The reverse grad school

I recently submitted a paper for review in a journal. The paper dealt with the null pronoun stuff that I’ve written here many times. A reviewer suggested that the article be rejected on the basis that s/he felt that it was “written by a grad student who has not had enough time to read what is out there on generative theory control and the pro-drop parameter.” The reviewer “strongly encourage[s] the author to persist, do some more reading, and try again in a while.”

The reviewer is correct, but misdiagnosed the source of the problem. I am not a grad student. So what is going on?

When we are born, a long process begins when we suck in everything what’s out there in the world, in our family, community, society, nation, and in the world; then we explore the history, humanity’s previous achievement, our values. Then we push. We work in some profession, to contribute something to others. A new generation will then, in some form, take advantage of our work. That can be simply that they ignore our work as useless and, thus, don’t repeat the mistakes. But once we reach an old age, a reverse process beings. I call it the “purge”.

I have followed two of my grandparents until the very end, one of the quite closely. What happens is that they gradually give up the world, or that they purge their mind of all the stuff that they once sucked in. At the very end, when my grandmother was close to 100 years old, she had purged almost everything. People end up where they once began, being surrounded by their closest family, or pictures thereof. Everything else, lost.

The same process takes place in grad school. In the beginning, there is an immersive sucking operation, in which we try to suck in everything that’s out there in our field, to master all the methods, to establish the connections, to examine what we really want to do, and, in the end, what we can indeed can or are able to do. So much stuff flows into our mind that it is, in retrospect, a huge achievement. What the reviewer saw in may paper was that this process had not yet completed.

But s/he misdiagnosed the problem. It was not that the process had not succeeded, but that I had undergone the reverse process. Let’s call it the “reverse grad school”.

As I’ve written in this blog, where I worked the intellectual landscape is very narrowly and tightly constrained, in a top-down fashion, by the university bureaucrats so that, for example, generative theory is considered unacceptable, unexceptionally, everywhere the whole country. It is a too “new” theory for Finland, basically because it adopts the natural scientific method for linguistics, still to be adopted in that country. The method itself was invented during the 17th century. I therefore made the decision, after a struggle, that it is not worth of my time and energy anymore. If a society is not able to adopt a natural scientific method in the 21th century, it is hopeless and has no future. Virtually everybody who thought natural scientific method is a worthwhile enterprise in linguistics had already left. So I quit working in the university (basically it was only teaching at that point) and left the country.

But what happens when you drop out from the university bureaucracy? The reverse grad school takes place. I started the purge, to unlearn everything. What had been indoctrinated earlier will all have to go.

You have an opportunity, after the dust settles, to see what is relevant and what is not. I “undid” most of the theoretical apparatus that I had once internalized, as I think it is simply worthless and distracts from the matters that are relevant in the long term. It is invented as a bureaucratic language for communication, and it serves the material interests of the participants, like the theory of the sun orbiting the earth once did for the Roman Catholic clergy. Managers’ views are adopted and boosted to keep the milking by taxation in place.

The minimalist program, for example, in and itself is interesting, but it fosters endless speculation on topics that I think is just worthless, all sort of “non-movement movement” analyses and absurd things like that, so much that if you work in that field you have to use a huge portion of your life’s limited resources to read, sort out, and comment that sort of crap. Why should we speculate if there is non-movement movement if many of the basic empirical generalizations of our data are still missing? Could you imagine Newton to formulate the laws of gravity if Tycho Brahe and Kepler had made wrong generalizations from the data, or ignored the details of the orbit of Mars?

Our field will have its Newton one day, but that man or woman needs to know what the facts are, and also in languages like Finnish, not just English or German. Newton required the corrects facts from the Mars’ orbit and Kepler’s laws. That was what made the breakthrough. (By the way, if you read Kepler’s books, his theories were simply crazy. But he had correct generalizations from the relevant data.)

Sure, there are people who think that a non-movement movement analysis is the way to go; but what I mean above is that if you work in a university bureaucracy, you have to use your resources to work with such stuff, simply because they emerge from the managerial level that you have to support no matter what. Yet, I believe that most people who give up being university bureaucrats will automatically drop much of the bureaucratic language for communication (“theories”) simply as idle liturgy serving the power structure and taxpayers milking operation.

Now a problem emerges, however, as I purged so much that I am currently without any theory whatsoever. That’s what the reviewer saw in my paper. I have no time, motivation and interest to play with managerial ideas that I see as wrong.

I see that there’s Merge, and I’ve seen Rizzi-style intervention effects in my data (see, for example, my paper on long distance case assignment in Lingua, “Long distance case assignment and intervention”). I see that there’s external Merge and internal Merge, but I have absolutely no way of knowing why there is internal Merge (EPP and the like). The last think I was able to say about EPP was basically that it’s there with no reason. At that point we’d need data from the brain processes themselves, which we don’t have. Future generations will have.

What the reviewer correctly observed in my paper is that I’d need to go to the grad school, precisely because I had been in the reverse grad school and purged it all out of my mind. I will not follow his/her suggestion, though.

What I should do is still very much open, and this is why I wrote this blog. Some people, when they are in my position, develop their own theory, publish it somewhere, and continue working on that intuition. There were, and still are, many breakaways from the generative tradition by people who then automatically drop out from that establishment. Generative semantics, the cognitive linguistics theory (the “space grammar”), LFG, all emerged in this way. These people first purged, and the built something. They were able to carve a hole in the establishment and emerge as independent scholars, still being able to force the rest to pay for their bills. I don’t know how that trick is possible. Possibly you just have to fool your handlers and managers for a while.

But what kind of theory?

 

As things stand now, I have no idea. I am doomed to write descriptive papers.