solid tradition & winds of fashion

[Steven Schaufele]

This is in response to Prof. Rasmussen's recent `manifesto', and i am
particularly grateful for the opportunity it provides me to get involved,
however tangentially, in this discussion.  I am a comparative syntactician
and syntactic theorist, and my interest in phonology is pretty much
limited to what would generally be expected of a comparative linguist and
typologist.  In short, i've been very interested in following this
discussion of the history of certain details of IE morphophonolgy,
without feeling that my own areas of expertise had much to contribute.
 
Prof. Rasmussen closed his posting of the 18th in the Indo-European list
with the following paragraph:
 
> 6. This has come to be a major manifesto, so let me end by saying that it
> is impressive how strong and solid tradition stands in IE Studies. The
> good old phonological (better, phonetic) reconstruction of the stops is
> good enough for the protolanguage from which all poststages come, and the
> verbal system is indeed the one laid down in Brugmann's Grundriss. A few
> laryngeals have been added, details of idiosyncratic histories of
> particular lexical items are pouring out, and elucidation of the
> prehistory of the protolanguage is in a state of revolution, but the
> general descriptive picture of the single most important chronological
> node represented by the final stage of the protolanguage stands basically
> unshaken. In the field of IE scholars have been able to build continuously
> on the results of their predecessors, adding ever new facets to the grand
> picture in a straight line going back some 200 years. IE Studies have been
> on the right track all along and have not had to "change paradigm" with
> the whims of fashion. Ours is a healthy branch of linguistics.
 
In *partial* agreement with the sentiments herein expressed, i will begin
by recalling a statement by my Doktorvater, Hans Henrich Hock, who when
he received his current job at the University of Illinois was told by (i
believe) the then department chair, `Historical linguistics is d'emod'e;
you should get more involved in generative syntactic or phonological theory;
that's where the action is.' (I paraphrase, of course; this is a 3rd-hand
retelling)  His answer: `Historical linguistics, along with its research
paradigm, has been around for over a century.  It has survived every
paradigm-shift in linguistic science; it will survive this one too.'  As
a general rule, what Prof. Rasmussen says is quite correct: Unlike a lot
of synchronic (theoretical) linguists, who seem to spend a lot of their
time reinventing the wheel (in his collection `The Great Eskimo Vocabulary
Hoax' Geoff Pullum has an essay on the history of the `unaccusative hypo-
thesis' that offers some rather pithy examples), historical linguists in
general and Indo-Europeanists in particular have been able to build solid-
ly on the research of previous generations, much of which is regarded
today as just as solid as when its validity was first established.
 
(Not that there aren't some fuzzy areas.  But that's where current
research is going on, as in any science.  While investigating those fuzzy
areas, we can rely with a fair amount of confidence on a large body of
previous research.)
 
This is one of the main reasons I have found historical linguistics, in
Indo-European and elsewhere, to be of such value for theoretical
research.  For one thing, it provides the theorist with a lot more data,
including a diachronic dimension all too rarely brought to bear in theo-
retical discussion.  But more importantly, i find that historical-
linguistic scholarship can often provide valuable test cases of theore-
tical claims, precisely by bringing in that diachronic dimension that
makes it possible for us to text whether correlations predicted or
implied by a specific line of theoretical thought are actually attested
in the processes of language change.
 
I therefore object very strongly to a tendency I see all too often in
academic linguistics to impose a dichotomy between theoretical linguis-
tics on the one hand and more `empirical', especially historical linguis-
tics on the other.  I would not for a moment suggest that Prof. Rasmussen
himself is guilty of this dichotomy; but i'm feeling rather sensitive on
the issue because i've had recently to deal with some researchers who
definitely are, on one side or the other.  There is a tendency to assume
that theorists and comparativists/typologists/reconstructionists have
nothing worthwhile to say to each other.
 
Which is a damn shame; the ongoing series of Diachronic Generative Syntax
Conferences, for one, is to my mind evidence of the mutual relevance of
historical linguistics and linguistic theory, at least in my own field of
syntax, and the energy and fascination of these conferences is further
evidence that there's a lot of interesting stuff to investigate in this
interface.  Not only does the discipline of historical linguistics offer
linguistic theorists with a lot of data that is not only, as Prof.
Rasmussen notes, methodologically reliable, but also *theoretically
interesting*; from the other point of view, the ongoing speculations of
theoretical linguists continue to raise interesting questions motivating
empirical research into historical data.  (This is, of course, a large
part of the value of scientific theory, that it raises new research
questions that might never have occurred under preceding paradigms.  In
this respect, different from the sense Prof. Rasmussen had in mind,
linguistic theory is also a `very healthy' branch of linguistics.)  As a
result, each is able to enrich the other.
 
Sincerely,
Steven Schaufele
---------------------
Dr. Steven Schaufele
712 West Washington
Urbana, IL  61801
217-344-8240
fcosws at prairienet.org
http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html
 
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