Linguistic modelling and the scientific enterprise

Language in and out of society: Converging critiques of the Labovian paradigm

“…Linguistics, it seems, has become part of the same trend. Nefdt (2016aNefdt ( , 2016b, for instance, has pondered continuity in generativism. He argues that even though we cannot infer ontological continuity from the history of generativism (minimalism has arguably little to do with the generativism of the 1960s), we can find continuity in its scientific modelling practice of idealisation.…”

“…The goal of this paper is to take these descriptions one step further and ask what they can tell us about progress in their respective fields. While Nefdt (2016aNefdt ( , 2016bNefdt ( , 2019 lays out modelling continuity in generativism quite convincingly, he is hesitant in passing judgement on the ontological breaches he discusses (which I describe in some detail in chapter 4.3 below). 27 If we want to ponder scientific progress, however, we need something to measure these ontological breaches against; something by virtue of which we are then able to say: "Theory A is better than Theory B, and hence the ontological breach", without ignoring the fact that what counts as better, truer or more real is, in part, theory-dependent (Kuhn, 1970(Kuhn, [1962).…”

“…In ways which will be laid out in the following two chapters, scientific realism has the potential to offer such a measure, but it comes with certain challenges. If these challenges are dealt with adequately, scientific realism can provide us with a theoretical toolkit that lets us argue, in the context of Nefdt (2016aNefdt ( , 2016b, that the dynamic turn in syntax did away with key assumptions of the traditional generativist framework because it was able to predict pronoun reference more successfully; or because treating the sentence as the pivotal studied subject was an unjustified restriction. In the context of Woschitz (2019), it enables us to state that sociolinguists have started problematising the autonomy of linguistics because they feel it is merely a heuristic stand-in for social processes at work.…”

A Constructionist Philosophy of Logic

“…17 I here ignore the question of whether their distinction between idealisation in linguistics and abstraction in the sciences is as strict as they claim. For a critical view, see: Nefdt (2016). emphasis on tractable knowability is, by contrast, primarily associated with efficient proof-procedures.…”

Modeling as a Method of Describing the Lexical Meaning Structure

“…Undoubtedly, most of the meaningful language units correlate with the reality, but the question about the information which creates the meaning of a sign is still unclear, and the terms used to denote components of this information are also very diverse. In this regard, it is interesting to consider modeling [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] from the point of view of modern semantics, to organize basic terminology and structural characteristics of the models and to determine the place of the modeling method to describe the structure of lexical meaning.…”