Everyone's a linguist

Today, Rachel posted a story which everyone in linguistics has experienced at some time or other. Perhaps that statement would be better reformulated as, "which everyone in linguistics regularly goes through whenever they discuss grammar with non-linguists". Rachel notes that a friend told her:

Then my partner in crime got up because she had to go to a meeting. Before she left, she whispered in my ear, "Don't get into arguments with people about linguistics. It doesn't accomplish anything." I think she probably learned the hard way and wanted to pass on the lesson.

Oh boy. Isn't that the truth?

SC had a coworker, before his recent transfer, who holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering, and does most of his work in artificial reasoning and formal logics. In other words, a very educated man with exposure to a lot of language issues. Nevertheless, he had a hangup about "-ing". This form is always, according to SC's coworker, a gerund. In other words, a noun made out of a verb (i.e. "Running is good exercise"). Even though he could recognize participles as clearly verbal uses of "-ing" words (i.e. "I am running"), he insisted that this made them "gerundive participles", because he was stuck on the claim that "-ing" words are gerunds. The description may not be wholly inapt, but it certainly isn't the term of art he imagines it to be: Google only has 15 recorded examples, none of which are from actual linguists.

Why are people so prone to Cracker Barrel Philosophy of Language? SC thinks the answer is pretty obvious -- most people think that if they're familiar with something, they are competent to discuss it. Most people wouldn't presume to tell a particle physicist that they think they have a better idea about the number and types of bosons (unless they were also particle physicists). But they won't hesitate to tell a linguist that they know better about the number and types of parts of speech, even though they've never even attempted anything close to a serious study of the facts of their own language, never mind a cross-linguistic study of same. This isn't to say that intuition and experience with usage are valueless and should be ignored, but they're only really applicable to questions about whether a particular string is grammatically valid. It probably doesn't help the cause of linguistics that people are taught some basic facts about parts of speech in elementary school, with no hint at any time that the story may not be the full one. But SC's not sure that they should have to be told -- who really thinks that once they've learned arithmetic, there's nothing else to know about math?

Comments

[Mary]

It seems to be a pretty common experience in a few fields: psychology is one, history a second, medicine probably another. Linguistics (grammar/syntax in particular) seems to attract a particularly hard-headed pedantic type of person though.

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