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<div><font face="Times" size="+2" color="#000000">Dear
Funknetters:</font></div>
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<div><font face="Times" size="+2" color="#000000">It will soon be
announced that next October 12-14, Rice University in Houston will be
hosting the regular CSDL (Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and
Language) Conference, which alternates with the biennial ICLC
(International Cognitive Linguistics Conference) that will next be
held in July, 2003 in La Rioja, Spain. If you want to know what is
going in contemporary cognitive, functional, and neural linguistics -
the most innovative and interesting work these days- these are the
conferences to attend. Both have been swamped in recent years. Many
more good papers than can be accepted. The papers accepted at past
conferences have on the whole been superb!</font></div>
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I mention this in response to Bruce Richman's proposed conference.
At CSDL and ICLC, all the papers happen to be "beyond Chomsky" and
have been for years. But they are positive in character, raising real
issues, and are not defined by and limited to going "beyond"
anything or anyone. If Richman doesn't like Chomskyan linguistics,
he can start reading the vast literature in these fields - including
papers coming from these conferences. Indeed, he ought to be going to
these conferences.<br>
<br>
One day in the early 1970's, I came up with the idea of writing a
book called "After Chomsky" which would detail hundreds of pages
of evidence that required a linguistic theory beyond his - a theory
of the kind being worked on by the many fine linguists of the day. But
I realized after a few minutes of thought that such a book would be
self-defeating. The reason comes from elementary frame semantics. You
don't argue against a frame by negating it; that just reinforces the
frame. Like when Nixon said, "I am not a crook" - which made
everyone think of him as a crook. A "Beyond Chomsky" conference
would simply reinforce the idea of Chomsky as the latest in
linguistics. This is just elementary cognitive semantics. That's why
Martin said to give it up and talk about a real issue. Martin, I, and
other linguists throughout the world have been talking about real
issues for decades. The result has been real progress, reported on at
real conferences.<br>
<br>
If you want to talk about Chomsky fondly in the past tense, organize a
conference called "Remembering Chomsky."</font><br>
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to all,</font></div>
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P.S.</font></div>
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<div><font face="Times" size="+2" color="#000000">For the record, John
Myhill got a couple of historical details wrong in his discussion of
generative semantics. John said,</font></div>
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"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."</font></div>
<div><font face="Times" size="+2" color="#000000"> <br>
I wrote the first generative semantics paper in summer 1963 - two
years before Aspects and before there even was an idea of "deep
structure." At that time, there were no "complex symbols"
and no Aspects. Complex symbols, as I recall, were a combination of
two earlier ideas: Jakobsonian features and Bar Hillel's categorial
grammars. </font></div>
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<div><font face="Times" size="+2" color="#000000">Ah, nostalgia! Why
not have a "Remembering Chomsky" conference? I have such nice
memories of the days, 35 years ago, when I still thought that that
work was relevant. We can get our bell bottoms and afro shirts
out of mothballs, bring a copy of the white album, and go to
banks of the Charles where we can argue about such issues of the day
as lexical decomposition, logical form, case roles, the coordinate
structure constraint, crossover, and all those old
issues.</font></div>
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But for contemporary linguistics, I go to CSDL and ICLC.<br>
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