Chomsky - Bill Bright's opinion, and my two cents

[Daniel Everett]

This is excellent, Lise. I completely agree. In my obituary of Levi-Strauss, reference a few days ago on this list, I said this about Chomsky, Freud, and Levi-Strauss. They opened our eyes to many possibilities and said and wrote many very interesting things.

Dan



On Oct 26, 2010, at 1:02 PM, Lise Menn wrote:

> Sometime in the 1990s, I asked Bill Bright what he thought Chomsky's contributions to linguistics were - and remember, Bill was among those who felt more and more miserable at UCLA as the department became increasingly formalist in the 1970s and '80s. When he was editor of Language, he had been attacked -sometimes quite angrily - by both pro- and anti-Chomskyan folks - as he attempted to preserve the journal's neutrality.  He said he figured that if he was getting it from both sides, he was doing his job.
> 
> 	Here's what Bill said, to the best of my recollection (yes, I should have written it down, but it was only a dinner-table conversation):
> 	First, Chomsky brought renewed attention to syntax; most of the major work on language structures {until Harris, who was a lot harder to read - LM] stopped at morphology and morphophonemics.
> 	Second, he worked on an extremely widely and well-known language, English. People could argue about it from their own knowledge, and test claims easily.  This really broke things open in a way we have forgotten; how many linguists were native speakers of Menomini?
> 	And third, he got a lot of people excited about linguistics; new departments were founded like crazy. We owe him a big debt of thanks for that.
> 
> My own two cents: Charismatic figures who open up fields (Freud, Schliemann, Levi-Strauss, Piaget...) do/say a lot of things that later generations of critical thinkers rightly deplore, or at least find to be oversimplified.  But there has to be a first approximation before there can be refinement.  I'm in my 40th year of explaining why Jakobson was wrong - Marilyn Vihman and I have a paper about the development of features in the forthcoming Benjamins volume edited by Clements & Ridouane - but if Roman Osipovitch hadn't made his grand theoretical claims, who today would even be interested in child phonology?
> 
> 	Lise
> 
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