Well hell, I've been going about it wrong for all of this time. I love theory, but hate all of that data. I guess that's why I ultimately chose to study literature instead of linguistics - Woo hoo for theory!

Language hat - you have such a wonderful blog here! Brava!

Why, thank you! (But it would be "Bravo" in my case.)

I guess a lot has to do with the lack of dialogue. The theoreticians don’t know the state of our data, and the historicists don’t know the theory/ies, which are quite well founded on modern empirical findings. E.g., theoretician asks historicist about iambic shortening in Latin and was surprised to find out how difficult it is to find examples beyond the usually quoted few forms.

But it is too bad that this thing is being billed as “dialogues”, though it’s more like two simultaneous dialogues instead of one common one.

It's important to keep the facts around. Without them, how would theoreticians come up with the next 'paradigm change'?