25.1270, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Henry Davis

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1270. Fri Mar 14 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.1270, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Henry Davis

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Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:26:26
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Let's Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014: Henry Davis

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While we are traveLING through Western North America, we are happy to
introduce you to our next Featured Linguist - Henry Davis. Read below Henry's
story  about what led him to the study of language and how he got where he is
today.

How I Became a Linguist by Henry Davis

I first learned that linguistic knowledge mattered at the age of four. I began
my academic career in a tough primary school in Paddington, London, where I
was regularly bullied for my non-Cockney accent. When the bullying got too
much, my parents moved me to a posh preparatory school in St. John’s Wood,
where I was regularly bullied because my accent was not upper class enough.
And then my family moved to Manchester. I spent hours in the boy’s toilet,
practicing [phæθ] and [khæsḷ]instead of [phαθ] and [khαsḷ] as though my life
depended on it; which, at least in the school playground, it did.

My uneasy relationship with educational establishments continued. I hated my
high school with such intensity that every morning I imagined the school
buildings sliding beneath the playing fields like some landlocked Titanic. I
and a band of fellow misfits even hatched a sub-Fawkesian plot to burn it
down, but were discovered in the basement at an early stage of our conspiracy.
Were it not for the fact that I was a good prospect for Oxford or Cambridge, I
would certainly have been expelled; as it was, I left for London immediately
after sitting my Oxbridge entrance exams, and fell, serendipitously, into a
company of clowns. I learnt to juggle, stilt-walk, and fire-eat, and for the
next fifteen years, vacillated between the life of an itinerant performer and
that of a still-reluctant academic.

After what I suppose would now be called a ‘gap year’ (though there weren’t
meant to be any gaps in those days), I returned to academia in the form of
King’s College, Cambridge, where I was to read English literature. I had
originally chosen King’s specifically because my headmaster had warned me
against it, on the grounds that it was “full of women and homosexuals”: he
was, thankfully, correct. However, in spite of the typical Cambridge mixture
of overgrown intellect and overheated hormones, fueled by a readily available
pharmacopeia, I felt lost, intellectually and otherwise; and though I toyed
with the fashionable obscurities of Lacan and Derrida, I couldn’t help sensing
that in taking them seriously I might have fallen for an elaborate French
intellectual joke. I took a year off (not a gap year this time – more like a
gaping void year) and ended up on an island off the west coast of Ireland
tending goats and planting potatoes for a primal therapy commune.

Back at Cambridge, I stumbled upon linguistics through politics, more
specifically through an anarchist reading group led by Raf Salkie, which led
me to start reading Chomsky. I found Chomsky’s political writing incisive, but
not particularly inspiring. However, I was intrigued by his linguistics, which
seemed hard in the right way – if you worked hard enough at it, it would get
clearer rather than more confusing. So I looked around for linguistics
lectures at Cambridge. I found a single course, taught by Terry Moore, with
one of those catchy obituary titles like ‘The Funeral of the New Grammarians’
or ‘The Death Rattle of Generative Linguistics’ or ‘Another Nail In Chomsky’s
Coffin’ or...well, you know the type. Of course, the rush to bury Chomsky’s
ideas just made me all the more intrigued to unearth them, but I couldn’t get
any further with generative linguistics at Cambridge. I ended up doing the
second half of my degree in Social and Political Science, graduating in
absentia while street performing in Italy.

The Thatcher years had begun to cast a pall over the UK. The last two places I
lived in England – Toxteth, in Liverpool, and Dalston Junction, in London,
both went up in flames. The Toxteth conflagration was particularly
spectacular, since it was fueled by a large furniture warehouse on the end of
the street where I lived. Things looked grim: either Thatcher was going to
win, or anarchy was about to be loosed upon the UK (the genuine, frightening
kind, not the genteel intellectual version). Neither seemed like an attractive
prospect, so I decided to cash in my Cambridge degree and apply for graduate
programs abroad. In the end, it came down to a choice between doing psychology
at UCL or going to Canada to do linguistics. (I had no intention of studying
in the States, since running into the arms of Ronald Reagan would have
defeated the purpose of fleeing Mrs. Thatcher). I chose the latter, and ended
up in Vancouver because David Ingram called me up from UBC and offered me
money and I liked the look of all those little islands on the map.

I never left. I learned some linguistics, and was given a more or less free
hand to do what I wanted – probably a mistake, because it turned out to be an
800-page dissertation, nominally on the acquisition of the English auxiliary
system, but including what I imagined to be a comprehensive theory of
parametric syntax and its relation to language acquisition. Ken Wexler was my
external examiner, and he did me the honor of showing up to my defense. He
pulled from his bag a giant stack of paper – my thesis, single-sided,
double-spaced, and heavily annotated – and commenced to ask questions,
starting at the beginning, and going on – and on. An hour passed, then
another. The atmosphere became thick with the fug of stale thought, and
finally, reduced to a gibbering idiot by nerves and exhaustion, I stumbled
over deep ergativity and could not go on. The Chair rescued me, the
examination ended, and it was announced that I had passed. I took revenge by
blowing fire over the heads of the examining committee.

And that was the launch of my linguistic career – except that it wasn’t. I now
suspect that like many others, I went through a kind of post-doctoral
post-partum depression, but at the time I did not recognize that I had a bad
case of it – perhaps because of the misshapen monster I had just delivered. I
didn’t want to do linguistics anymore, let alone work on language acquisition,
and so I dropped out once again and went back to clowning. But the life of a
clown is hard on the body and yields mostly spare change, and so, in order to
pay the rent, I ended up in the twilight zone of sessional teaching.

Then, nearly five years after I had finished my dissertation, I had a stroke
of enormous luck. I had begun to learn a little about Salish languages through
Dwight Gardiner, who was writing his dissertation on Shuswap at Simon Fraser
University. An opportunity arose to do syntactic research on St’át’imcets
(Lillooet), through a grant held by Pat Shaw at UBC: I jumped at the chance,
and began work on the language in the summer of 1992. That fall, a further
opportunity arose: Simon Fraser advertised for an instructor in St’át’imcets
through their nascent First Nations language teaching program, based in
Kamloops. They needed someone with a Ph.D., and since I was in the right place
at the right time, I got the job. Of course, it was a ridiculous situation: I
was teaching a language I knew almost nothing about. But my teaching
‘assistants’ were three fluent elders, who decided if I was going to teach
their language, I’d better learn it, and learn it properly. So began my
apprenticeship in St’át’imcets.

And that is what finally made me into a linguist. A couple of months after I
began working on St’át’imcets, one of the elders I was working with asked me
simply: ‘Are you on our side or theirs?’. Though I’m not sure I quite
recognized it at the time, my answer (‘Yours!’) constituted a long-term
commitment to the language and its speakers, which continues to this day.
Though many of the speakers I have worked with over the years have passed on,
it is my hope that at least some of their deep knowledge of language and
culture will be available for future generations.

Over the years, I broadened my commitment to include several other indigenous
languages of British Columbia. For me, the documentation and analysis of these
critically endangered languages is a huge responsibility and an extraordinary
opportunity; I feel very privileged to do the work I do, and though the route
I took to get here was circuitous, it is where I – finally – feel at home.

Henry Davis







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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1270	
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