schools and subdisciplines (nitpicking)

[Tom Givon]

Of course, the problem could be mitigated if we just stopped playing the
alphebet-soup game that has been so well perefected by The Other Guys, and
just went back to calling ourselves by our simple, rightful, old-fashioned
name -- "linguists". Better yet, why don't we  invite the other guys in on
this simple ploy.  It is disheartening to see so many functionalists display
the terminal symptoms of this fatal disease, Alphabet Soup Envy, casting and
re-casting themselves in  an endless proliferation  of beautifully-named
sects. (Where, oh where is Sigmund Freud where we so desparately need him?).
Hey you guys, let's go back to doing honest work. There's worlds of beautiful
stuff out there yet to be discovered & made sense of. TG
=================================

Victor Golla wrote:

> 11/13/99
>
> > Functionalism is a school of linguistics, not a sub-discipline.
>
> <...>
>
> >
> >I don't mean to pick particularly on Dan here, I've seen this usage
> >on FUNKNET more than once before.  And maybe it doesn't matter at all,
> >except that I fear it reinforces the widespread confusion that equates
> >functional linguistics with the subdiscipline of discourse analysis.
>
> Scott is precisely correct, and it does matter.  It is an ancient
> strategy, employed by every dominant paradigm, to dismiss competing
> paradigms as trivial or irrelevant because they are concerned with
> peripheral issues of no moment in the central debate.  With apologies
> the Emperor Charles:  "I am a Functionalist when I analyze discourse,
> a Bloomfieldian when I do dialectology, a Neogrammarian when I do
> comparison, but when I do linguistics it is in the Minimalist Framework."
>
>                                                         --Victor Golla