A linguist's take on linguists' takes

If you want to critique a linguist's paper, you don't need a PhD in linguistics. You don't even need an undergraduate degree in linguistics. But you do need to read beyond the paper's abstract.

If you do that, you might find, say, that the well-known existence of unanalyzed phrases in early language acquisition--e.g., "lemme" (for "let me"); "wanna" (for "want to")--qualify neither as examples of what believers in "gestalt language processing" call "gestalts" (aka "soundtracks for emotional experience"), nor as evidence against the analytic basis for language acquisition.

And if you put your own analytic skills to good use, you might realize that the need to segment the often quite long holophrases that occur polysynthetic languages--i.e., the need to analyze these into their smaller units--is a need for analytic processing, not for gestalt processing.

So, no actual degree in linguistics is necessary to advance a compelling linguistic take on another person's linguistic take. But reading skills and analytic thinking are a must.

Just sayin'.