Directional Source-Marking and Enumerated Utterance Syntactophoric Replacement in Notso Yi—Keith W. Slater SpecGram Vol CLXIII, No 4 Contents Grey Duck or Goose?—Mapping variation in a children’s game in Minnesota—Sven Slater and Ollie Bickford

How Linguistics Got Her Groove Back1

Gunnr Guðr Entgegenlächeln
FG Klopstock Universiteit

Common wisdoman oxymoron if ever there was onehas it that linguistics and linguists themselves have a bit of a reputation problem. Are linguists boring? Incomprehensible? Pointless? Evil? The contention of this paper isgiven that perception is nine-tenths of realityunless we ask, we’ll never know.

To that end, I conducted a survey, which took place at a cocktail party, where there were many linguists and many non-linguists who were not particularly well-acquainted with linguistics. I interviewed 3 (±0.15) non-linguist partygoers: JWD, a mathematician, JWM, an artist, and WMJ, a biochemist.

I asked them to rate each of the following types of people on a desirability scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is “the mostest awesomest thing evar!” and 2 is “a root canal” (preserving 1 for some unnamed personal horror, as is standard practice):

persona random unknown person at a cocktail party

linguistan unknown person at a cocktail party who, when asked, “What do you do?”, replies, “I’m a linguist.”

πa previously identified linguist who, when asked, “How many languages do you speak?”, replies, “About 3.14159265.”

diseasesa previously identified linguist who, when asked, “How many languages do you speak?”, replies, “That’s like asking a doctor how many diseases they have.”

rocksa previously identified linguist who, when asked, “How many languages do you speak?”, replies, “That’s like asking a geologist how many rocks they have in their head.”

watera previously identified linguist who, when confronted with the comment. “Linguistics? Is that even a thing? I mean, I speak a language, how much can there be to know?” responds with, “Would you assume that a fish knows everything there is to know about water?”

aira previously identified linguist who, when confronted with the comment. “Linguistics? Is that even a thing? I mean, I speak a language, how much can there be to know?” responds with, “Does the fact that you breathe air mean you know everything about atmospheric science?”

The raw data is provided below. Responses for each respondent are listed columnarly in the column under their initials. Additional computed fields include:

μthe mean of the respondents, by row

σthe standard deviation of the respondents, by row

Δthe difference of the row mean from the row mean for “linguist”

ϙa heuristic “reliability score” predicting how predictive the row mean for each row means to be:

ϙ = 
|(μμ - μ) * Δ|
σ

where μμ is, naturally, the mean of the row means.

JWDJWMWMJμσΔϙ
person5665.670.58-1.001.08
linguist7676.670.580.00
π7846.332.08-0.330.01
diseases8777.330.580.671.20
rocks9577.002.000.330.12
water5866.331.53-0.330.01
air6866.671.150.000.00
survey4544.330.58-2.337.91

After completing the first round of survey questions, I detected the need for an additional category of linguist, already included in the data summary above:

surveyan unknown person at a cocktail party who, when asked, “What do you do?”, replies, “I’m a linguist. Could I get you take a quick linguistic survey for me?”

There are a few caveats that need to accompany the data above. Due to the small sample size, I did not control for the use of singular they in the survey questions. Also, there appears to be an unexpected but likely sample bias from gathering survey data at the most recent International Men of Philology/Women of Anthropology Multidisciplinary Mixer.

Nonetheless, we can draw some useful, practical conclusions:

Well, now we know!


1 This title is for rhetorical purposes only, and is maintained for historical reasonsin that it was the title used in the grant proposal which funded the survey. Linguistics is not female, never had a groove, and was unsuccessful in getting it back.

Directional Source-Marking and Enumerated Utterance Syntactophoric Replacement in Notso YiKeith W. Slater
Grey Duck or Goose?Mapping variation in a children’s game in MinnesotaSven Slater and Ollie Bickford
SpecGram Vol CLXIII, No 4 Contents