31.3020, Featured Linguist: Adele Goldberg

Tue Oct 6 03:45:47 UTC 2020

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-3020. Mon Oct 05 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.3020, Featured Linguist: Adele Goldberg

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Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2020 23:44:29
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Adele Goldberg

For this week's featured linguist, we are proud to present Professor Adele
Goldberg!

--

As a kid, my mom always praised me for being logical. Not appreciating how
generously mothers view their children, I took this praise very literally and
as an undergraduate at U of Penn, I signed up for all of the courses related
to logic I could find. I ended up majoring in math and philosophy:  Math,
because my parents wanted to ensure I would be employable, and philosophy
because I was interested in the philosophy of mind (and because I had a lot of
courses in logic).

When I graduated, I had no idea what I wanted to do, and the job market was
lousy. If I could only afford it, I just wanted to continue taking classes.
This passion, to just be a student, is what led me to graduate school. I was
lucky to stumble into UC Berkeley’s Logic and Methodology of Science PhD
program which very generously offered me a fellowship despite my
rudderlessness. The philosophers in the program were kind and excellent
teachers, but the math professors I met in those days were somewhat less
skilled at teaching or relating to people. One told us that we should think of
him as a fountain of knowledge and then cupped his hands to inform us that we
should try to drink the downpour. Another scribbled his lectures on the
chalkboard without turning around. I had a sense of not fitting in. Many of
the students I began the program with, including all of the women, soon
dispersed to other programs on campus.

Perusing the course catalogue in 1987, I found a class by George Lakoff, who
had just published Women, Fire, and Dangerous Ideas, which we read and
discussed in class. As he pirouetted through topics that crossed linguistics,
psychology, cognitive science, math, and philosophy, I was riveted. His
enthusiasm for the ideas was palpable. And he seemed pleased to find a
potential “convert” from the Logic program.

Transferring to the linguistics program felt like coming home. In my fellow
graduate students,  I found kindred spirits. Since we were all expected to
take undergraduate classes, the fact that I had virtually no background in
linguistics didn’t present much of a problem. I boldly asked the simplest
questions “what is the subject in that passive?” which were generously
interpreted as deep (“what is a subject?”). Chuck Fillmore and Paul Kay
co-taught a course in which they formulated an evolving version of
construction grammar. They filled their classes with laughter, a sense of
shared curiosity, and a deep appreciation for the richness of language. George
Lakoff taught a graduate level “boot camp” where we all learned to come up
with examples and counter-examples to formulate and then challenge every idea.
He always made time for students, happy to talk shop for hours at the
slightest provocation. I was giddy that we were encouraged to take classes in
computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and education, with faculty
from the same varied departments sharing the narrow halls of a drafty
temporary barracks with a dozen of us graduate students.

By sheer luck, I landed a faculty position right after graduating, at UCSD: in
a brilliant and eclectic linguistics department with strong ties to the
cognitive science department. Luminaries included Liz Bates, Jeff Elman, Marta
Kutas, Ron Langacker, and David Perlmutter. It was at UCSD that I learned to
appreciate the wealth of evidence for the usage-based approach to language. I
also began to take part in the sort of experimental work that I had always
felt was important.

I would have happily stayed at UCSD for my entire career, but my husband and I
were commuting as he finished his postdoc in the Bay Area. When I interviewed
for a new job at UIUC, I attempted to hide my pregnancy under a blousy dress,
only later learning that this was entirely unnecessary (and unsuccessful). At
UIUC, I found another welcoming community, where I was exposed to new
perspectives and new skills. Like UCSD, UIUC had an active cognitive science
community at the Beckman Institute, with Kay Bock, Gary Dell, Cindy Fisher,
Susan Garnsey, Greg Murphy and Brian Ross. I came to appreciate how to apply
the constructionist perspective to learning and processing work, enjoying the
thrill of collaborative research.

I’ve come to feel that moving is the best way to grow as a researcher, as day
to day interactions with new colleagues have a way of suffusing one’s thinking
with new perspectives and ideas. In 2004, we came to Princeton, an hour from
where I grew up in Pennsylvania. The cutting-edge work here in experimental
methods, neuroscience, and machine learning has convinced me that linguistics
needs to embrace the full range of methods at our disposal.

I also now see that there are many unifying themes across newer work in
linguistics. The usage-based constructionist perspective offers theoretical
grounding for the growing field of sociolinguistics by emphasizing that
language is a complex dynamic system with an important social dimension. The
approach is also a natural counterpart to the healthy field of laboratory
phonology, applied to grammar rather than sound:  both emphasize that
generalizations emerge from learned distributions constrained by our general
perceptual and cognitive abilities. The impressive strides being made within
machine learning provides evidence that language can be learned, while
simultaneously making clear that communicative goals are required to shape
what it is that we learn.

Thanks to brilliant and committed students and postdocs, I’ve been able to
branch out recently into projects on polysemy, second language learning,
conceptual metaphor processing, computational linguistics, and language
learning in individuals on the Autism spectrum. An appreciation of language’s
complexities and nuances provides fertile ground for a panoply of research
topics, constrained only by time and resources. As far as these constraints
go, I appreciate that I have been immensely lucky.

But linguistics has a lot to offer both academia and our broader communities. 
Embracing interdisciplinary efforts and keeping up with rapid changes within
the field and beyond, hold the key to its future success.

--

Thanks for reading and if you want to donate to the LINGUIST List, you can do
so here: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
All the best,
--the LL Team

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