reporters and early syntax (fwd)

[bennettk at twsuvm.uc.twsu.edu]

    I agree with much of what's been said, especially the
point that this is not a problem peculiar to researchers in
language acquisition, but part of a general trend among public
servants and their constituents to devalue intellectual activity
which does not appear to them to have an immediate technological
or economic benefit. I know in Kansas our universities are being
slowly strangled to death by the attrition of our best scholars
and the choice by future scholars to avoid academia altogether.
The pay is low compared to those other fields requiring the same
amount of education; there is no longer any particular esteem
or respect given to teachers at any level; and we are constantly
pressured to "account" for the time we spend outside the
classroom since this is not viewed as "work." Deans and
vice-presidents have in some cases resorted to counting publications
as a measure of a person's worth, ignoring differences between the
value of, say, a really ground-breaking paper and a replication,
or a scholarly monograph by a less well-known (outside the field)
publisher versus a textbook by a big name publisher.

     I have no advice to offer, but I am interested in the
question one contributor posed, what is syntax?

      -Tina Bennett