ABSTRACT
In linguistic research, the investigation of a complex phenomenon often involves the adoption of a strategy whereby researchers consider this phenomenon from the perspective of their own area of expertise, carving out for themselves that part of it that best yields to their own tools and providing results consistent with their own assumptions. While such an approach is often efficient and very fruitful, it has clear limitations. The most obvious is the creation of results of the ‘blind men and the elephant’ variety, in which each partial description of the phenomenon comes to be seen, inaccurately, as representative of the whole, and the various descriptions are difficult to integrate. Another kind of limitation emerges when the phenomenon itself seems to defy easy answers to the question of where the borders between different domains of linguistic competence are drawn or how the principles that govern these different domains interact. Thus, working on any one part of such a complex problem without an appreciation of the other parts leads to artificial and empirically unsatisfying results.
