Adam's message

[Robert Levine]

Hi Shalom---

I think that even intelligent people are prone, under the correct
sorts of pressure, to fall into using the current Newspeak, whatever
the context; otherwise bright people talking about `market-driven' economies
rather than capital-dominated economies; `globalisation' rather than
`Americanization', and so on. It's current coin of the realm to
pretend that MIT linguistics is the only generative brand on the
market---something really savvy types like Fritz Newmeyer, who
struggles to keep his intellectual integrity intact even amidst his
Chomskyan commitments, have noted in print; so in his Linguistic
Theory in America, he is quite explicit in talking about GPSG, LFG and
other nonderivational theories as codialects, with transformational
grammar, of generative linguistics. Smith obviously values that kind
of integrity less than being seen to publically endorse the implicit
party line: MIT is still the revolutionary faction, and everyone else
are latter day avatars of American structuralism. I would bet you
anything you wanted that Smith has no idea that the notion of
generativity as it was originally applied to linguistic theory was
taken from the work of people like Emile Post and other formal system
theorist interested in the nature of computability and solvability,
and that it had this explicit notion of enumeration at its
centre. What's weird is that Bob Borsley tells me that long ago Smith
taught courses in GPSG and understood well that in the relevant
respects transformational and nontransformational grammars could be
variants of generative grammars. So maybe some kind of sectarian
dementia has set in?

We are eagerly looking forward to your visit. Things are actually
rather crackling around here, and there's a lot going on. And don't
forget: you are having dinner with us while you're in town---

cheers,

and best wishes for the New Year,

Bob