[PLing] Vortrag + Diskussion: Charles Reiss (Concordia University), "Armchair Linguistics is Empirical Science" (19. 10.)

[Laura Grestenberger]

Liebe PLing-Liste,

Charles Reiss (Professor of Linguistics, Concordia University, Montréal, 
https://www.concordia.ca/artsci/cmll/faculty.html?fpid=charles-reiss) 
ist kommende Woche in Wien und wird zusätzlich zu seinem Vortrag bei der 
Wiener Sprachgesellschaft am 18. Okt. 
(https://wsg.univie.ac.at/veranstaltungen/charles-reiss-epistemic-boundedness-poverty-of-the-stimulus-amodal-completion-and-wugs/?mc_id=3) 
auch noch einen kurzen informellen Workshop mit dem Titel "Armchair 
Linguistics is Empirical Science" abhalten (unten das Abstract).

Die Veranstaltung richtet sich vor allem an Studierende, die sich für 
sprachwissenschaftliche Methoden bzw. theoretische Sprachwissenschaft 
interessieren, es sind aber natürlich alle Interessierten herzlich 
willkommen.

Wann: Mi, 19.10., 9.15h - 10.45h
Wo: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Sensengasse 3A, Seminarraum 8 (5. 
OG)

Das Format ist Vortrag + informelle Diskussion - als Katalysator für 
letztere werden auch Kaffee/Tee und Kuchen bereitstehen. Daher bitten 
wir um eine kurze unverbindliche Anmeldung (Email am mich), damit wir 
ungefähr einplanen können, wieviel wir brauchen.


Liebe Grüße,


Laura Grestenberger
Markus Pöchtrager
Hannes Fellner




---------------------------------------
"Armchair Linguistics is Empirical Science"


Abstract: Chomskyan Universal Grammar (UG)  is sometimes characterized 
as a controversial hypothesis lacking empirical support, both within 
academic circles and beyond. I suggest reframing the issues to cast UG 
as the assumption that makes empirical work on language possible, and I 
argue that Chomskyan theoretical linguistics is actually *more* 
empirically grounded than other approaches. In brief, without the 
assumption of UG, cross-linguistic comparison makes no sense, whereas 
accepting  UG expands the body of relevant data for each language to 
include data from all languages (as Chomsky 1986 suggests).

Even among linguists, one finds the anxiety that UG will have to be 
implausibly rich to account for  the variety of possible human  
languages.  I  address such concerns by demonstrating with the basic 
combinatorics of phonological features that even an extremely  compact 
UG provides an "essentially infinite" (Gallistel and King 2009)  
typological space.

Finally, I identify and name several forms of argument used  by 
linguists to make specific proposals about the content of UG. I 
illustrate these 'Empirical Argumentation Devices' with simple data sets 
from various branches of linguistics (morphology, phonology, semantics).

Overall, I hope to show that theoretical work sometimes derided as 
'armchair linguistics' is empirically grounded, and that doing such work 
requires some specialized knowledge of what language is.








-- 
Dr. Laura Grestenberger
Elise-Richter-Fellow, Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of 
Sciences
Lecturer, Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna
lauragrestenberger.com