 Hello again, welcome back to our Five Reasons video series. Today we would like to give you five reasons for the permanent progress in linguistics and as usual I have someone with me here who can talk about the reasons much better than me. It's Christian Meyer from Prybog University, one of Germany's leading linguists, well known for his achievements in using and developing linguistic corpora and this is the context in which we met as head of the Clarin Consortium's working group on foreign language philologies. Welcome Christian. Well thanks Jürgen for having me and I'm looking forward to this interview experience. Great pleasure. As usual I will not introduce our guest any further, just google his name and you will find him straightforwardly but just in case here behind us is his website. Now Christian before we talk about the five reasons for this permanent progress in linguistics let me ask you a personal question. What was your motivation? What was the main trigger for you to become a linguist? Well interesting question Jürgen. I would say it was an interest in foreign languages in school and foreign languages in their social and cultural context. I enjoyed trying out Italian on the family holiday and in university I was sort of torn between the literature and linguistics components and through a number of accidents I drifted into English linguistics and I emphasize English linguistics because I guess for me linguistics interest in languages and interest in foreign languages go together so I can't see myself as a linguist researching my own language. I see myself as somebody working on a foreign language that's part of it for me. Okay so that sounds interesting but let's now discuss your main points for the permanent progress in linguistics but one thing that comes to my mind is that there are always charismatic people who are driving forces in the field. Is that true? Yes you've identified one of several causes. The genius linguist, the charismatic innovator introducing new concepts which help us see the entire field differently, take a different view of language and so on and I would add that sometimes you would be tempted to say that the genius innovators, the genius innovators are also marketing geniuses of a kind. I guess if you look at this or so, his book wasn't published, his foundational book called the Linguistic General wasn't published until 1916, three years after his death, his fame probably emerged only decades after his death but if you look at Chomsky I guess you would say that he became famous, rightly famous for his conceptual innovations in his lifetime and I would say he hasn't been among the worst marketers of his own ideas, certainly not. Yeah I can confirm this, I work together with Bill Labov and can fully subscribe to your view, he's a charismatic linguistic force and a bundle of energy and an energetic worker at 80 years old. But today we don't only have linguistic leaders, we have the global community, part of them are watching perhaps now hopefully. So is that the driving force too? Yeah I suppose there is the phenomenon of crowd intelligence in academic linguistics as well. If you study the history of structuralism you end up at the overpowering founding father Ferdinand de Soussure, if you study generative linguistics you end up, the history of generative linguistics you end up at Chomsky's revolutionary books of the 1950s and 1960s. If you have a look at usage-based linguistics at linguistic typology I guess you would be able to point out individual scholars who've made significant contributions but you would not arrive at one single founding figure. So let's take functional typology, the paradigm emerged in opposition to formal approaches. Many people at various times were unhappy with the relatively dogmatic understanding of certain things in formalist approaches to language and they accumulated the basis on which to formulate an alternative paradigm. And so you would say many parents, many founding figures but not a single powerful. And today what we experience of course with the YouTube videos like this one we are permanently checked by the global community. Everything is scrutinized and then criticized, evaluated but there's constructive criticism. The community has become much larger. Okay there is review so I guess let me take the devil's advocate's point of view, let me take the conservative position at least for the sake of argument. What we need in the linguistic community is informed peer review in a democratic research culture and I want to stress that there's a lot of review on the web, there's a lot of comment on the web but some of it is by peers and I'm happy to accept any student who's got something to say as my peer if they have reasonable arguments for their point of view but we should also emphasize the informed and the peer in the review and I think we should have a little more of the informed and of the peer on the web. But anyway you're right, you're describing the way things are going. Okay let's slightly change topic for a moment. Couldn't we say that linguistic progress is also a consequence of a permanent repositioning of linguistics in the concept of academic disciplines? Yeah that's the third reason I think when linguistics emerged it was part of an undertaking referred to as philology, the study of texts, the study of literary texts and this strong alliance I think has informed linguistics for a very long time. It's beginning to be questioned these days. We need new alliances with psychology, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, neuro-linguistics, the study of the brain and I would say if you ask me where I expect great progress in linguistics over the coming 10 or 20 years I would point to neuroscience as one area. I mean we're just beginning to unravel the mysteries of how language is stored, processed in the human brain, in the human mind and we'll find out more about that than I'm expecting with all due reserve and caution breakthroughs in this area which might be comparable to the discovery of the common origin of all the Indo-European languages in the proto-language, the great insight of 19th century historical comparative linguistics. Factor number four is not just the academic context which we just talked about, it's the wider social context. One of the ideological reasons for the flowering of linguistics in the 19th century was clearly the rise of nationalism. You had the study of the privileged three sacred languages of the Bible and interest in European vernaculars, their history, interest in contemporary dialects, non-standard varieties of languages was really considered an eccentric and marginal interest in the 18th century. In the 19th century in a climate of nationalism, romantic nationalism, not the vicious kind which has plagued so much of more recent history, certainly provided a climate in which the study of older forms of the European vernaculars, old English, old high German, was encouraged. Young people were interested in that kind of thing. University funders were willing to establish professorships and that kind of alliance has certainly disappeared. I mean linguists who work on languages today would resent the notion of being considered romantic nationalists and I guess there are areas like language and feminism, language and education, discrimination in the educational system against linguistic minorities which especially in applied linguistics context are very important and if we could raise more interest among the general public that the work which is being done in linguistics has many useful applications in education, in language planning, then this could be a new alliance which would probably encourage governments to reinvest in linguistics in a different kind of linguistics but there is hope for that so I would say distinguish between the wider social context where developments go on which might be interesting and the academic context which is our day-to-day environment. We talk to our colleagues in literature in psychology all the time we compete for the same kind of funding for the same resources in the university. So having mentioned four reasons already let's finally talk about technology one of your research areas and our research areas. What about the shift from pen and pencil and paper to modern technology? Isn't that the final driver or the ultimate driver even? That is the important driver which always works together with all the other four factors which we mentioned and which is probably more important than we generally tend to think. In academia we tend to think of achievement as the idea in the individual's mind but if you think about sound recording and research on the spoken language you will instantly see that there are many interesting branches in contemporary linguistics which would be impossible without a tape recorder or some kind of smaller digital recording device discourse analysis without the recording of spontaneous conversation impossible. Social linguistic variation without... sociophonetics without recording of sound data absolutely impossible. So the mobile recording device which could be used in the field has expanded the horizon of linguistic inquiry enormously. Right usage-based linguistics statistical approaches to language require the easy availability of large masses of digital language data. I mean we're doing an interview audio-visual multimodal. I mean can you think of research and gesture facial expression body language in relation to language communication in the round so to speak without audio-visual recording no. So I guess we're not any cleverer than the geniuses that have worked in the field before us certainly not we stand as the proverb has it on the shoulders of giants but what we do have is the technical tools which enable us to ask questions which the people before us couldn't ask because they would have known that compiling a concordance to the works of Shakespeare was years of work. For us now in the digital era it's one after another. Not minutes but hours but it's short. Okay so Christian I'm sure you could go on and on but we have to stop because our policy is to be as concise as possible so we confine ourselves to five reasons. On behalf of all our viewers thank you very much for being with us. I'm looking forward to seeing this in the web. Thanks for your statements and all the best for your futures. Thank you very much. Okay