I'm in an unusual situation. I'm not a linguist, but I think I've come up with something that would be of interest to Linguistics. Does anyone know how I could find someone who could give me serious feedback?
Like I said, no background in Linguistics, and I'm not an academic at all. I majored in math in my undergrad, which has helped me a lot with the mathy/comp-sci side of what I'm attempting.
My biggest fear is being or being perceived as a crank; I'm well aware that I'm not the first outsider to think that they've come up with some Grand Universal Theory of Language that turns out to be trivial, at odds with basic evidence, or Not Even Wrong in Pauli's sense.
That said, I have pretty good reasons to believe I'm not a crank:
I use mathematical proofs for my more unusual claims (of which there are a few), defining terms clearly and formally deriving results from them
In the process of making this, I kept trying to disprove myself by deriving formal predictions and assessing empirical evidence when possible. In fact, I only continued this project because not only did these falsification attempts fail, the evidence my model predicted tended to be considered unexplained by existing frameworks.
The other non-Linguists who have read it (i.e people with some bachelor's or master's level linguistics training but are not academics) agree that it's interesting and non-trivial
Repeated searches have not indicated that this has been done before
The problem is that what I've got is neither small nor particularly aligned with any existing framework. It's an attempt at explaining language production, reception, and acquisition all together in one model, and I know that each one of these is a whole field unto itself. But the predictions it generated endogenously are non-trivial. To give some examples
Well documented aphasia profiles fall directly out of the model. In particular, the specific comprehension difficulties of Broca's Aphasia and Conduction Aphasia are, to my knowledge, still considered open problems in Linguistics (Like why would damage to one part of the brain only be associated with issues with repetition and comprehension of highly specific structures?). I actually hadn't heard of Conduction Aphasia when I started writing this - At first I thought it would break my model, because the only way my model could account for someone who could produce fluently but struggle with repetition was if they had the same comprehension deficits as Broca's Aphasia. And then I looked it up further, and only then found out that Conduction Aphasia patients do have the same comprehension deficits as Broca's aphasia.
A similar moment occurred was when I realised that I'd inadvertently predicted that head-final languages couldn't exist unless they had something like topic-prominence - Again, I thought this ruined the model, but then I actually looked it up and found out that head-final languages having topic-prominence (or something similar to it, like Basque's focus-prominence) is apparently a well established typological observation that has thus far eluded easy explanation.
It also predicts that non-context-free structures can exist, but are rare, typically marked, and almost never occur in deeply nested contexts, which is apparently an open problem, but I'm not sure if I can count this one because I knew a little bit about this before I started
So while from the inside I'm pretty sure I'm not a crank, I feel like there isn't much infrastructure for someone in my position to really move forward? I'm pretty sure the empirical strength of what I've derived so far should warrant some interest, but given my lack of an academic background I'm fairly sure there's no way I'll get this into a publishable state without some help from someone who actually knows what they're doing. At the very least, if I am completely off and there's nothing of value in what I wrote, I'd at the very least like somebody to explain why I'm wrong rather than just assuming that I am because I'm admittedly quite crank-shaped.
That said I'm also aware that this is something of an imposition; I've written quite a lot (54 pages, and it's still very unfinished), and given that it doesn't fall neatly into existing frameworks I expect that there's a lot that can't be skimmed.
So my question is: Does anyone know how I could find someone who actually knows enough about linguistics (especially the relevant subfields of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, UG, or maybe language acquisition) to read over this and engage with it?
I'd really appreciate it if anybody could help!