5 - Evidence and Motivation

Abstract

This chapter discusses the types of reasoning and evidence that linguists typically employ in the motivation and justification of phonological descriptions. There are two broad categories of evidence. First, there is corpus-internal evidence. In this, the argumentation is based on the primary body of data the linguist works with, a corpus of utterances in phonetic transcription with each utterance given at least a rudimentary grammatical and semantic analysis. This body of data is restricted in scope (in cases where the linguist does not have access to speakers of the language being studied and must rely on whatever descriptive materials are available) or open-ended (in cases where the linguist has the opportunity to work within the context of a speech community where the language is actively used). Second, there is corpus-external evidence. In this, the argumentation is based not on the language data itself, but on various types of linguistic behavior a full explanation of which seems to require appeal to the speaker's knowledge of his language. The various kinds of linguistic behavior include foreign language acquisition, speech errors, and systematic distortions of the language. This particular type of evidence is viewed as being of great importance; thus, while it is easy to find good examples of argumentation based on internal evidence, it is much more difficult to find analyses where external evidence is carefully utilized.