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<br>Dear FUNK people,]
<p>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.
<p>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--
<p>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.
<p>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.
<p>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.
<p>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.
<br>
<p>Y'all be good y'hear, TG
<p>=========================
<br>
<br>
<p>bruce richman wrote:
<blockquote TYPE=CITE>
<div style='background-color:'>
<b>Beyond Chomsky 2003: The Real Study of Real Language</b><b>
</b>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
<a href="mailto:brucerichman@hotmail.com">brucerichman@hotmail.com</a>
or Alexander Gross at <a href="mailto:language@sprynet.com">language@sprynet.com</a> </div>
<p><br>
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