Can you talk about your specific field in linguistics/philology?
I've mucked about here and there including in language classification (did those two extinct tribes speak related languages?), stemmatics (what is the relationship between all those manuscripts containing the same text?), non-traditional authorship attribution (who wrote this crap anyway?) and phonology (how and why do the sounds of a word "change" when it is inflected?). To preserve some anonymity (though I am not famous) I'd rather not get too specific.
what are the main challenges?
There are lots of little problems I'm interested in for their own sake but perhaps the meta-problems are of more interest here. Those would include getting people to accept that we can actually solve problems and that we should try our best to do so, Many scholars seem to have this fatalistic view of the humanities as doomed to walk in circles and never really settle anything. And for good reason - if someone manages to establish "p" then all the nice speculation based on assuming "not p" is worthless. But many would prefer to be as free as possible to speculate about as much as possible.
Do you have a stake/an opinion in the debates about the Chomskian strain in syntax/linguistics in general?
Yes. I think the Chomskyan approach is based on a fundamentally mistaken view of cognition, akin to "good old fashioned artificial intelligence". I hope to write a top-level post on this at some point. But I'll say this for Chomsky: He's not a walk-around-in-circles obscurantist. He's a resolutely-march-ahead kind of guy. A lot of the marching was in the wrong direction, but still, I respect that.
non-traditional authorship attribution
Is that really the standard term? You know, that the LW party line is that it's a bad term like selling non-apples. Google suggests to me that it is not the most popular term. The link below replaces "non-traditional" with "modern," which isn't an improvement on this dimension.
Also, my first parsing was that "non-traditional" modified "authorship." This is actually a reasonable use of the prefix "non," since having a strong prior on the author makes a big difference (sociologically, if not technically). How bout that Marlowe?
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