Thanks to Tom Givon

[Stokoe, W.C.]

Another hearty second. It is now just shy of 40 years since I heard some
fine analysts of language, Henry Lee Smith and George L. Trager, insisting
in their department of Anthropology, not linguistics, that the study of
A language without attention to the people who use it and what they use it
for is quite sterile. Perhaps something of value has been added to knowledge
about language in the last four decades, but from here it seems more than
ever evident that we need a lot more data, a lot more natural history, befor
getting into theories so universal they explain everything--and nothing.
Bill Stokoe