3 ms·

The fact that these people conflated "grammar" and "inflection affixes" makes me think they don't know what they are doing.

tgv 3y ago
They know what they're doing: publishing and attracting attention. It's pop-sci-bait. You take some grandiose idea X, dumb it down, operationalize it in a way that doesn't really prove what you want to say, do a correlation, and publish "X is true" or "X is false".
- mcswell 3y ago
  I haven't paid a lot of attention to the debate, so I can't give you a citation. But there have been many claims over the years (some of them by real linguists) that language property X is correlated with physical/ social/ ethnic property Y. This "grandiose idea" that you're referring to was one of those, and not one made up by the authors of this paper.
stinos 3y ago
They literally say it's an example, and 'along with many others'. Doesn't sound like actual conflation on their side, perhaps misreading or misinterpreting from your side?
jcranmer 3y ago
The fact that is a PR about the research (and consequently "dumbed down" for a lay audience) and not the actual research paper makes it a bit hard to divine, but I'm pretty sure the authors didn't conflate grammar with inflection affixes. In fact, the section on "Defining complexity" in the article here does mention this: > "Many of the disagreements are down to differences in how 'complexity' is defined [...] In this study, we improved the methodology by teasing out two distinct measures: fusion (how many affixes verbs and nouns have) and informativity (how many distinctions are made)." It strikes me as more likely that they're focusing on easily quantifiable metrics of grammatical complexity. Without reading the paper myself, I'd guess that the metrics chosen here suffer from lamplight fallacy (they're focusing on what can be quantified because it can be quantified as opposed to working out what would be a useful guide).
- mumblemumble 3y ago
  I think you may be right about the lamplight fallacy. I just started learning Mandarin this year. It's somewhat famous for having a simple grammar, but that in no way means that it has lesser expressive capacity. It just means that the language has evolved different ways of expressing the same ideas. They don't happen to be ways that can easily be summarized as grammatical rules. But I'm not sure I'd take that to mean that it's a simpler language. I think it probably says more about the concept of grammar as defined by grammarians.
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    Mandarin grammar is very complex. Mandarin inflection is quite simple. (Worse, Chinese language instructors say "grammar" but mean "inflection", which makes Chinese grammar textbooks an infuriating affair.)
bdowling 3y ago
Usually journalists don't actually understand what they are reporting on. Usually that's fine because most readers don't actually understand what they're reading.
- codr7 3y ago
  Until you do, and realize they have no clue. And then you turn the page and again assume they know their shit.

tgv 3y ago

They know what they're doing: publishing and attracting attention. It's pop-sci-bait. You take some grandiose idea X, dumb it down, operationalize it in a way that doesn't really prove what you want to say, do a correlation, and publish "X is true" or "X is false".

mcswell 3y ago
I haven't paid a lot of attention to the debate, so I can't give you a citation. But there have been many claims over the years (some of them by real linguists) that language property X is correlated with physical/ social/ ethnic property Y. This "grandiose idea" that you're referring to was one of those, and not one made up by the authors of this paper.

stinos 3y ago

They literally say it's an example, and 'along with many others'. Doesn't sound like actual conflation on their side, perhaps misreading or misinterpreting from your side?

jcranmer 3y ago

The fact that is a PR about the research (and consequently "dumbed down" for a lay audience) and not the actual research paper makes it a bit hard to divine, but I'm pretty sure the authors didn't conflate grammar with inflection affixes. In fact, the section on "Defining complexity" in the article here does mention this: > "Many of the disagreements are down to differences in how 'complexity' is defined [...] In this study, we improved the methodology by teasing out two distinct measures: fusion (how many affixes verbs and nouns have) and informativity (how many distinctions are made)." It strikes me as more likely that they're focusing on easily quantifiable metrics of grammatical complexity. Without reading the paper myself, I'd guess that the metrics chosen here suffer from lamplight fallacy (they're focusing on what can be quantified because it can be quantified as opposed to working out what would be a useful guide).

mumblemumble 3y ago
I think you may be right about the lamplight fallacy. I just started learning Mandarin this year. It's somewhat famous for having a simple grammar, but that in no way means that it has lesser expressive capacity. It just means that the language has evolved different ways of expressing the same ideas. They don't happen to be ways that can easily be summarized as grammatical rules. But I'm not sure I'd take that to mean that it's a simpler language. I think it probably says more about the concept of grammar as defined by grammarians.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  Mandarin grammar is very complex. Mandarin inflection is quite simple. (Worse, Chinese language instructors say "grammar" but mean "inflection", which makes Chinese grammar textbooks an infuriating affair.)

bdowling 3y ago

Usually journalists don't actually understand what they are reporting on. Usually that's fine because most readers don't actually understand what they're reading.

codr7 3y ago
Until you do, and realize they have no clue. And then you turn the page and again assume they know their shit.