Call for Papers: Beyond Chomsky 2003

[Tom Givon]

Dear FUNK people,]

Having received, courtesy of Bruce Richman, 22 commerial messaages from
the hustlers at Hotmail, and having been over the past few months
subjected to his repeated announcements of  the "Beyond Chomsky" agenda,
I am finally moved to say the following:  Hey, you may be a terrific
guy, Bruce, I have no way of knowing. But---even you Hotmail caper
aside--I think you stand in grave danger of alienating a substantial
number of the FUNK folk. So I though I'd maybe take a minute to tell you
why.

Vigorous alternative approaches to Chomsky sprang all over the
countryside beginning with Ross & Lajoff (1967) "Is deep structure
necessary?". Chuck Fillmore (1966) "The case for the case" was an
implicit challenge already. Wally Chafe's (1970) "Meanning & the
structure of language" was right-on  and right there. The early CLS
years (1968-1975) gave vent to a large & unruly collection of
'alternatives'. The Greenberg/Bolinger-inspired
typological-cum-functional explosion of the 1970s was another case in
point, as was Langacker/Lakoff's "Cognitive Grammar". Joan Bresnan,
another ex-student of Chomsky, has certainly counted herself as an
alternative to nthe Master since the late 1970s. And there are many more
whom space does not permit to enumerate. But still, Bruce--

Even if you grant all this, there is something a bit bizarre about the
"Beyond Chomsk" agenda. Certainly to me. You see, I count myself as
Chomsky's student. I rebelled very early, even before I finished my
dissertation (1969). For how could someone interested in typological
diversity, meaning/function and diachrony abide by Aspects for very
long? But Aspects was my first Syntax textbook, fresh off the press
(1965). And to this day, having spent I think a considerable
portion--perhaps too much--of my professional life trying to articulate
where the Generative agenda went wrong--I still must go on record and
say that I owe my career in syntax (and linguistics) to Noam Chomsky.
And that even when I find him least helpful, most arcane, most
infuriating, I must nonetheless credit him with raising some of the most
interesting questions that still haunt us in the study of
grammar/syntax.

Who of the Bloomfieldians would have challenged the Watson/Skinner
extreme empiricist view of language learning by--ONLY-- rote, memory,
immitation and S(timulus)-R(esponse)? Who would have challenged
Bloomfield's anti-meaning and anti-mind dogma? Who would have raised the
possibility that beyond the surface item-and-arrangement strucures that
Bloomfield urge us to catalogue, classify, disect AND THEN QUIT, there
lay a system that 'supported semantic interpretation'? That accounted
for meaning paraphrases? That accounter for 'syntactic' (but perforce
also semantic, given Chomsky's very definition of Deep Structure)
ambiguity? Ross and Lakoff (1967), with all due credit, old amigos, was
nothing but the logical consequence of Aspects, a consequence that Noam
himself was either unwilling or unable (or perhaps afraid?) to draw. The
Generative Semantics rebellion that sprang right there was a direct
consequence of Chomsky's "complex symbol" treatment of semantics in Ch.
2 of Aspects.

Sure, we have many reasons for choosing to disagree with Chomsky. But
before we/you go beyond him, perhaps it would behoove us all to
acknowledge what--and how much--we owe him. And perhaps it would be
useful to remind ourselves that however infuriating he may be at times,
and however  'wrong'  posterity may eventually deem him (yeah, that
fickle lady of whom none of us could ever take for granted...), his
reasons for doing things the way he does are neither haphazard nor
fickle nor incoherent. They spring from, and are dictated by, an agenda
that has certain--indeed rather consistent--philosophical &
methodological roots, ones that may be traced back to both Plato and
Saussure and, somewhat paradoxically, also to Russell and Carnap (tho
here Chomsky might disagree most violently). What is more, Chomsky's
historical position--as the person who almost single-handedly deposed
the dogmatic, philosophically-constrained, methodologically bizarre
Bloomfieldians at the worst stage of their convoluted, garrulous decay
in the 1950s--is something all of us benefitted from, and should be
therefore generous enough to acknowledge.

The fact that Chomsky's Generativism soon became just as extreme and
reductive as the dogma Empiricist that preceded it is indeed sad. It
reflects a certain dynamics of our historical community, of swinging
like a wild pendulum from one extreme to the other. It is indeed this
very reductionism that impelled many of us, I contend  for valid
philosophical and methodological reasons, to dissent and strike out on
our own. But let us (in this departing from Chosky's own
occasionally-infuriating coups of revisionist historicism and
self-invention) try to keep in mind where we come from. It has, just
maybe, a huge bearing on where we're headed.


Y'all be good y'hear,  TG

=========================



bruce richman wrote:

>                      Beyond Chomsky 2003: The Real Study of Real
> Language                              A conference to be held on April
> 26 and 27, 2003 at                              Carnegie Mellon
> University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania       For the past 40 years
> progress in the study of language has been set back by the huge
> influence of Chomsky's model of studying language.  Linguists,
> language scholars, people in other fields, and the general public have
> concluded that Chomsky has somehow made a great discovery about
> language of great scientific importance.      (See the pro-Chomsky
> article that appeared in the Science News section of the New York
> Times on Jan. 15, 2002 for an example of this.)      The time has come
> for those of us who know better, to announce to the world that
> Chomsky's great "discovery" about language is basically empty and
> irrelevant.  Rather than being a real study of real language,
> Chomsky's method involves the rhetorical invention of a made-up
> subject matter that has little relation to language and little
> relevance for it.  It started out supposedly being an explanation
> about the discourse relations of sentences.  Then it changed to an
> explanation of the psychological reality of sentences.  When this
> proved impossible, Chomsky's method retreated to being an explanation
> of biology; a biology that was impossible to study -- but great for
> speculation.  For 40 years, it has retreated further and further away
> from the reality of language.  Chomsky's model remains just an
> ingenious explanation in search of something to explain.      Once we
> renounce this irrelevant "method," we can go forward with the hard
> work of the empirical study of real language in real life.
> Chomsky's biggest mistake from the beginning was to hold on
> tenaciously to the belief in the basic principle of traditional
> grammar that the basic organizing force of grammar is meaningless,
> mechanical "agreement."  This mistaken view of grammar as meaningless
> and mechanical goes back to the theories of ancient grammarians, who
> were unable to explain the actual distribution of grammatical cases,
> and consequently invented the notion of grammatical "agreement" as a
> way to "explain" their ignorance of why forms were distributed as they
> were.  (The late William Diver and his followers have done great work
> on this subject.)      Chomsky and his followers have taken this
> crucial mistaken view of grammar and kicked it upstairs and enshrined
> it, making meaningless, mechanical grammar the be all and end all of
> all accounts of language.      All the complicated grammatical stuff
> that Chomskyans expend so much ingenious efforts on "explaining" are
> about aspects of grammar that are entirely irrelevant to what most
> adults and all children actually deal with.  All the complicated
> grammatical "calculations" that Chomskyans waste so much effort on are
> about phenomena that do not occur at all in spontaneous spoken
> language and are really the kind of stuff that only some college
> trained people sometimes encounter in written form.  Real spontaneous
> spoken language is quite free of much of the "grammar" so dear to
> Chomskyans hearts.  (See Jim Miller and Regina Weinart's work on
> this.)     This is another reason to agree with Esa Itkonen that
> Chomsky's theory is an explanation in search of something to
> explain.     We want people from a wide range of areas related to
> language present papers and join in our discussions.  Only by having
> people from many different areas can we build up an overall picture of
> where language study should go.  At the end of the conference we will
> try to put together a collective statement of the findings of the
> conference which we will make public.    If you are interested in
> participating, please contact Bruce Richman at
> brucerichman at hotmail.com or Alexander Gross at
> language at sprynet.com
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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