conferences

[George Lakoff]

Dear Funknetters:

It will soon be announced that next October 12-14, Rice University in
Houston will be hosting the regular CSDL (Conceptual Structure,
Discourse, and Language) Conference, which alternates with the
biennial ICLC (International Cognitive Linguistics Conference) that
will next be held in July, 2003 in La Rioja, Spain. If you want to
know what is going in contemporary cognitive, functional, and neural
linguistics - the most innovative and interesting work these days-
these are the conferences to attend. Both have been swamped in recent
years. Many more good papers than can be accepted. The papers
accepted at past conferences have on the whole been superb!

I mention this in response to Bruce Richman's proposed conference. At
CSDL and ICLC, all the papers happen to be "beyond Chomsky" and have
been for years. But they are positive in character, raising real
issues, and are not defined by and limited to going "beyond" anything
or anyone. If Richman doesn't like Chomskyan linguistics, he can
start reading the vast literature in these fields - including papers
coming from these conferences. Indeed, he ought to be going to these
conferences.

One day in the early 1970's, I came up with the idea of writing a
book called "After Chomsky" which would detail hundreds of pages of
evidence that required a linguistic theory beyond his - a theory of
the kind being worked on by the many fine linguists of the day. But I
realized after a few minutes of thought that such a book would be
self-defeating. The reason comes from elementary frame semantics. You
don't argue against a frame by negating it; that just reinforces the
frame. Like when Nixon said, "I am not a crook" - which made everyone
think of him as a crook. A "Beyond Chomsky" conference would simply
reinforce the idea of Chomsky as the latest in linguistics. This is
just elementary cognitive semantics. That's why Martin said to give
it up and talk about a real issue. Martin, I, and other linguists
throughout the world have been talking about real issues for decades.
The result has been real progress, reported on at real conferences.

If you want to talk about Chomsky fondly in the past tense, organize
a conference called "Remembering Chomsky."

                                Best to all,

                                George


P.S.

For the record, John Myhill got a couple of historical details wrong
in his discussion of generative semantics. John said,

"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."

I wrote the first generative semantics paper in summer 1963 - two
years before Aspects and before there even was an idea of "deep
structure."  At that time, there were no "complex symbols" and no
Aspects. Complex symbols, as I recall, were a combination of two
earlier ideas: Jakobsonian features and Bar Hillel's categorial
grammars.

Ah, nostalgia! Why not have a "Remembering Chomsky" conference? I
have such nice memories of the days, 35 years ago, when I still
thought that that work was relevant.  We can get our bell bottoms and
afro shirts out of mothballs, bring a copy of the white album,  and
go to banks of the Charles where we can argue about such issues of
the day as lexical decomposition, logical form, case roles, the
coordinate structure constraint, crossover, and all those old issues.

But for contemporary linguistics, I go to CSDL and ICLC.



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