Linguistics - is it worth learning ?

[aokoye]

Is a linguistics degree a BA ? I always thought linguistics was a science.

Yep it's a BA at the vast majority of US institutions that offer it. Given that BAs in the US generally require fewer math courses and more language courses it makes sense. It is considered a social science though. That said so is sociology and psychology and those are also often offered as BAs.

[blaurebell]

Is a linguistics degree a BA ? I always thought linguistics was a science.

BA in Germany too. Actually, like all social sciences it's some very weird and unrigorous mix of flawed statistics combined with shoddy theory, so neither scientifically nor philosophically rigorous enough in most cases. This started to become clear to me when I had to take Pragmatics (Linguistics) and Theory of Action (Philosophy of Language) together in the same semester, because I happened to be studying two different degrees at the same time. The content is exactly the same, but the attitude is entirely different. What we criticised and totally took apart for being logically flawed or not conceptually rigorous in the philosophy course I actually had to learn by heart as if it was divine truth in the linguistics course. Since then I have a hard time taking linguistics seriously. Some of it is a tad more scientific - like conversation analysis, natural language processing, that sort of thing - but there is an awful lot of hand-wavy theory elevated to fact without proper justification.

Also, apart from often being methodically flawed the whole logic of it also doesn't fit the scientific method. In science it usually goes like this: hypothesis -> experimental confirmation -> conceptually not very rigorous theory / no theory at all. In the social sciences it usually goes: conceptually not very rigorous theory=hypothesis -> "experimental" confirmation with severe confirmation bias and otherwise flawed methods. Anyone with a proper science training will find social sciences entirely unscientific and anyone trained in philosophy will find their theories extremely shoddy and full of holes. Bad combination, because that means any proper scientist and philosopher needs about 5 minutes to tear down the whole house of cards. You can have holes in your theory if your scientific method is sound, and you can have flawed scientific methods if your theory is bad, but if you have both you have basically wasted your time. Of course there are always gems of insight hidden in the mess and single studies that are entirely flawless conceptually or methodically, usually coming from people with a philosophy or science background. Most of it makes me shudder though! Linguistics happens to be one of the more rigorous subjects of the social sciences and has some bits that overlap with computer science, so it's not quite as bad as Media Studies or Sociology. Still, definitely not science.

By the way, all of it could be easily remedied if social scientists were required to get a decent level of philosophical AND scientific training, but well, the current policy is not to encourage people to go into the humanities at all.

[Cainntear]

The answer, as always, is "it depends".

My introduction to linguistics was through an excellent Open University course about the history and development of English. It didn't cover anything to a great degree of depth, but everything was made very meaningful. A lot of what it dealt with was about pragmatic functions of language, so it wasn't just decontextualised structure.

For example, are you familiar with the idea of "indirection"?

I've seen so many language courses teach a "would you...?" early on for politeness, but they never talk about why, so it always seems a very arbitrary thing.

Indirection is the (reasonably obvious, if you think about it) use of less direct language to be polite.
So
* Shut the door! Is rude.
* Please shut the door. Is still very direct, so implies power on the sayer.
* Will you shut the door? Is also quite direct. No-one likes being told to do something this way.
* Can you shut the door? Now we're starting to get slightly indirect, because the request is now purely implicit as the verb is technically about ability. However, we're still using the indicative present, which is still direct.
* Would you shut the door? Is no longer indicative present, instead conditional/hypothetical, so indirect
* Could you shut the door? Is very indirect because of both the verb and the tense.

Then we've got all the turns of phrase like "Any chance you might [shut the door]?" Again, it's all about indirection. To a learner, that big long list of things categorised as "command", "request" or "polite request" can be baffling and bewildering, even though they probably have as many variations in their own language.

A concept like "indirection" becomes an ordering principle that allows the learner to build up a meaningful internal model of how the different items relate to each other, and also to process them grammatically, the same as a native would. (You may not be aware that you use grammar to identify indirection in this way, but it's almost certain you do.)

There are lots of concepts like that in linguistics, and being aware that these variables exist makes it far easier to notice them when you encounter them in other languages, and the material you are using doesn't tell you they're there.

[aokoye]

Most of it makes me shudder though! Linguistics happens to be one of the more rigorous subjects of the social sciences and has some bits that overlap with computer science, so it's not quite as bad as Media Studies or Sociology. Still, definitely not science.

By the way, all of it could be easily remedied if social scientists were required to get a decent level of philosophical AND scientific training, but well, the current policy is not to encourage people to go into the humanities at all.

There was a session at AAAL this year about statistics in linguistics and needless to say, it ended up being standing room only. The main takeaway that I got from it was - take every statistics course available to you. The other was that there needs to be more stats classes aimed specifically at linguists. As a slight aside, have you taken any conversation analysis courses? I ask because you might like it (or at the very least find it more scientifically sound) because it is far less abstract compared to say, critical discourse analysis. I, not so shockingly given my preference for things like sociology, prefer CDA but I'm part of a working group that does analysis from a CA framework so I've gotten fairly good at it.

[Saim]

Is a linguistics degree a BA ? I always thought linguistics was a science.

It depends on the branch of linguistics. I don't see why phonetics wouldn't be classed as a natural science, for example, whereas sociolinguistics, pragmatics and linguistic anthropology are all well within the realm of social science.

[Iversen]

The purpose of linguistics is to describe language, not to teach people how to learn languages. You would expect that to be the purpose of language pedagogics, which as far as I know also is claimed to be a science by its practitioners - but what I have seen from that part of the academical world has been even less practical and definitely more biased than the writings of the linguists.

I have seen some practical experiments which gave relevant and potentially useful information, for instance about the workings of things like memory and attention, but it seems that the predominant attitudes in the pedagogical ivory towers still reek of 68 and political opinion mongering. And contrary to Blaurebell I don't think that more philosophical schooling would have positive effects on that situation - on the contrary: the more philosophy you find in an academical milieu the less hard science you can expect from it. I did go through a philiphy couorse (named "Videnskabsteori" in Danish) at the onset of my own university studies, but in retrospect I think it could have been limited to one page of Popper, one page of Kuhn and something about formal logic - the rest was irrelevant.

Some kinds of lingustics have been less harmed by good will and political thinking than others. It is hard to keep sociolinguistics from being infected by wishful thinking and political considerations, but things like phonetics and grammar can be studied without referencing people like Karl Marx and Marcuse and Habermas. Actually the relevant part of linguistics seems to be the empirical field work, and the theory is only a tool to make that field work more efficient. And then we are closing in on defining why studying some aspects of linguistics can be wortwhile - namely those parts of the theory that allow you to notice, grasp and categorize linguistic structures.

I would definitely have had a harder time learning my languages if I hadn't been trained in analyzing sentence structures almost automatically. And even though speaking foreign languages is the part of language use that is least important to me in my daily life I have profited immensely from knowing something about theoretical phonetics. The irony is that some of the 'thinking techniques' that I use most weren't taught to me - I had to discover them myself during (or after) my studies. For instance nobody taught me how to make three column wordlists - I developed that layout after resuming my language studies in the late noughties. And I still 'think syntax' using a system I developed during my French studies, but it was definitely not the way grammar was taught by my teachers.

So for me the practical benefits of learning about linguistics have first and foremost been 1) to get a better understanding of the empirical information which has been distilled into grammars and dictionaries, 2) being forced/lured into the metatheoretical considerations (mostly my own) which lead to the formulation of the study techniques which I use now, 3) learning about concrete languages in operational terms.

[IronMike]

If you want to study the linguistics of how people learn languages, study Second Language Acquisition. May or may not help you figure out how best to learn a language yourself, but if that were the main point I'd just study languages and figure out my system.

Linguistics is my favorite academic subject, and I read linguistics books and texts and articles purely for fun. Even more fun? Reading linguistics texts in Russian or Esperanto. I am most proficient, lexicon-wise, in linguistics. I've actually surprised Russians when I've talked with them about their language's grammar in Russian, and used the proper terms.

If you want some fun, layman's books on language, I always recommend two: John McWhorter's The Power of Babel and Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word.

[Chung]

Just been having a look at some linguistics books and am interested in the idea that they can teach how to learn a 2nd/3rd etc language. Also if I want to teach languages in the future it would be useful to know

Do you think it is worth investing time in learning about linguistics and if so anyone recommend any books for a beginner - thank you

Did come across this but don't know if it is any good:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Learn ... 7QSS4H1Y2D

Unless you're keen enough on linguistics, I think that you as someone learning a language are better served by keeping it light and spending as little money as possible for linguistics textbooks. I recommend Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages by Eifring and Theil whose manuscript is available for free downloading through the University of Oslo. It's a very readable summary on the subject, and as the title leads on, takes examples of linguistic phenomena from languages outside the bubble of SAE.

Applied linguistics covers language learning and second language acquisition, although you might need to go beyond simply reading about the topic if you want to apply usefully any topics from those areas in your strategies to learn a language.

The branches of linguistics that I've found helpful as a learner are historical linguistics (especially comparative linguistics) and to a lesser extent sociolinguistics although I've done nothing more than read introductory material on them and then some papers focused on some aspect from those subdisciplines involving my target languages (e.g. To what degree are Croatian and Serbian the same language? Evidence from a Translation Study, Become-Constructions in Finnish and Estonian: Diachronic and Contrastive Perspectives)

[galaxyrocker]

SAE.

A little aside, but it's always frustrated me how common that acronym is in linguistics -- Standard American English, Southern American English, Standard Average European, etc.

Otherwise, I do agree with what everyone else has said: learn about linguistics if you're interested in linguistics. Oftentimes, language learning will make someone interested in it; that's what happened to me when I started really getting interested in Irish. It was quickly down the never-ending rabbit hole trying to understand concepts of syntax, which then eventually also made me read about phonetics, sociolinguistics (fairly pertinent to Irish), historical linguistics, etc and realize how much I enjoyed the whole subject.

[DaveBee]

If you want some fun, layman's books on language, I always recommend two: John McWhorter's The Power of Babel and Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word.

I used to watch Mr McWhorter on Blogging Heads. I bought an Assimil course after he mentioned it in an NPR piece (it then sat on a shelf for 10? years).