HONOURING HISTORICAL FACTS: THE CASE OF INTONATIONAL DOWNTRENDS Jan Volín, Pavel Šturm Institute of Phonetics, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Czech Republic jan.volin@ff.cuni.cz Abstract: Various researchers of the past are honoured in citations as the very first who described or discovered certain scientifically important phenomena. However, the illusion of “our times being superior to past” causes certain myopia: we often do not go back enough to identify and appreciate the true pioneers. Generally, we tend to underestimate what our ancestors already knew and did, and we overestimate the con- tribution of our own era. The present paper demonstrates this predicament with the case of intonational downtrends, i.e., gradual lowering of phonologically equivalent melodic targets within an utterance. The first report of the phenomenon is often at- tributed to K. L. Pike, sometimes even to later intonologists. We, on the other hand, document much older accounts of intonational downtrends, and offer some tentative explanations as to why the earlier research was ignored. 1 Introduction 1.1 Rationale Science as a way of human learning about the world possesses several crucial attributes. One of them is cumulativeness. Researchers who expand human knowledge always build on what has been achieved before them. Many lay people believe that in terms of scientific endeavour our ancestors were somehow underdeveloped or even backward. This cognitive illusion stems from several sources. First, it is the state of technology that leads to a childish contention like “our ancestors did not have our ‘wonderful gadgets’, therefore, they must have been intellectually deficient”. This way of rea- soning not only confuses innovations with science, but also ignores the fact that innovations largely benefit from science, and share the cumulativeness feature with it. Second, when teach- ing children to be grateful, there is a general tendency to portray the current state of affairs as advanced in comparison with backslidden or even degenerated past. Third, it is often pointed out how the outdated scientific views of the past were mistaken, but we do not realize that our current views will also be judged as outdated and mistaken one day. Moreover, what seems clearly wrong from today’s perspective in the science of the past actually constitutes the essen- tial precondition of our current knowledge, so even the errors should be considered with grati- tude and respect. It follows that one does not have to be a trained philosopher to appreciate the past as the essential prerequisite of the present. Current conventions of empiricist discourse require accurate and unambiguous referencing whenever non-trivial facts, propositions, assertions, or quantitative results are presented in re- search reporting (see, e.g., American Psychological Association [1]). This seemingly simple requirement causes a surprisingly large number of problems. Our present paper demonstrates one of them: attributing certain suggestions, findings or primacy to the wrong person. The rea- sons for this can be many – anything from good faith in a source, through plain ignorance up to ill intentions. It has to be stressed, however, that our chief objective in the present study is not to criticize blunders of our colleagues, because we realize only too well that no one is really immune to 63 Fourth International Workshop on the History of Speech Communication Research (HSCR 2021) 27-28 August 2021, Prague, Czech Republic 10.21437/HSCR.2021-6