second the motion

[Suzette Haden Elgin]

April 12, 2003

My enthusiastic (and weary) thanks to Dan Everett for his letter about the
need for more attention to intonation. He is, in my opinion, absolutely
right when he says: "Regardless of one's perspective/theoretical
intonation, the failure of the average field linguist to carefully study
intonation is one of the most serious omissions of our discipline's
history." I would only say that I wouldn't restrict it to the field
linguist; "the average linguist" would be preferable. Dan is also right
that it's hard work.

Final comment: I wish that almost everything written about the topic were
not so extraordinarily hard to _read_. It's as if there were a conspiracy
within linguistics to suppress the information.

Suzette