etc.

[Tom Givon]

Dear FUNK people,

I have been following the recent exchange with some interest. There seem 
to be a number of constituencies here, whose interests do not always 
coincide. We have first our young generation, struggling to get a 
tenure-track position and then secure a lifetime license to practice 
with impunity. We then have the universities, with their departmental 
search committees, deans and their advisory committees, provosts and 
theirs--all anxious to follow clear criteria for evaluating candidates. 
We then have the old professional alpha males, determined to keep their 
control of the process via journals, refereeing and resounding academic 
posts. And we have, lastly, the perennial orphan, the one that tends to 
fall between the cracks--the interest of advancing our lurching 
discipline toward some semblance of a real science--of human language, 
culture, society, mind and brain.

The old establishment bulls and the universities have always co-existed 
in close symbiosis, sharing their preference for ranked journals, 
exhaustive refereeing, downgrading edited collections and the 
quantification of quality judgements. In this, they have striven to 
perpetuate the pretense that, somehow, quality emerges--Deus ex 
machina--out of rigid criteria and rigorous quantification. Here I 
thought my own life experience may be of some value. I have always found 
the editorial review process of journals a closed door for my work. In 
this I am in full sympathy with Martin Haspelmath's original note--by 
the time you are finished revising to the referees' specs, it is their 
work, not yours. As far as I could determine, the editorial review 
process enshrined the gate-keepers, those in charge of conserving the 
status quo and slapping down the upstarts who came out of nowhere. The 
typical referee's world-view has always seemed narrow, defensive, 
preservationist and process-oriented. They seemed to champions playing 
the by the rules as a core value. And their view of the coming 
generation appeared to be: Slow down, tread with caution, let us squeeze 
the creative marrow out of you till you produce tiny square pegs that 
fit our tiny square holes. I might as well confess--the very few journal 
articles I did publish were let into the inner sanctum by editors who 
bent the rules for me, who brazenly bypassed their own reviewers, 
editors who just happened to consider my perspective worthwhile. They 
are long gone now, so I hope they will forgive me--from whatever 
elevated perch they may occupy now--for revealing their unprincipled 
violations of the established canons of refereed professionalism.

I might as well say something about the much-maligned edited 
collections. In the early 1970's, Charles Li organized three consecutive 
symposia, which came out in three successive edited-- 
brazenly-unrefereed --volumes: "Word-Order and Word-Order Change" 
(1975), "Subject and Topic" (1976), and "Mechanism for Syntactic Change" 
(1977). As far as I can see, if these three unrefereed volumes had not 
appeared, the subsequent rise of the 
functionalist-typological-diachronic-acquisitional ground-swell we have 
all been part of would have never taken place. Carol Justus' 
functionalist-typological-diachronic LSA Summer in Oswego (1976) was a 
direct outcome of the Charles Li symposia. The TSL edited--and proudly 
unrefereed--series was a direct, explicit continuation of Charles Li's 
three volumes, beginning with Hopper (ed. 1982) "Tense and Aspect" and 
counting ca. 90-odd volumes now. The transformation of Studies in 
Language into ?our' journal was a direct outcome of the three moves 
noted above. This transformation was done in collusion with a visionary 
editor--Jon Verhaar, RIP--who decided to flaunt the rules, and damn the 
torpedoes. So when someone tells you that ?unrefereed' volumes do not 
count as much as ranked, strictly-refereed journals, perhaps you should 
ask yourselves, and them: Who are the rankers? Who are the referees? And 
what is their underlying interest, conscious or not, in this convoluted 
enterprise?

We can steer our younger generation into safe, conservative, 
slow-and-sluggish careers designed to preserve the prevailing 
disciplinary order, and to embellish the current paradigms with 
unthreateningly-small increments. This is certainly one way careers and 
status are constructed. If it were up to me, tho, I would caution our 
y'all as follows: Those authoritative referees are after you hide. They 
want to chop your ideas down to their size and in the process diminish 
them--and you. They want to squeeze you into their mould, so that you 
may emerge as carbon copies of them. So that whatever juice of 
adventure, discovery and innovation flows in your veins would be curdled 
and denatured and made palatable--to them. So that you may gain the 
whole world but lose your soul.

This is, lastly, not only about your nascent careers. It is also about 
the future of linguistics as a credible field of inquiry. That future is 
in your hands. It is up to you to move this contentious would-be science 
off the dime, so that we may all quit our perennial regurgitation of old 
pablums and move on.


Y'all be good, TG