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

[Arnold Zwicky]

alice faber reminisces about the 1974 linguistic institute, and in
passing asks:
 >If there were any problems with my paper, Arnold, can I blame it on
 >Barbara Jordan and Hamilton Fish?

as i recall, there was nothing whatsoever to blame on anyone.

both classes i taught at that institute (intro to discrete mathematics
for linguists was the other) were lots of fun.  ellen prince and
rochelle lieber (then an undergraduate) were in the math class.  the
syntax/phonology course had a lot of auditors, including rob robinson,
who's now my colleague at stanford (head of german studies and now
also of the intro to humanities program).

the 70s involved a lot of travel for me - teaching at the linguistic
institute (at north carolina) and a month in europe (the international
phonology congress in vienna, and more) in 1972; the california summer
school in linguistics (at santa cruz), a workshop on pragmatics at the
linguistic institute (at michigan), and a month visiting the
theoretical psychology program at edinburgh, all in 1973; teaching at
the u.mass. institute in 1974; a summer visiting the experimental
psychology unit at sussex in 1976; a return there for the autumn of
1977; several weeks at the linguistic institute at illinois in 1978.

by 1970 i was embarked on the study of syntax/phonology interactions
(pullum joined me in this enterprise in 1973), a project that led me
into extensive work on morphology and on clitics and has provided me
with wonderful puzzles for the past thirty years.  increasingly, this
work (and other projects on argumentation, on variation, on speech
errors, and on stylistics and poetics, all of which i got into through
teaching introductory linguistics classes) moved me far away from what
was happening at mit, a process that had begun with my sympathies for
"generative semantics" in the late 60s and blossomed into an
enthusiasm for generalized phrase structure grammar in the late 70s.

that was linguistics in the 70s, in a nutshell, for me.  i wouldn't
imagine there's anyone else whose experiences were much like this.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)