| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Posts: 9
|
 Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 2:57 am
Post subject: LINGUISTICS SUCKS |
 |
|
Linguists!!! Listen!!! I am asking you!!! Is there another area in the universe which is as useless as linguistics is? What, on earth, does a linguist contribute to the advancement of knowledge? Nothing!! If anything, linguistics serves only the purpose of makings things more complicated for students thereby making them feel bad about themselves.
Yes, I was in linguistics, too. But I left. I left the field, because I noticed that it is totally and totally and totally useless. All linguists follow what one man (Chomsky) made up. How, on Earth, do you know all those structures are right? People keep changing them.
Moreover, it is impossible, from cognitive point of view, that human brain could handle those stupid useless movements. I mean how come German is head final and you derive the verb-second phenemenon by movement. That, I call absolutely made up nonsense. Not just that... There are many examples of such nonsense in linguistics... A few man make up some stuff, and then all the linguists follow what they say.
Linguistics is for losers... I will come back here and post under this thread. I am seriously annoyed with linguistics. |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
Joined: 22 Jul 2006
Posts: 11
|
Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 7:15 am
Post subject: |
|
|
Ok... you can apply that point of view to any science. You say that linguistics is useless. you could say the same of chemistry, medicine (medicine is useless because all men has to die anyway...), literature and many others...
I donīt understand your anger, anyway... if you are annoyed with chomsky... well, everybody is annoyed with chosmky, generatives and functionalist linguists. Chosmky is important in the field because he inaugurated a new kind of formal study in linguistics, compatible with the modern science, related with cognitive science and biology.To me, Chomsky is some kind of (very) little newton.
You say that "it is impossible, from cognitive point of view, that human brain could handle those stupid useless movements". Well, obviously, the theory is not perfect yet... but you canīt say that natural languages has not movements, thatīs a fact. natural languages process displaced elements as if were located at a diference place in the sentence, and they left behind a trace (or a copy...).
"linguistcs is for losers", well, yes: that can be true...  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Posts: 9
|
Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 2:32 am
Post subject: |
|
|
Well, given that most of the linguists follow Chomsky, my arguments still hold! The thing is that this man is WRONG!! That's it! What he says is absolutely nonse!
I am not against movement; I am against those explanations that try to account for everything by way of movement. The German example is a good one for instance. But again, this field will soon be stuck.
I will watch the end of the field of linguistics with great joy! What else can you do in linguistics? Already, they proposed minimalism, coz it got stuck at one point; there is a limit to your movements and those unnecessary processes. But then, again, now in mimnimalism, they started to be just like pre-minimalism. Things are getting more and more complex again.
Get a life linguists!! You have no life!! Again: Only losers would choose a filed that is a big NOTHING!! Notice the mistake that you did, and change your area. Sooner or later you will notice that, but it will be too late. I noticed it early in my life, and now I am happy that I left this stupid field. There are much more useful things to do than waste your time doing nonsense movements.
And no, the same argument cannot be stated for areas like chemistry, medicine etc. That's totally different. Chemists do something that is USEFUL for normal people. Again same withe the medicine people; NORMAL PEOPLE can get use of those. Even for literature, for the sheer reason of getting pleasure, normal people are interested in literature.
WHAT ABOUT LINGUISTICS? CAN NORMAL PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THAT? CAN NORMAL PEOPLE AT LEAST GET USE OF WHAT LINGUISTS FIND? A BIG NO!! OK. Normal people do not understand medicine either, but at least they can get use of the findings of medicine.
Linguistics, an utterly useless area, does not serve that purpose at all. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 22 Jul 2006
Posts: 11
|
Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 12:35 pm
Post subject: |
|
|
most of the linguists follow chomsky????? I donīt think so.... maybe you are talking about american linguists, but (in the rest of the world) GG is not the top research area...
I can see that you donīt believe it, but linguistics is an important science. all the things that humans can think and do are consecuences of the faculty of language. linguistics is the science thatīs trying to explain this exclusive human faculty.
The grammatical model of MP is, obviously, far from being perfect. you are right when you say that it is getting more and more complex... But you should consider the advances and discoveries that each one of the generative models has allowed.
PD: linguistcs is older than christianity... i donīt think that you could see the end of the field... |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 16 Jul 2006
Posts: 32
|
Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 2:20 am
Post subject: |
|
|
| Yeah, I agree with Pawn in that linguistics wold not die. But linguistics_sucks, I guess, generalizes Chomskian linguistics to the whole area of linguistics. Well, in that respect, I agree with him/her, because Chomskian linguistics would disappear of course, sooner or later. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 24 Jul 2006
Posts: 5
|
Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2006 12:04 am
Post subject: |
|
|
| Linguistics_sucks, you do realize you come off as a pompous condescending ass, right? So what linguistics course did you fail miserably? I'm guessing the essay question about German V2 killed you. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Posts: 9
|
Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 6:23 pm
Post subject: |
|
|
The government should close all the linguistics departments in the country, and open something useful instead. Linguistics sucks sucks and sucks. If Shakespeare was alive, he would say "Linguistics sucks," "Linguistics sucks," "Linguistics sucks," three times "Linguistics sucks."  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 22 Dec 2006
Posts: 3
|
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2006 4:14 pm
Post subject: |
|
|
Ok linguistics_sucks, I'll tell you what, I'm pretty skeptical when it comes to syntax too.
It all made sense to me at first. Of course there are relations between words beyond the word order! There have got to be tree structures! But then there was IP, and the subject moved to Spec-IP. We learned about case. It seemed sort of like magic, but then, so does magnetism. I could just about live with it.
Then I, like you, learned about V2. How does that verb get up there? Well, [i]obviously[/i] there's a silent complementizer that the verb has head movement to, and then the NP moves to Spec-CP because...you know, why not? It made me pound my fist on the table and say "This is bullshit and sorcery!"
But you've completely missed the craziest part. No one says that any of these movements are congitively real. Chomsky has said in a number of places that his theories don't try to explain at all what speakers do in their minds when they produce or perceive a sentence.
So, all those movements and transformations aren't actually happening in your head, and no one's trying to say that the are....SO WHERE ARE THEY!?? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 22 Jul 2006
Posts: 11
|
Posted: Mon Dec 25, 2006 12:58 pm
Post subject: |
|
|
| well, it is pretty clear that chomskyan linguistics is not trying to explain all that happens in your head when you speak. All those models are trying to describe that thing that chomsky calls "the faculty of language in the narrow sense" (FLN) , the computational system that underlies language. In that sense, he doesn't try to explain "what is in your head" (that is psychology, I think, not linguistics...). |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Posts: 9
|
Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 9:22 pm
Post subject: |
|
|
[quote="Pawn"]well, it is pretty clear that chomskyan linguistics is not trying to explain all that happens in your head when you speak. All those models are trying to describe that thing that chomsky calls "the faculty of language in the narrow sense" (FLN) , the computational system that underlies language. In that sense, he doesn't try to explain "what is in your head" (that is psychology, I think, not linguistics...).[/quote]
If what Chomsky is trying to explain is the computational system that underlies language, then, it is, in a way, an effort to acccount for what happens in mind. But they CANNOT achieve this. And thus, they cheat and say, "well, this is not really what we wanna do." Now, that I call a big lie... |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 10 Jan 2007
Posts: 58
Location: Catania, Italy |
Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 2:40 pm
Post subject: |
|
|
There are different schools within chomskyan paradigm, I think. These are the ones I recognized so far:
Minimalist Program
Kayne model (antisimmetry)
Cartography (Rizzi, Belletti, Cinque...)
P&P
...
Well, I noticed that, as far as Cartography is concerned, you never ask yourself "why on earth did that XP move? why don't other similar items move? and so on. It is so because movements are never trivial. Instead, they are alwais triggered in order to give moved phrases a particular interpretation or function. This recalls very ancient intuitions about syntax (e.g. overt case morphology & (relatively) free order vs. rigid order & poor morphology: position (=movement) is an strategy alternative to morphology for setting information in the clause) which are now given a theoretic principled explanation. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
administratorSite Admin 
Joined: 20 Jun 2006
Posts: 66
|
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 9:15 pm
Post subject: |
|
|
salvomenza wrote:
There are different schools within chomskyan paradigm, I think. These are the ones I recognized so far:
Minimalist Program
Kayne model (antisimmetry)
Cartography (Rizzi, Belletti, Cinque...)
P&P
...
Well, I noticed that, as far as Cartography is concerned, you never ask yourself "why on earth did that XP move? why don't other similar items move? and so on. It is so because movements are never trivial. Instead, they are alwais triggered in order to give moved phrases a particular interpretation or function. This recalls very ancient intuitions about syntax (e.g. overt case morphology & (relatively) free order vs. rigid order & poor morphology: position (=movement) is an strategy alternative to morphology for setting information in the clause) which are now given a theoretic principled explanation.
Minimalist program also started like that; in Chomsky (1993), for instance, there was GREED, which prevented a phrase from moving unless it satisfied a need of that phrase. It all changed later, once minimalists noticed that this kind of a restrictive theory leaves many of the well-known syntactic phenemona unexplained. So, they gave up with GREED and included it in the definition of ATTRACT. From that moment on, a phrase could move just because it is attracted by another phrase; so what attracts is the greedy one in this new version, which, in my opinion, kind of gives the minimalist program the same problem of optionality. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 20 Jan 2007
Posts: 3
|
Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2007 12:08 pm
Post subject: |
|
|
^ funny thread  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 01 Jul 2007
Posts: 5
|
Posted: Mon Jul 02, 2007 10:17 am
Post subject: |
|
|
joseff wrote:
Chomsky has said in a number of places that his theories don't try to explain at all what speakers do in their minds when they produce or perceive a sentence.
So, all those movements and transformations aren't actually happening in your head, and no one's trying to say that the are....SO WHERE ARE THEY!??
Yes, Chomsky distinguishes between "performance" and "competence", so right, his structures have nothing to do with the stages of producing the utterance ("performance"). It's the sphere of psycholinguistics.
Yet, you are not right in thinking these transformations are "not in our mind". They are meant to show the competence of the speaker, the knowledge of the relations between the structures thanks to which we can understand the utterance and its place in the whole system. Since it deals with knowledge, it IS in our minds.
So, the bottom line is there's much of a difference between the notions "to generate" and "to produce" but they they're both "happenning in our minds". |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Joined: 20 Jul 2007
Posts: 4
Location: Seattle, WA |
Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 3:57 pm
Post subject: |
|
|
Just thought you should read this quote from Chomsky. All sciences go through change to progress, how can we ever have a better understanding about anything if we don't analyze, hypothesize, write the rules and re-analyze. Linguistics is still a very young area of study.
_________________
"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation."-Chomsky |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
