An overdue remark on what linguistics needs

[Danielle E. Cyr]

Thanks Stephen,

I tend to think that linguistics needs someone who would go way farther than
Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo went in astronomy and physics. In my view, we
need someone who would dare to go into the quantum language universe. Indeed,
in language as in quantum physics, «separating what is from what happens is not
so easy» (Kenneth W. Ford, The Quantum World).

Interestingly, once while attending a talk on Derrida and Co's postmodernism
views, I couldn't refrain smiling because I thought how Algonquian people had
seen the world in the same way since eons. Now that I look a bit more at
quantum  physics, I have the same smile because quantum physics echoes so
appropriately the way Algonquian people and other Aboriginal peoples, once
again, look at the world and at the language. In their view, human beings stand
(or try to stand) on a huge membrane below which is a constant chaos where
things can be there and not there at the same time, where you can't really
predict anything with total accuracy, where things and beings can change form
and shape in a tick of time and where it is almost impossible to separate what
is from what happens, especially in language.

Could it be that it is US who are scientifically, or at least philosophically,
behind? I have to admit that some of us, like you and Hopper at al., who have
seriously questioned the reality of grammar, have come quite close to a quantum
approach. Hopefully, one day some Aboriginal person will become a linguist able
to write down her/his view of language and make us understand at another level.
Two Aboriginal thinkers who are already expressing their views are much closer
to quantum physics that to the classic one Out of curiosity, some of us might
like to look at a conversation between Moonhawk and C. Loftig at

http://www.enformy.com/dma-ls13.htm

Enjoy!

Danielle Cyr

Quoting "Straight, H. Stephen" <straight at binghamton.edu>:

> Chomsky has more in common with Ptolemy (2nd century) than Galileo (17th
> century).  Chomsky, while claiming to replace anti-psychological
> "structuralism" with a "mind"-focused theory of language, in fact put forward
> a model of language knowledge as a "grammar" with no (to date)
> operationalizable relationship to either language comprehension or language
> production and with only a circular (descriptive but not explanatory)
> relationship to "grammaticality".
>
> The rules of a generative grammar have proven problematic for reasons
> parallel to those of Ptolemy's heavenly epicycles.  The underlying
> model--ethnocentricity in the case of Ptolemy, logicentricity in the case of
> Chomsky--is a non-starter.  Linguistics owes to Chomsky and his followers
> both its rise into the academic firmament and its having become stuck there
> with no tie to earthly reality.  The only important insights into language
> that have emerged in the last 50 years have occurred in spite of or in
> opposition to Chomskyan theory.
>
> Linguistics lacks not only a Galileo or Kepler (17th century) but also a
> Copernicus (16th century) and, arguably, has not yet even had a theorist as
> prescient as Aristarchus of Samos (3rd century BC), "the first known person
> to speculate that the Earth revolves around a stationary sun" (Wikipedia).
> FWIW, my candidate Aristarchian insight is a corticocentric view of language,
> in which the neural subcomponents of language processing, both receptive and
> expressive, are seen as separate but interacting agents in the creation of
> linguistic percepts and products, with no overarching "grammar" governing
> their interaction beyond the brute and always conflict-ridden reality of
> their need to interact effectively in physico-temporal reality.
>
> H Stephen Straight
> Professor of Anthropology & of Linguistics |Â Binghamton University, State
> University of New York
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu
> [mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of
> dharv at mail.optusnet.com.au
> Sent: Monday 10 November 2008 02:09
> To: Salinas17 at aol.com; funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Concerning WALS - Bees, Bats, Butterflies
>
> At 10:48 PM -0500 9/11/08, Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
> snip..
>
> >  we need a Copernicus, not a Chomsky or a Greenberg.
>
> A reminder that it was Kepler who formulated the planetary laws, and
> a comment that Chomsky has in common with Galileo a
> discipline-changing body of work (subsequently elevated into a theory
> of everything). Both also had clashes with authority although of a
> rather different kind. Maybe we haven't yet had our Darwin or
> Einstein but to be a Galileo is not to be sniffed at.
> --
> David Harvey
> 60 Gipps Street
> Drummoyne NSW 2047
> Australia
> Tel: 61-2-9719-9170
>
>


"The only hope we have as human beings is to learn each other's languages.  Only
then can we truly hope to understand one another."

Professor Danielle E. Cyr
Department of French Studies
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada, M3J 1P3
Tel. 1.416.736.2100 #310180
FAX. 1.416.736.5924
dcyr at yorku.ca