History

Wallace Chafe chafe at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU
Mon Jan 20 04:47:23 UTC 1997


Maybe we're about done with this for a while at least, or maybe not, but
I can't help thinking that a little historical perspective wouldn't hurt.
Just as the synchronic state of a language can't be fully understood
without reference to its history, the state of linguistics can profit from
a little historical understanding too.  Dont worry;  I won't go on for
very long.

By historical accident I happened to be educated in linguistics while it
was still dominated almost completely by "post-Bloomfieldians".  I was
taught some things I've always found useful, but two things I fairly
quickly decided were wrong.  One was anti-mentalism--the rejection
of the mind that came from behaviorism, as colored by logical
positivism and an excessively narrow view of what it meant to be
"scientific".  The other was the view that, even though everyone might
admit that language is somehow related to all of human experience
(cognitive, emotional, social, historical), there was an isolable part of
it that could be studied all by itself, so linguists could happily be
exempted from worrying about all the rest.  That view had been
heavily promoted by Bloomfield, with bows toward Saussure.

Shortly after that there was a change in attitude concerning the mind,
but that was about all, and the results were curious.  There was no
change in the view that some part of language could be isolated for
scientific study, apart from all the rest.  Linguistics came to be
dominated by a search for the nature of that isolable thing within the
mind, which had to be innate because its connections with everything
else were held to be negligible.  One unfortunate result was an all-
consuming interest in universals with a corresponding disregard for
ways in which languages differ, whereas the Bloomfieldians, much to
their credit, had always been interested in those differences.  Most
linguists nowadays can hardly imagine the sneering that was directed
in the early 1960s toward those who practiced "mere description".
Much was made of "explanatory adequacy", but instead of working
toward an understanding of language as shaped by socio-cognitive and
historical forces, explanations took the form of tree diagrams.  Tree
diagrams that mysteriously changed their shape according to rules that
also had no basis either in how people talk or in language history.

The latest exchange makes we wonder if we haven't come full circle.
Some would apparently now like to believe that it's OK to restrict one's
interest to the isolable part, thereby accomplishing one's own kind of
descriptive adequacy, while leaving more encompassing
understandings to those who might be interested in that sort of thing,
and who, quite ironically, might thereby succeed in achieving an
explanatory adequacy very different from the kind proposed in the 1960s.

But is it even possible to restrict oneself in that way?  A lot of the
discussion has revolved around that question.  My own view is that
the stuff of which syntax is made--its elements and the constructions
into which they enter--is either functional stuff (and a great deal of it
most certainly is), or consists of the fossilized (or partially
fossilized) remains of things that were functional at an earlier time.  I
think that's what Jon Aske has been saying, and certainly his experiences
accord with my own.  If we are right, then a great deal of effort is being
expended on the wrong thing, something not rare in human affairs,
but something that's regrettable at this special moment in human
history when most of the world's languages are about to disappear.

Wally Chafe



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