Chomsky, Labov, Cassidy, Lakhoff, Dilliard, McDavid, Nixon in 1974.

[Alice Faber]

I inadvertantly sent this just to Tim last night, instead of the list...

AF
Tim Frazer said:
>Linguistics in 1974.  I went to the Linguistics Institute in Amherst, Mass.

Hey...I was at that Institute too. It was the summer before I entered
graduate school.

>The Generative vs. Interpretive Semantics debate was hot and heavy.  Noam
>Chomsky gave a lecture which might as well have been in Martian as well as I
>was concerned. He was very much worshipped there.

Not completely. One of the things I vividly remember about that lecture
series was Barbara Partee's anguish at giving a critical followup to one
lecture. Oh, yes, and happening to get in the same elevator as Chomsky
*and* Halle after another Chomsky lecture and having a friend stage-whisper
to me "any questions?"

There was lots of other stuff in the air suggesting that Chomsky didn't
have the complete story. I had read the Keenan and Comrie Accessibility
Hierarchy paper in mimeo (faded, at that) form for an undergraduate class.
At the institute, I audited a class that Steve Anderson taught on
ergativity. I think I audited something by Keenan also on grammatical
relations and the AH. Or perhaps that was for credit. I also took (and
greatly enjoyed) the course that Arnold Zwicky and Geoff Pullum taught on
interconnections between phonology and syntax. I also  was one of six
students in a seminar on Generative Phonology with Halle and Keyser. There
were so many auditors that the class met in a very large lecture hall
(probably seated 250 or 300), and it was pretty full. It was a very
intimidating setting for giving an oral presentation on my term paper.

> I felt very intimidated!
>Robin Lakhoff gave a talk  arguing that linguists needed to get out of ivory
>tower and pay more attention to the needs of ordinary people, e.g. issues in
>education, etc.  Oh, and Bill Labov gave a very nice paper where he showed,
>empirically, that many native speakers of English did not much agree with
>Chomsky and his followers about which sentences were "ungrammatical."

I don't remember these. But I remember a talk by Bob King on rule loss,
specifically final devoicing in Yiddish. That talk made me very glad I had
already decided to go to Texas for grad school. Bob ended up being my
dissertation adviser, and the provocative questions he asked about final
devoicing have indirectly influenced my work on near mergers.
>
>As it turned out, I ended up spending a lot of that summer watchng the
>Senate Committee's Watergate hearings on TV.

Yup. I was sharing an apartment off campus with two UMASS students. One was
in the process of divorcing her husband, and she was thrilled that I wanted
to watch the hearings, as it gave her an excuse to demand the TV from him.
I wrote two fairly decent term papers to the sound of the hearings, both
house and senate. If there were any problems with my paper, Arnold, can I
blame it on Barbara Jordan and Hamilton Fish?

It's not Linguistics, but I have three other Watergate, etc. memories from
that summer. The first was buying an "I Am Not A Crook" t-shirt at the
student union. I still have the t-shirt, but have never worn it; Nixon
resigned that night. The second was the reverberations from the fireworks
set off at the grad student apartment complex after the resignation speech.
Finally, the only place I knew in Amherst to get the NY Times was a
drugstore a block or two from my apartment. Bundles of newspapers were
dropped off in front of the store early in the morning, and they opened
around 9 AM. The morning after the resignation, I got there around 8:45.
The bundles had been torn open, and there were only a few papers left. But
there was a pile of money on the sidewalk. I added my 50¢ to the pile and
took two copies of the paper, which I still have, at my parents' house.

Bringing it back to Linguistics, one of my professors (either at the
Institute or back at Cornell) referred to certain of the evasive political
utterances of that era as "circumlocutionary acts". Or something like that.

For another take on the Zeitgeist of the early to mid 70's in Linguistics,
have a look at _Studies out in Left Field: Defamatory Essays Presented to
James D. McCawley on the Occasion of his 33rd or 34th Birthday_. Arnold and
Larry may be able to contribute further insights.

Alice
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