Bruce Richman's announcement

[George Lakoff]

In case anyone is interested, I'm attaching a copy of the overheads from an
all-too-brief and oversimplified talk I gave last weekend at the UCSD
Conference on Explanation in Linguistics. Jerry Feldman and I are currently
writing a book on the emerging Neural Theory of Language that we are
working on at Berkeley, with collaborators at the University of Chicago and
SRI.This is intended to supplement the already existing field of Cognitive
Linguistics. For a selected bibliography, see the references in Philosophy
in the Flesh, by myself and Mark Johnson. Also take a look at Mike
Tomasello's THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE.

At the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Stockholm last year,
about 750 researchers from 34 countries attended. We don't need to start an
alternatives to Chomsky movement. Such a worldwide movement already exists,
with a huge body of work, a journal, a number of book series, an
international society, regular conferences, and so on.

I suspect that most ICLA members would probably agree with Richman's
negative assessment of Chomskyan linguistics. But we are interested in
positive research, not negative polemics. A huge amount of such research is
going on at an extermely high level. It's an exciting field -- at least as
exciting as generative linguistics was back in the 60's, but far more
profound. Anyone can join in. But there is a bit of literature to catch up
on. I'm reading as fast as I can to keep up.

I wish Richman well with his conference and hope it takes a positive form.

George Lakoff


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