Linguistic Mythology: Russian and Icelandic Languages [Лингвистическая мифология. Русский и Исландский Языки]

This is a presentation of my talk given at the international conference on the interaction of the Russian, Icelandic and Faroese culture in the Arctic context (Moscow, Gorky Institute for the World's Literature, 22-23.05.2019 http://imli.ru/index.php/konferentsii/konferentsii-2019/3615-vzaimodejstvie-kultur-v-arktike-rossiya-islandiya-farerskie-ostrova-literatura-yazyk-kultura). My modest contribution to the conference subject was an analysis of linguistic myths shared by a good deal of authors in Russian and Icelandic studies. Russian and Icelandic (as well as Old Russian and Old Icelandic) both deviate from the Standard Average European and presumably are similar to each other. Shared illusions and wrong statements in Russian and Icelandic studies generally arise due to the fact that linguists like other human beings are prone to mix up correct generalizations with heuristic estimates. An additional reason is that many theory-minded authors (often - native speakers of Russian and Icelandic) are misguided by their intuition and naively believe that if some form or combination of elements is predicted to be well-formed / ill-formed by their theory, it must also be true, since this theory looks so promising. Wrong statements of that ilk are as I argue an instance of the well-known priming effect: the author is enchanted by his (or even worse, someone else' theory) and goes descriptively blind. A more specific message concerning the illustrations I provide is that many interface phenomena (communicative-syntax and/or prosody-syntax interface) cannot be satisfactorily explained in syntagmatic terms (surface linear position) without recourse to syntactic structure and morphosyntactic features. Comments. I have deep respect for the authors of the criticized works. I do not deny the value of their contributions to the linguistic theory, Russian or Icelandic studies. I criticize ideas, not names and expose the myths. There is a typo on p. 53. The correct dates are 'Moore, Perlmutter 2000' and 'Sigurðsson 2002'. This bug is fixed in the card of this publication, see the “References” section. Both papers are from Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. The titles of the initial slides revoke some pages from "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften" and "Animal Farm".