Commentary on Sam Featherston, ‘Data in generative grammar: The stick and the carrot‘

Abstract

Since Featherston (henceforth ‘F’) has labeled me as a ‘conservative supporter of generative practice’ (272), I would guess that he expects me to devote my commentary to a defense of this practice. My first thought was to invoke what in Anglo-American legal tradition is called the ‘tu quoque defense’, essentially the rebuttal that, guilty as I may be, ‘you did it too’. That turned out not to be a viable option, since, to my knowledge, F has not published in syntactic theory per se. I will therefore broaden my defense to one of ‘omnes quoque’. From the title of his paper to its conclusion F implies that there is something intrinsic to generative grammar that invites partisans of that framework to construct syntactic theories on the evidence of a single person's judgments. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The great bulk of publications in cognitive and functional linguistics follow the same practice. Of course, rhetorically many of the latter decry the use of linguists' own intuitions as data. For example, in his editor's introduction to an important collections of papers in cognitivefunctional linguistics, Tomasello 1998: xiii deplores the data that are used in generative grammar, which ‘are almost always disembodied sentences that analysts have made up ad hoc’. Yet only two contributors to the volume (Wallace Chafe and Paul Hopper) present segments of natural discourse, neither filling even a page of text. All of the other contributions employ examples constructed by the linguists themselves. It is quite difficult to find any work in cognitive linguistics (and functional linguists are only slightly better) that uses multiple informants. It seems almost disingenuous of F to fault generativists for what (for better or worse) is standard practice in the field, regardless of theoretical allegiance.