What's the point of linguistics?

[[ergativity notes]]

Generative view

• Organizing phenomena of languages that seem to occur in parallel
  • Doing so in a generalizable way (one we can make predictions from)
• Characterizing all languages as different parameter settings of one big "model"
• Deriving highly non-intuitive understandings of language
  • eg. (left periphery) why do most languages do SVO / SOV?
    • ordering of topic
  • eg. why can we say "the boat was sunk deliberately" but not "the boat was sunk (wait bad example)"
  • eg. why do we have to say "i ate an/the apple" or "i ate apples" but not just "i ate apple"?