Re: why does linguistic literature tend to be opaque?

Am 11 Nov 2006 06:12:44 -0800 schrieb Ray:

mb 寫道：

Nathan Sanders wrote:
grumbler_ntust@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

After reading a dozen linguistic papers, I often feel the authors are
rather unclear about what they want to say; they often present a theory
and an example in support of or in contradiction to the theory, but
don't show the reader in enough detail why a certain example supports
or refutes a theory. They leave the task to the reader himself. I often
spend hours on a single paragraph, trying to figure out the relevance
of it to others, etc. Why is this practice so prevalant? Are they being
opaque for some purposes? It's rather frustrating to read such works,
and unfortunately, there are many.

I doubt this is anything particular to linguistics. Academic articles
in any field can be hard to understand, especially if you don't have
the relevant background, or are just plucking random articles out of
the literature with little understanding of how they fit into the
field as a whole.

Perhaps you'd get better results if you got guidance from someone more
knowledgeable who could recommend to you more appropriate articles,
ones that are written by good writers and are aimed at your knowledge
of linguistics.

There is a little something in this claim, though: When giving
examples, as the OP says, some authors have a tendency to present it in
the form: "A modifies B in the presence of C" and follow it by a
longish text where A, B and C are not individually marked. This can be
irksome for anyone (including people with otherwise good formal
training) that is not perfectly conversant with the particular
subspecialty. The practice is not limited to linguistics, of course,
but it is infrequent in, say, biology or chemistry where you'll have
(and expect) arrows marked A, B and C.

I suspect some linguists prefer not to write straightforwardly,
probably because once clarified, their theory is open to easy
refutation. Or they refuse to make explicit some assumptions. And the
read often has to guess at their meanings by assuming tentatively that
they assume A, and then bringing A into their theory to see if the data
they furnished fits well with A and the theory as a whole. This process
could repeat several times (because there are often several assumptions
they don't make explicit) while we read a paper, and really takes a lot
of time. This is one major reason why some linguistics students turn
out to hate linguistics in the end.

I don't understand why such a behaviour should be peculiar to
linguists.

Joachim
.

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