation use, like, “Oh, that’s the theory.”
Taylor: [laughs]
Adam: It usually means contentless nonsense, sort of the way Chomsky derives postmodernism, but I think it’s partly because so much of the prestige, and of what’s called linguistic theory has been developed by people sitting on armchairs and then, the rest of the languages of the world and field workers and people are really dealing with data and trying to test the hypotheses as an afterthought. The attitude is like, “If they find something that works with my theory, great. If they don’t, I don’t even want to talk to this person. They don’t understand.” That sort of the relationship– there’s intellectual answer to that question, which is everything because there’s no theory-neutral research, and then a sociological answer to the question, which is like, “Well, there’s these people in our field that have ordained themselves the theoreticians, and I’m always in a tense relationship with them, because they’ll be very happy if I find something that works with their theory, but very unhappy if I don’t.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Taylor: One of the best things that I’ve ever been taught was from Jeff Heinz, who’s at Stony Brook now. He was teaching us in grad school that theories and frameworks are tools. So, you use them as a tool. They are not sacred. If you use it, and it works, great. You should test it and push it and prod it, but the moment it doesn’t work, throw it out, figure it out, what the actual question is. Then, you’re not faithful to a theory just because you’re faithful to it. And that was one of the best things I was ever taught, because it really opened up the kinds of research questions that I’m willing to ask, because I’m not feeling like I have to do it within optimality theory or within rule-based theories, or I’m not having to argue about X bar versus minimalist syntax versus whatever. I’m able to just go, “Okay, so there’s this framework, and let’s see if it works. And we can take this piece of it, and this piece of it and zombie together something that’s actually explaining what we’re seeing, and then see what’s going on elsewhere.” Adam and I think very similarly in this.
Hedvig: Yeah, it sounds like you both pick and mix when it comes to linguistic theory. Do you think that’s the future of the field? Do you think that once maybe more of the older generation is maybe retiring and the new ones are in the tenured professorships, that would be a more common thing? Or, do you think that there are young people today that really keep this conflict alive? Even if it’s sociological– You both touched on this fact that it seems, like, some of it is a scientific conflict and some of it seems to be a sociological conflict, just like inheritance religion, where you grew up.
Taylor: Well, yeah, I think that it is certainly a lesser conflict in our generation of researchers, or perhaps I’m in an echo chamber of my own making, where a lot of people who are in our generation are much less committed to these big conflicts, and more committed to trying to be more ethical, more scientific, implementing interdisciplinary approaches. So, taking theory, but adding computational analysis, field work analysis, neurological analysis. Trying to find the psychological reality of what we’re talking about in terms of theories, as opposed to just talking about it. And so, you’ll find that a lot of us are not disagreeing with each other very much about that.
I think that where we have differences, and Adam may think of this in a different way, but people who choose to work primarily in fieldwork and community-based research versus theoretical, I feel I’m less of a weird breed of linguists by doing both now. But at the time that I started, no one knew what to do with me, because a lot of the advisors were like, “Why? Why would you do that?” I was like, “Why wouldn’t you do that?” So, it was a fundamental change in thinking, and I think that that is happening in a generational sense. We’re starting to see that showing up in a real way, because we’re now in professor and postdoc, and these early career positions that have us in the hierarchy, so to speak, so we’re functioning within academia primarily. Academia is the abusive partner that I will never leave kind of thing, where there’s toxicity, there’s hierarchy, there’s a lot of these norms that you follow. And a lot of the younger generation is going, “Enough. I don’t have to believe you just because you’re 65 and tenured. I get to question those ideas. I get to question those theories. I get to throw them out and start over and show you why because I’m smart enough to do it.” There’s a lot of discussion that comes from that. There’s not very happy people about this. It can involve a backlash right now. We’ve seen it a lot in the public sphere, where it’s not necessarily a question of generativism, but just age.
That’s why I had sent you guys that email before we recorded in the fact that the backlash to the open letter to the LSA, which I know you guys have talked about on the podcast, it exemplifies this change that’s happening in the field, where younger people are saying, “No.” It’s not just younger people, it’s just a majority younger people going, “I refuse to let this be what academic is. I refuse to let this be what linguistics is. I don’t want to be perceived.”
I go to conferences all the time, and when I’m at a conference that’s not primarily generative, I don’t want to be perceived as the evil one in the room. I try very hard to not be. There’s a history here that is showing that it is very inherently classist, racist, sexist. It has been and is, and the younger generation is like, I think we can do this and not be those things. So, let’s try that. It is changing, I think but it’s going to have some growing pains, because the age of the field of generativism is young. We’re talking about the people who did this are still working. They’re starting to retire, but the old guard are still here. So, there’s a lot of clashes happening right now. I think that it’ll shift generally. Like with anything, it’s a slow-moving process.
Hedvig: This is a fun shift from the ending of one of our previous conversations with John Goldsmith, which was that young people should–
Adam: Young people should listen to the older generation more. [laughs]
Hedvig: It’s a little bit what he said–
Taylor: Let me grab my microphone. Young people don’t. [laughs]
Hedvig: He was a little bit of a point– it’s good to not throw everything out with the bathwater, surely.
Taylor: No, it’s true.
Adam: To sort of defend him slightly, I think what he’s done a lot of research in the history of linguistics is that he noticed that generative linguists, he thinks they’ve tossed out a lot of good ideas from the structuralist, and he’s feeling–
Hedvig: Oh, that’s going to– off and again.
Adam: I think he universalizes it a little bit too much. I think maybe there was something very special in the history of linguistics that made those specific generativists a little bit too enthusiastic.
Taylor: I did start reading his new book and I agree. The history of the field is incredibly important because you carry it with you.
Adam: Right. I think that’s what he was specifically, that’s where he’s coming from. I think maybe he’s trying to apply it to the current generation. But I would push back on this a little bit, because there’s a huge difference between the way the field is in the 60s and right now. One, linguistics is much more institutionalized. So, he’s talking about me not forgetting all the things that the previous generations learned about. But the curriculum is developed in such a way that I was forced to sit in classes where these things were driven into my head over and over and over again. That really wasn’t true in the 60s to the same degree. I don’t think there were classes on learning discovery procedures. At least, Professor Wolfert never told me there. I don’t think Chomsky ever took a course called behaviorism. I just don’t think that happened.
Then the other difference is that in the United States, in particular, the university system was expanding. So, it’s much easier to disagree with your elders, because you could get a job easily. With the younger generation, it’s much harder because the job market in linguistics and academia in general has contracted to a large degree. So, we’re super dependent on the older generation to give us positions, even if we think they’re pigheaded and attached to debates that happened in the 1970s that we no longer think are relevant.
Taylor: It’s true. It’s worth noting that Adam and I are not in tenure track positions. It’s a hard job market. I have been shortlisted for several tenure track positions and have been turned down for seemingly stupid reasons. It’s a luck thing if you get the tenure track position really at this point.
Adam: Crucially though, it just was not like that in the 60s and 70s. I’m sorry.
Taylor: No, it was not.
Adam: I saw a talk given by John Goldsmith and Jerrold Sadock at the University of Chicago talking about how they got into linguistics. And Jerrold Sadock was like, “Well, I don’t know. I was thinking of doing chemistry, and I was just hanging out. And then the University of Chicago called me and gave me a job.”
Hedvig: [laughs]
Adam: I’m like, “Yeah, okay.” [crosstalk] I spent a month organizing an application and then get rejected from 13 jobs and so on and so forth. I have a strong publication record. There’s some good things about this. Maybe we won’t forget what the older generation said before because we can’t. So, at least there’s that, but on the other hand–
Hedvig: Because they’re safeguarding the jobs.
Adam: Yeah. This is one of the reasons I would push back against what John Goldsmith is saying, I don’t think we’re going to forget what the previous generation has been saying. I think that was something very specific about the historical era.
Taylor: I think we’re not in danger of that at all.
Adam: Yeah, I think there was something very specific about the era he grew up in, and he realized this happen now and he’s writing books about how they lost a lot of insights from the prior generation.
Taylor: I think, if anything, the new generation is like, “Yeah, of course not. We’re going to look at old structuralist arguments and other functionalist arguments, and really try to find something that is working here.” But, yeah.
Hedvig: There’s a difference between forgetting and not opposing. You can remember and appreciate what people have done before you, but still question it. I think Daniel is signaling that it’s been very lovely to talk to you all, but that we are running maybe a bit over time. So, we need to think of a good way of wrapping it up.
Taylor: You’re going to have to probably do quite a bit of cutting. [laughs]
Daniel: To be honest, I really do not know if I would want to cut anything because this has been such an incredible conversation, but–
Hedvig: It’s a bit longer than what we usually do. [chuckles]
Taylor: Sorry we’re both talkative. [laughs]
Daniel: What an incredible conversation with Dr. Taylor Miller and Dr. Adam Tallman. Thanks to both of you for giving us your perspective and where you’re coming from. I learned so much from you. So, thank you so much.
Taylor: It was great being here. I do love the podcast now that I know about it, and I will be listening to you moving forward. I’m really excited.
Daniel: Excellent.
Adam: Thanks very much for inviting me. It was great.
[music]
Daniel: But you’re not done yet, because it’s time for Words of the Week, and I believe–
Ben: Linguistic capitalism.
Daniel: Dr. Taylor Miller, you have brought us-
Taylor: Oh, yes.
Daniel: -a word.
Taylor: Well, it’s technically a phrase. I feel like I should clarify that.
Ben: We’ve used many phrases for Word of the Week. Word of the Week is just the loosiest-goosiest possible definition.
[laughter]
Taylor: My Word of the Week is “out of pocket” because it’s undergoing a change in meaning currently. I know that because I was watching TikTok and I instantly aged 50 years because I didn’t understand what was being said.
Daniel: That you do.
Taylor: [chuckles] This is a very Gen Z thing that is starting. From what I can tell, out of pocket is now meaning, it’s no longer, like, I used to use it as like, “Oh, am I out of pocket? Am I completely on a different planet here? I’m totally not following what’s happening.”
Ben: Oh.
Hedvig: Oh.
Taylor: That’s not how I use it at all.
Hedvig: Me neither.
Daniel: No, not at all.
Taylor: Really? Now it’s more like speaking out of your ass or whatever. If you’re just making it up and flying by the seat of your pants, you’re like, “I’m not out of pocket. I know what I’m talking about.”
Daniel: Oh, my gosh.
[crosstalk]
Taylor: Yeah. I saw this all the time on TikTok, they’d be like, “Tell me if I’m out of pocket,” or, “I’m not out of pocket. I know what I’m doing.” Or like, “He’s so out of pocket.” I’m like, “What is that?” It’s like out of line?
Daniel: This is the most interesting thing I’ve heard.
Ben: Can I tender a guess? What if, and I’m also going to age myself right now because I am trying to come up with like a homebrew theory to explain how of youth are using language, but do you think that it might be, my personal experience of having observed many teenagers, is that when someone starts doing something seriously ba-na-na, phones come out to record what’s going on. When something genuinely hectic or crazy is going down, teenagers film it. It is a deeply ingrained process. Do you reckon they mean that? Yeah, like, “You are behaving so randomly that I’m pulling my phone out of my pocket?”
Hedvig: No.
Taylor: I feel it’s a new version of extra, which also broke me when that first started being a thing, because I was 27 or something. It was like I went to sleep one night, and I woke up the next morning, and I was old, because people started saying, like, “Oh, don’t be extra. That’s so extra.” And I had to ask my friend, I said, “Hello, you’re young,” and she was, “Please stop talking.”
[chuckles]
Taylor: I said, “I need to ask this question. Extra what? I feel like we’re missing of word there. Being extra what?” She was, “No. Taylor, it’s just extra.” I’m like, “Help.” I feel like the out of pocket thing, it’s very new from what I can see, and I’d love it. I’m trying to figure it out, and I’ll probably use it once I figure out how to use it properly.
Ben: You won’t though, because you’ll use it near a person from Gen Z, and they will just be like, “No.”
Taylor: Yeah. They’re going to be like, “No, Dr. Miller, what are you doing?”
[chuckles]
Ben: Because Gen Z would definitely use the honorific doctor.
Taylor: [laughs] My students would. [laughs]
Daniel: Ben, can you tell us what your understanding of out of pocket is?
Ben: Oh, I’ve always understood out of pocket to basically mean unaccounted for expense.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: Like I’ve been cruising around the streets and I bought a bunch of stuff and now I’m out of pocket like 30 bucks. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Or, it’s unreasonable to demand that young scholars pay for their own travel to conferences, because that’s an out-of-pocket expense.
Taylor: Oh, I have that meaning too as well.
Hedvig: But I’ve never heard of either of the meanings Taylor brought up, so that was very fun. Thank you.
Daniel: Okay. Well, I’m just looking at Green’s Dictionary of Slang, greensdictofslang.com. It looks like there is a version of this phrase out of pocket or out of the pocket, which comes from Black American English, and it means acting in an unacceptable or tasteless manner.
Taylor: Right.
Hedvig: Wow.
Taylor: So, it’s probably not new in Black English, but it is new to the white people on the internet. [laughs]
Ben: As the old cool lingo, it has just been shamelessly stolen from black folks.
Taylor: Yes.
Daniel: They’re Columbusing again.
Taylor: Because I love the phrase and I’m hoping to learn it. [laughs]
Daniel: That’s great. Okay, this one comes from Nikoli on our Discord channel. I think that we’re all in favor of people from other disciplines doing work in linguistics, there’s no problem there. Some of our very favorite guests and researchers are not linguists. Then, there’s another tendency–
Hedvig: [crosstalk] -some caveats.
[chuckles]
Ben: I feel a big hairy but making its way onto the field.
Daniel: But there’s another tendency for people who come from other fields for some reason, it’s often economics, they try to use language data to prove an idea that they have. It’s often a misguided idea that regular people find very attractive, but that linguists have worked very hard to disabuse people of. And then, when these non-linguists are corrected by linguists, what they do is they dismiss the linguists, they double down on their ideas, and then they cry that they’re being bullied. So, the term that I learned for this tendency from a tweet from Joshua Raclaw is ‘epistemic trespassing’. The idea that you’re working outside of your area, but not just that, but that you’re dismissing experts in the area, you’re coming up with your own views and doing it badly. What do you think?
Taylor: That’s a real thing.
Hedvig: Wow.
Taylor: I agree. I think it’s a real thing. I like the term, because it allows me to just define what’s happening as opposed to just getting irrationally mad or rationally mad. I don’t think it’s irrational actually.
Daniel: Too gatekeep-y?
Hedvig: It could easily become gatekeeping, yeah.
Taylor: I think that the epistemic trespasser is the gatekeeper often. They’ve declared themselves the gatekeeper.
Ben: I would like to tender an alternative, Milhousing. Because epsitemic trespass has a real sort of judgy vibe, like, you’ve been like, “Don’t come on my lawn. You get off my–” Whereas Milhousing just describes a humungous dweeby baby who tried a thing and now is hell whingy about it.
Hedvig: We’re talking about Milhouse from The Simpsons–[crosstalk]
Adam: Which episode?
Taylor: Yeah, I can see that.
Ben: All of them.
Taylor: Oh, he’s in the lot of them.
Ben: Milhouse is regularly the awful person who no one wants around the whole time.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: He’s not claiming things about things outside of his knowledge base that often, I see.
Ben: Oh, no, there are many episodes where he tries to flex and fails.
Adam: I really don’t like the term ‘epistemic trespassing,’ I have to admit, I think it’s–
Hedvig: I find it a bit clunky.
Adam: I think it’s not just clunky, it’s got a very neoliberal ideology underlying it.
Taylor: [chuckles] That’s true.
Adam: Your knowledge is your property as an academic, or that some domain of study as your property. It’s just kind of gross.
Taylor: I think that you can venture into different areas of study and not be this though. That’s always the goal. This is not my typical wheelhouse, but am I out of pocket to say–
Ben: Am I being a Milhouse right now?
[chuckles]
Taylor: [crosstalk] If you come in from that perspective, I think most people are willing to listen to you. It’s when you come in and declare yourself an expert in some way that you’ve not put in the time. So, I don’t think it’s necessarily gatekeep-y as much as like be respectful and remember where fields have come from. I’ve had to do this, you don’t have to like put in your time necessarily, but you have to take the time to recognize what people have said, what the active conversation is, and then add to it as opposed to reinventing the wheel.
Hedvig: What about something that takes on the metaphor of disguise, charading or something, is that a word? Is that how that word works?
Taylor: Yeah. Like masquerading as– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Masquerading, there we go.
Daniel: Masquerading. I still like Milhousing. I still like it.
Hedvig: Okay.
Ben: Yeah, because everyone–
Hedvig: It’s a better word– but Ben just went very interesting. He’s looking funny to you guys as well?
Taylor: He’s frozen.
Daniel: Hmm.
Hedvig: This is Perth internet.
Daniel: I’m going to defend Perth internet, but way to go. Ben, we lost you.
Adam: I’ll continue on with this. You get frustrated when people talk about something maybe you’ve thought about it a lot more or you feel like they shouldn’t be imposing their view on you so strongly. But I also think this is our public responsibility as academics, I think that comes with the terrain. This actually might depend on where you are. Excluding lecturers in the United States where they’re paid complete shit wages and are literally totally proletarian eyes, academics are pretty privileged overall, and I think it’s part of our public responsibility to be patient with people and explain things to them in a way that is not condescending. So, that’s kind of one of my reasons for not liking that.
On the other hand, often the people who are doing the epistemic trespassing aren’t working class people. I think they’re the most privileged people. So, there’s that dynamic to it. I think I’m just going to stick with the term, ‘being a huge dick’.
[laughter]
Daniel: Very good.
Taylor: Yeah, that’s what I tell everybody. I was like, “My life philosophy is to just not be a racist dick.” So, if you do that, then you’re probably pretty good.
Adam: Yeah.
Taylor: [giggles]
Daniel: Next one, this one comes from [unintelligible [01:41:47] on our Discord channel, tattleware. This comes from an article by Sandy Milne in The Guardian. “Bosses turn to tattleware to keep tabs on employees working from home.”
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: I do not have a lot of experience with this, but what have y’all noticed?
Hedvig: I’m reading a book right now by Roland Paulsen called Empty Labor, which is about what people do in their work time that isn’t work. He explicitly excludes academics, because they’re too hard to define what work is. So, he’s just like-
Taylor: [chuckles] We’re a hot mess, yeah.
Hedvig: -“I’m not going to interview any academics,” which makes sense. I found out very interesting stats that, for example, there was a study of internet traffic to porn sites in United States, and that 60% of the internet traffic to porn sites is between the hours of between 9:00 to 5:00, suggesting that a lot of people are watching porn on their work time.
Taylor: Wow.
Hedvig: This book goes on to explore many reasons why people might be doing things that aren’t work, maybe they can also go on. Another thing a lot of people do apparently is go on like Amazon or shop or do personal errands or stuff. And there are many reasons why people might be doing this. Some people could say it’s sabotaging their employer. Other people say it’s reclaiming time that has been colonized by work. It’s a long discussion. I really recommend this book, by the way, but it has meant that some employers have installed tattleware, which is surveillance programs that monitor, for example, which websites you visit or what you do on your computer for people who work on computers in the work time.
Taylor: There are also software that measure if your mouse moves. If you’re working from home, it’s checking that your mouse is active, or that you’re actively typing something every once in a while. And it’s awful. I actually really like the word for it, because it is that. It’s tattling. Your workforce will be more effective if they just get the work done. You don’t need to police how it happens. You just need to police that it happens.
Hedvig: Yeah. For example, there was in the Swedish news very recently, a man who used over 50 hours, he’s working for the tax office, on calling and he spent over 50 hours calling his own mobile phone. So, in those instances-
Adam: [laughs]
Hedvig: -calling is the work.
Taylor: Okay. But you know what? If you’re going to commit that hard, I’m kind of just impressed.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Yeah, or calling family members is another thing. For some employers, the work that you’re being paid for is easier to quantify than in other places. In academics, you can say like, “Are you publishing enough? Are you teaching enough?” But for some people, it’s like, “How many calls are you making?” I think those are the workplaces that install the most tattleware.
Adam: Hold on. Is it a software or is it just a class of types of software, what is it–
Taylor: It’s a class of software. There’s different ones– [crosstalk]
Adam: Basically, any management tool that’s monitoring people and trying to keep track of the seconds.
Taylor: Yeah. If you’re in a call center, oftentimes– especially with the pandemic, with people transitioning to work from home, this has become more prevalent, because they want to make sure that you’re actually earning your money. But it becomes really restrictive, because the whole benefit of working from home is that you can take a break. You can go take a nap, and still come back and get the work done, but these softwares are put into place, so that you do not do that.
Adam: Has anyone seen the movie, Office Space?
Taylor: Yeah, exactly.
Hedvig: It is frequently referenced in the book I’m reading.
Adam: Okay, good, where the guy basically spends only about 15 minutes actually working. And it also reminds me of that book by David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, which is a good book, basically arguing that we’ve created jobs where people don’t really have to do anything, and they don’t have any public function. So, yeah, naturally, you’d spend your time looking at pornography, which I guess is more meaningful– [crosstalk]
Taylor: Yeah, I guess we could just bash capitalism for a while. But, yeah, it’s true.
Hedvig: Reading this book, one of the chief complaints people have is that they don’t find their work meaningful, and that’s why they’re doing other things. Anyway, tattleware is a good term. I see also that glyph on discord nominated as well, stalkerware, which is a bit more disturbing. So, this is where–
Adam: [laughs] Stalkerware.
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s like when you install an app on your girlfriend’s phone without her knowing, and it tells you where she is at all times, and what phone calls she’s making.
Daniel: Or keyboard trackers on a desktop.
Taylor: Yeah, which is not cool. Don’t do that.
Daniel: Do not do that.
Hedvig: Don’t do any of these things. Don’t do tattleware, don’t do stalkerware.
Taylor: People talk about doing that as parents, and I’m like, or talk to the children.
Adam: Oh, wow.
Taylor: Just an idea.
Daniel: Those are the worst stories. Okay, let’s go on to one suggested again by Diego on Patreon. He says, “Hey, this is a new word for me. Scromiting.”
Taylor: I hate this one.
Daniel: Just a quick announcement. Ben has dropped off the call and he’s lost power in his building, so he conveys his support for the rest of the conversation. Scromiting. This comes from NBC News in the USA the article is “High-potency weed linked to psychotic episodes, mysterious vomiting illness in young users.” “The condition officially called cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, but now known to healthcare workers as scromiting, a mashup of screaming and vomiting has popped up with increasing frequency at hospitals in Colorado, doctors say.” This is terrible. You’re just trying to enjoy some weed.
Taylor: It’s simultaneously hilarious because it’s about weed, and awful because that’s a horrible blend. I hate it. It’s icky. I don’t like saying it. And it’s also a gross concept. [laughs]
Hedvig: I hate vomiting. I think it’s the worst.
Daniel: I would think it was hilarious, except for the fact that the part ER workers have to deal with.
Taylor: Oh, yeah, for sure. I’m sure it’s a pain. I had heard greening out for that.
Daniel: Oh, really?
Taylor: Like you green out. It’s that you’ve smoked too much weed and you’ll get sick.
Adam: Yeah, that’s the word I would know. Yeah, green out.
Daniel: Oh, wow.
Taylor: But I suppose that this is just a new word for that.
Adam: Yeah, you just puke and stuff.
Taylor: Yeah, puking.
Adam: [crosstalk] Yeah, I never heard of that with weed.
Taylor: I couldn’t understand that if it’s like you’re screaming, but isn’t that just projectile vomiting? [laughs]
Adam: Oh, sure.
Taylor: I feel, I don’t know. I don’t get this one.
Adam: They’re vomiting so much that it’s like they’re screaming?
Taylor: Yeah, I don’t know.
Adam: [mimics scromiting]
Taylor: I saw this written and I went, “Ew. No, ew. Move on.” [laughs]
Adam: This is popping up in Colorado, marijuana is legal there?
Taylor: It’s been legalized there for a long time.
Adam: We know it’s in the weed that they’re smoking.
Daniel: I guess so.
Hedvig: Colorado listeners, get better weed. Is that what you’re saying?
Adam: I don’t know. Is this too much THC or what the hell? Because I’ve never heard of this.
Taylor: I wish for you, Coloradoans, that you get better weed. That’s what I wish. It’s my blessing to you. [laughs]
Adam: No, but I think maybe because it became legal people were able to like choose the highest-potency weed they possibly could, and so overdoses. Whereas when I was a kid, back in the day, you’d go down and you’d have to buy it from some sketchy person and it would be mostly oregano.
Taylor: [laughs]
Adam: You’d still get a little high, but–
Taylor: You’re not going to green out.
Adam: You’re not going to scream at the very least.
Taylor: [laughs]
Daniel: Yeah, no scromiting. Check out this poll quote from the article. Bo Gribbon, 20 years old, went to the ER 11 times in nine months for a condition that causes nonstop bouts of vomiting and screaming. 11 times? [screaming] “Argh, this is going to change nothing about my behavior.”
[laughter]
Hedvig: Poor person.
Taylor: I don’t get that. I feel bad for him.
Hedvig: Maybe they’re going through some depressive. Maybe there’s a good reason for using that much weed in their life, is what I’m saying.
Taylor: Yeah. If you’re using cannabis medicinally, but it’s making you sicker, perhaps don’t do that.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: But after the sixth ER visit, wouldn’t you put it together?
Taylor: I would think.
Daniel: I don’t know.
Hedvig: Maybe.
Daniel: Anyway, that led me to think about what other bodily portmanteaus we need. I once made a chart of cough, sneeze, fart, shit, and vomit.
Taylor: Well, I mean shart is a great one.
Daniel: Shart is classic. We know that shart exists. We also know that vurp exists.
Taylor: Yeah.
Hedvig: Excuse me? One more time.
Taylor: Vomit and burp.
Hedvig: Burp.
Daniel: Vurp.
[crosstalk]
Hedvig: Isn’t that just acid reflux?
Taylor: Yeah.
Daniel: I mean yes. Repeating on you, yes. But the important thing about a portmanteau is that both parts of it are kind of clear. And I think shart and vurp are very successful because they are etymologically transparent. They’re very intuitive.
Taylor: Scromiting is not obvious to me. It sounds like vomiting and scrotum.
[laughter]
Taylor: Which is not what we want, ever.
Hedvig: Yeah, or scrum.
Taylor: [laughs]
Daniel: I’m trying to imagine what that is–[crosstalk]
Hedvig: When I saw it the first time, I thought it was a scrum, like a rugby scrum.
Adam and Taylor: Oh.
Daniel: Yeah. Get it together.
Adam: I would have guessed it had something to do with getting your scrotum crushed. [crosstalk] Obviously, we need a word for that.
Hedvig: Hmm.
Daniel: Okay.
Taylor: Just get on it, social media, make some new blends.
Hedvig: Scrushing.
Daniel: Scrushing.
Adam: Scrushing.
Taylor: [laughs]
Adam: Mm-hmm.
Hedvig: I think I’ve talked on the show before about one that exists in Swedish as an example of a portmanteau, but I’ve never heard anyone use which is gråtrunka, which is crying and masturbating.
Adam: We have that in Winnipeg.
[laughter]
Daniel: Well, obviously, cryturbating is something that–
Adam: Well, except in Winnipeg, you also have to be holding a beer. So, it’s a little different.
Hedvig: Oh, that’s multitasking.
Adam: [chuckles] Yeah, but I don’t think that was widely used. It was just something with my high school.
Taylor: Is there one for crying and eating at the same time, because that’s a common thing that people talk about, but I don’t know.
Daniel: So, the word that came up in the 2016 was kummerspeck, a German loan, and it meant grief bacon, but that refers to the extra weight that you might put on after a bout of emotional eating. I think emotional eating–
Taylor: Well, now it’s called pandemic weight. [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah, no, that’s a different thing.
Daniel: No, it’s different.
Hedvig: I thought people used comfort eating for that. But you’re right, we find if there was a portmanteau–
Taylor: Yeah, if there was a portmanteau, I think that we would all really latch on to that, but I can’t think of one that would sound right.
Daniel: Well, I don’t know if we’ve made any headway, but maybe our listeners will be able to help us. As it is, we’ve got out of pocket, epistemic trespassing, or Milhousing, tattleware, and scromiting [chuckles] are Words of the Week. Dr. Taylor Miller and Dr. Adam Tallman, thank you so much for joining us on our show today. It’s been amazing.
Taylor: Thanks so much, guys.
Adam: Thanks very much.
[music]
Daniel: Hey, everybody, thanks for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any comments about what we’ve said, or you want to contradict us, or you’re just very angry and you want to let us know, or you’re very happy and you want to let us know, you can get in touch with us. We are @becauselangpod on every conceivable social platform, you know the ones. Facebook, Twitter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but also hello@becauselanguage.com is a good way to reach us. If you’d like to help the show, please give us a review in all the review places. Tell a friend about us. Dustin of Sandman Stories is very good at recommending us to lots and lots of people on Twitter. And if you can do those things, then it’ll help people find us, which is what we want.
Hedvig: And we would like to send a special thanks to all of our lovely patrons on Patreon– our lovely patrons on Patreon. This is a struggle for every podcaster. [crosstalk] patrons and on Pateron.
Daniel: You got it right first time. Oh, my gosh.
Hedvig: We love you guys, and because of them, we can do things like make episodes and release them for free. So, anyone who isn’t a patron should send well wishes to those that are. We can also make transcripts and it means that our shows are accessible for people who can’t listen or who don’t want to listen, for whatever reason, and our shows are searchable. So, if you want to know which episode we said scromiting in, you can find that out.
Daniel: [whispering] It was this one.
Hedvig: [whispering] It was this one. If you’re not yet a patron, but you enjoy our show, consider giving us some money. We try and do good things with it. Special shoutout our top patrons who are Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Bob, Udo, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Michael, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, Dave H, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, zo, Kathy, Rach, and the wonderful Kate B. Thanks to all of you.
Daniel: Not so fast, Hedvig. We’ve got some even newer supporters. They are Diana, Cheyenne, and Felicity. Thanks so much to all of you. You know that great theme music you’re listening to right now? Well, that had to come from a human. That human is Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno, and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]