In the last two years or so I have gradually transitioned away from experimental-behavioral and computational work towards a larger proportion of what used to be called “pencil-and-paper” research: the development of theories, formalisms, and analyses. (“Description” also is pencil-and-paper in the relevant sense, but I am not really trained as a descriptive linguist.) While there are several reasons for this, one is the rather poor state of science funding in US, which suggest that we may be entering a moneyball era for linguistics.

When describing or presenting my pencil-and-paper work on phonology and its interfaces with morphology (which, to be fair, is mostly done on my trusty desktop computer, and which is sometimes quantitative), a few colleagues have suggested that I ought to be doing fine-grained acoustic or articulatory phonetics instead. I find this suggestion vexing. Consider something like my analysis of Spanish “raising verbs” in Gorman & Reiss (in press), which in turn is used to illustrate a series of formal-theoretical proposals under the umbrella of the theory of Logical Phonology. What could phonetic analysis contribute to this discussion? It’s obvious that, e.g., p[i]do ‘I ask’ has the same surface vowel as in v[i]ivo ‘I live’ whereas p[e]dir ‘to ask’ has a different surface vowel, one that is the same as the surface vowel in sum[e]rgir ‘to submerge’.  There are of course are subtle differences betwene renditions and speakers, but there’s no reason to think those differences are relevant to the analysis of raising verbs. Anyone reading this is welcome to show that I’m wrong, but I for one think it’d be a waste of time to so much as check. 

Similarly, a few colleagues have suggested that I ought to be doing human subjects experiments to figure out how such things (i.e., Spanish raising verb alternations) work. I too find this vexing. Now one can do a wug-test, and people have, but it’s not really clear what one gains from this, since we don’t have an agreed-upon linking hypothesis. Indeed, the most likely hypothesis is that adults are using a mix of task models, some of which might be relevant to our account of raising verbs, but some of which surely aren’t. How any of this might link up to the relevant linguistic notions like underspecification, morphophonological rules, suppletion, etc.—whatever you think the relevant notions might be—is unknown. A colleague thought the task ought to be some kind of online processing experiment, exploiting an unspoken form of what we might call a “derivational theory of complexity”, a totally discredited idea from before I was born. Similar issues plague neuroimaging work. The sorts of things that we can instrument in the brain at present—single-neuron firing rates as measured by single-cell recordings, magnetic current in boxes of 50,000 or so neurons as measured by MEG, blood oxygen levels in boxes of million or so neurons as measured by fMRI,  the smeared electrical currents measured by EEG, and so on—simply do not match the “grain size” of the linguistic constructs we are interested in (Poeppel & Embick 2005): a single neuron is almost surely too small to store a “raising rule” (whatever sort of thing that is), and a fMRI voxel far, far too large.

I am happy to have phonetician, experimental linguist, and neurolinguist colleagues, I just think that it’s sort of their j-o-b to figure out how to translate interesting linguistic ideas into something their tools can test, and I somewhat resent the implication that I am leaving hanging any phonetic or experimental low-hanging fruit. In those rare cases where I myself have ideas that I think can be tested using phonetic analysis or human-subjects experiments with clear linking hypotheses, I do phonetic analysis or human-subjects experiments. Indeed, the august National Science Foundation has even funded some of these experiments. But most of the time, I don’t—we don’t—and so I theorize, formalize, or analyze instead. 

References

Gorman, K. and Reiss, C. In press. Metaphony in Substance-Free Logical Phonology. Phonology to appear.

Poeppel, D. and Embick, D. 2005. Defining the relation between linguistics and neuroscience. In Cutler, A. (ed.), Twenty-First Century Psycholinguistics: Four Cornerstones, pages 103-118. Routledge.

A few years ago I wrote to an eminent phonologist noting a small omission in a publicly circulated manuscript of theirs marked “to appear in [major journal]”. They took the suggestion politely. In a follow-up, I asked when the manuscript would appear in [major journal]. They—the eminent phonologist, who I am keeping gender-neutral purely for anonymity—said they had no idea: the paper had been accepted to said major journal with minimal revisions years and years earlier, but they’d never bothered to send in the final version of the manuscript to the editors.

I realize it’s easy to let work, even good work, gather a bit of dusk. I’m guilty of this myself at times and I imagine it happens even more when one is eminent. But what this essay supposes is that it is bad for work, particularly by eminent linguists, to sit in public view without peer review, for years or even indefinitely.

Let me provide an example. I am working on a revision of a squib in which I provide a simple analysis of [phenomenon]. My motivation for interest in [phenomenon] is more or less that I saw a talk, a few years ago, presenting an alternative analysis for [phenomenon] using [bizarre theory]. While I am not ready to say that [bizarre theory] is “completely mad” (as one of my less-eminent colleagues has it), it was promulgated in a manuscript by an eminent phonologist (a different one this time) and that eminent phonologist’s eminent former student. That manuscript has, by now, circulated for a decade without any sort of peer review, but it has racked up hundreds of citations, and while certainly interesting, it raises many, many more questions about [bizarre theory] than it answers. This is a roundabout way to say, then, that [bizarre theory] has at its foundation a paper that would not make it through double-blind peer review in its current sketchy form. That’s not to say that a full explication of [bizarre theory] wouldn’t make it into print, but I suspect a peer-reviewed version would be much more valuable for the field than the decade-old manuscript we actually have.

So to be clear: I think these eminent linguists should just polish up these manuscripts and send them off for peer review. I for one have never had a paper which wasn’t substantially improved by peer review. And in particular, I think it’s borderline unethical for these eminent linguists to treat unpublished manuscripts as good enough for their graduate students to base a dissertation on, for instance, if they’re unwilling to even debate the work with their peers.