Chomskian linguistics

[Robin Hamilton]

From: "Laurence Horn" <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>

> At 4:52 PM +0100 9/9/10, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>>From: "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>>
>>>Has Chomskian linguistics gone out of favor?  Why?  And in favor of what?
>>>
>>>Joel
>>
>>Well, there's M.A.K.Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics, but that
>>may
>>only run in Australia.
>
> pretty much, or at least not in the U.S.

Sounds as if things haven't changed that much since the sixties -- even
then, before Halliday departed for Australia, it mostly ran on a
Glasgow/Edinburgh/London axis and the rest of the world (though I didn't
discover this till later) was obsessing over Generative Grammar.

I thought he'd simply vanished after the seventies, till I rediscovered him
sometime in the nineties and came to the conclusion that it was more that he
seemed to have washed his hands of the entire English-speaking world,
*except* for Australia, which he seems to have virtually taken over.  And
not just in linguistics and language teaching but also literary criticism
and film studies, you name it.  Most Australian university graduates I've
encountered, not that wide a sample admittedly, not just the linguists, have
been taught with his ideas as a foundation.

So maybe he made the right decision ...

Robin

>>(Is Minimalist Linguistics still considered to be Chomsky2 or Chomsky3?)
>
> It's considered to be Chomsky, and hence (by definition, in most
> influential quarters here) the Right Way.  A hundred flowers bloom
> and a hundred schools of thought contend, but they're not equally
> fertilized.
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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