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--></style><title>Re: Call for Papers: Beyond Chomsky
2003</title></head><body>
<div>Well put, Talmy!</div>
<div>John</div>
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<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
Dear FUNK people,]<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>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.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>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--<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>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.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>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.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>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.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>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>
<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Y'all be good y'hear, TG<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>=========================<br>
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>bruce richman wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite
> <span
></span> <b>
Beyond Chomsky 2003: The Real Study of Real
Language <span
></span
> <span
></span> </b> A
conference to be held on April 26 and 27, 2003
at <span
></span
> <span
></span> 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
> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
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<hr></blockquote>
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</blockquote>
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