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.