¿Y que...?

I sent this out as a question, but realized that it would be absurdly long to project out on the screen, so I'm going to post it here for everyone's perusal.

 

How much does a researcher's willingness to believe a given outcome influence whether or not that person finds it? And how much does another researcher's negative reaction to such a "found" outcome motivate the undertaking of research to question its validity? The reason I ask is because it seems that a lot of the articles we are reading are responses to assertions of corruption of language, lack of linguistic ability, and other similarly negative characteristics of the language of code mixers. The general theme I've been seeing is that the first quest is to show why the apparently extra-linguistically motivated conclusion is untrue and then to say that the phenomenon in question (we've seen lack of skill, grammatical convergence, and calques) is in effect, inconsequential. We seem to be saying, "see, it happens in monolingual varieties too, just in a different way." The effect that this produces in the audience (i.e. grad students subjecting themselves to amounts of this stuff the way undergrads drink) is the frustration that all we are doing is showing that the categorically heinous findings published previously are in fact, and can to be proven with empirical evidence, categorically heinous. I think that the non-linguists in the room are then stymied by an overwhelming sense of SO WHAT?!!! Even though the author who wrote the categorically heinous findings was well, heinous, it was still compelling enough to want to disprove. Right now the only thing I feel compelled to do is find some mind-numbing activity that will compensate for reading through all that technical language. Maybe I'm asking to have my cake and eat it too, but when it comes to many of these articles that disprove previous research, not only do I want them to be correct (which they have taken great pains to be) but I want to want to care.