The End of Linguistics

[John McCreery]

Here in Yokohama, I have just received the Winter, 2001 issue of The
American Scholar, which contains an article by Michael Halpern entitled "The
End of Linguistics." (p. 13-26). Halpern is described as "an editor and
writer who lives in Oakland, California. He is the author of _Binding Time_,
a book on computer programming, and has contributed articles to the
_Atlantic Monthly, IEEE Spectrum_, and the _Vocabula Review_."  My posting
the following paragraphs do not constitute an endorsement. I am, however,
curious about how the linguists among us will reply to them.

-------

"Linguists have been very busy, but their busyness seems to be about an
increasing number of increasingly divergent topics: some are in effect
anthropologists, gathering linguistic data from remote peoples, and
compiling dictionaries and grammars of languages spoken by small and
isolated tribes; some study the minutiae of the grammars of their own or
other contemporary languages; some try to find 'language universals' among
seemingly unrelated tongues; some, following Chomsky, try to find 'deep
structure' behind language's facade; some create maps depicting the
boundaries of various dialectical usages and pronunciations; some try to
deciper the remaining fragments of language that were dead before Troy fell;
some study the way in which children acquire language skills, or explore the
brain sites that seem to be associated with language acquisition and use;
some study the possible linguistic significance of sounds made by whales and
apes, or try to teach these anials the rudiments of human language.

"All of these investigations and projects have their interest and value, but
they give little promise of converging toward a comprehensive and unified
theory of language. The only thing that these studies have in common is that
they all deal with language in one way or another--and this, it seems clear,
is not enough to make them all part of a recognizable discipline.There is no
aspect of human life that language is not part of; to take everything
language-related for one's domain is to take on too much, to cast one's net
too wide. Linguistics has declared no aspect of language alien to
itself--and this, while admirably catholic and generous, is fatal to its
hopes of being a science.

"In another way, though, linguistics is too narrow and selective. While
speech and writing are important parts of almost every human activity, they
are the whole of very few. Human life is shot through with language as good
beef is marbled with fat; and as no edible cut can be without fat, or
composed wholly of it, so no humanistic study can either avoid language or
deal with it alone. Linguists have tried to carve from reality a cut
consisting of all and only the fat, without regard to where the animal's
joints are, or to whether the resulting cut can be eaten. It is as if a
group of scholars decided to study all and only the things humans do with
their left hands, and then claimed for Sinistrics the status of a science."

A pretty deadly indictment, that. Then, here is the next paragraph.

"A lesser but still serious problem linguists face is one that besets all
the human sciences: they are studying creatures who are increasingly aware
of being studied, and whose behavior increasingly reflects that knowledge
and subverts those studies. We, the tens of millions who have been to
college, all own dictionaries and sometimes consult them; we buy books on
usage and style, try to develop our vocabularies, and read such writers as
William Safire. And while we manipulate and toy with language (with no
apology for our ignorance of the goals and methods of linguistic science),
linguists try desperately to discern behind all this noise the intrinsic
laws of language that they hope and believe are there. One can't help
sympathizing with them, however misguided one thinks them, just as one might
sympathize with would-be herders of cats."

How would you answer these charges?


John McCreery
c/o The Word Works
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