Is linguistics a respectable branch of science?

cognitive ling and computational ling are extremely /increasingly important in current AI pursuits
think Siri

t. cog sci major

Our languages are one of the most important things there are to us so of course

People who shit on stuff like linguistics are most likely engineering fags who think that everyone who isn't in a STEM field is going to become unemployed, because they fell for the meme.

Linguistic study is similar in a lot of ways to evolution based approaches to studying biology. Constructing phylogenies, utilizing features in order to model change over time, and using statistical models are all normal in linguistic study.

The study of how language evolves over time often time leads to understanding mechanistically how object identities and syntax work as they apply to new systems, and like implies is wildly useful in working constructively/prescriptively rather than descriptively.

It's the same people that shit on linguistics that always ask why philosophy majors have high IQ on that one chart that's always posted about average IQ and choice of major.

>then you're basically doing math.
Are they doing maths beyond statistics though?

why does a pursuit have to be useful?

Yes

You sound like the "About us" section of a shitty university's website.

Linguistics is highly relevant because it offers a fundamental protection from ideologies that want to reinvent language to suit arbitrary political reasoning.

I like this one

Yeah, some basic graph theory, some formal language theory/automata theory, lambda calculus, model theory, proof theory, and modal logic (namely in the fields of generative grammar and Montague semantics).

>generative grammar
>1990+X

Sounds interesting, thanks for your reply

Police police police police police police police police police police police police police police.

Language doesn't exist. Fake news.

Linguists know about fragments of these (if at all), always with a computational bent. Consequently, most linguists struggle with "real" model theoretic ideas (even applied), being sort of removed from purely computational approaches to math. I wish this were not the case.

>sauce: I work in linguistics and see misconceptions about mathematical concepts, or straight sloppy formal work, with uncomfortable regularity.

it also has the least to do with what linguists do. Linguists study language as it is used; we don't try to restrict any of it and surely not protect people from its "reinvention".

Linguists, to offer two services in application. identification of vibrations/symbols, and translating that identification into communicated intention(conversation/ preserving knowledge of what we associate our thought with)
Linguistics is required to exist at all times but it should be recorded.

I'm a linguist and I agree that we aren't specialists in those areas of math, but let's remember that we are linguists, not mathematicians. Although it would be great if linguists had a better theoretical grasp on discrete mathematics, the resources within linguistics departments to teach these areas in depth are limited. But there has been fruitful collaboration between linguists and logicians over the decades, and this seems to me a good means of insuring some level of quality control within the field.

>muh cognitive linguistics
>muh neural nets
>is my black box real science yet?

Now you got me interested in linguistics.

yeah, and it's especially interesting when considering just how you communicate ideas with other people in the first place, especially complex ideas.

>statistics in linguistics
Absolutely disgusting.

It's a field of aesthetics applying the scientific method. aesthetics are much more important than science, so yes

what?

I'm doing a double major in linguistics and anthropology, probably gonna end up mostly doong translations of old texts. I consider what I'm learning more of a humanity than a science, but if you approach linguistics from a cognitive perspective (i.e. psych major with focus on language) I suppose it could be considered a soft science.
Also, none of the classes for my major have been in the STEM building.

What university are you studying at, out of curiosity. Depending on where you study, linguistics can be either very mathematical, very computational, very psychological, very sociological or very anthropologic. The field is very broad after all, as there are many things to say about language.

USC. I think our program tends to start off pretty sociological and start to emphasize psychology more as we move forward, but since USC likes to encourage interdisciplinary studies my work has tended to have a pretty strong anthropological focus.
Are you currently studying linguistics? Curious to hear how your college goes about it.

I study linguistics at MIT. It's very rooted in the Chomskyan tradition, so lots of formal models in syntax, semantics and to some extent phonology (the latter of which is mostly optimality theory). Not much psycholinguistics. While there are a few labs for experimental research, it's really not the place to go if that's what you intend to focus on. As for sociolinguistics, there is simply nobody in the program doing that, so we don't touch the subject at all.

Yes, are linguistics is a respectable branch of science.
Are linguists a respectable subset of scientists? Usually not. Seriously though, why do I the impression the average academic linguist is antiscience?

Wow, that soudns awesome! What are your classes? Wanna share any of your teacher's notes, exercises etc? I'm really curious I want to see it.

Also can you please show how wrong I am: A huge issue with you is that you're at great university so your perspective is probably very skewed.