Explanation in Linguistics

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to understand what the notions of explanation and prediction in contemporary linguistics mean, and to compare various aspects that the notion of explanation encompasses in that domain. The paper is structured around an opposition between three main styles of explanation in linguistics, which I propose to call ‘grammatical’, ‘functional’, and ‘historical’. Most of this paper is a comparison between these different styles of explanations and their relations (Sections 3, 4, 7, and 8). A second, more methodological aspect this paper seeks to clarify concerns the extent to which linguistic explanations can be viewed as predictive, rather than merely descriptive (Sections 2, 5, and 6), and the problem of whether linguistic explanations ought to be causal, rather than noncausal (Section 6). I argue that the notion of prediction is equally applicable in linguistics as in other empirical sciences. The extent to which the computational model of generative syntax can be viewed as providing a causal or psychologically realist model of language is more controversial (Sections 5–9).