[ANTHRO-L] The End of Linguistics

[Ronald Kephart]

John McCreery wrote:

>Good for you. For my two cents, the Alessandro Duranti reader where
>I found the Hymes article is very good value, indeed, as a compact
>source of major articles.

Thanks. I'm almost certainly gonna use it in that "language and
culture" course.

>I never, by the way, doubted that linguistics exists. But to have
>lived through the linguistic-models rush, when it seemed that--as I
>still occasionally tell my students--linguistics seemed like the
>only serious competitor to economics as a model for social science
>and then lived on to see it recede leaves me wondering how this all
>happened.

I really don't think it's receded at all, unless you mean receded
from anthropology, which may be true. Or maybe it would be more
accurate to say that anthropology retreated from linguistics. I think
that much of this took place at a point where generative grammar was
still figuring out where it was headed; Chomsky talks about this,
somewhere, or maybe it's Pinker- I've been nibbling at different
things lately and they get a little mixed up. Anyway, the point is
that the number of phrase-structure and transformational rules needed
to describe even a tiny bit of English (or any other language) became
overwhelming... I think this is the point you mentioned in another
post, a point of too many rules. I still have a "TG tree" we did of
an Aymara sentence way back then- it's truly bizarre.

At that point, Chomsky and some others decided that this incredibly
complex system would be unacquirable by children. Something had to be
done to bring the thing in line with what was known about language
acquisition. What they did, as of the last point that I'm caught up
with, is reduce the whole thing to a fairly small set of principles,
and two rules: "merge" and "move."

My impression is that anthropologists simply gave up too soon, turned
off by all those rules and trees and stuff. If you put some time and
effort into working thru some of the *recent* stuff Chomsky et al are
doing (and believe me, I've only scratched the surface myself), you
find some really elegant, fascinating things happening, things that
*ought* to be known to anthropologists interested in language, things
far more compelling than the early stuff, although the seeds of
what's happening now were certainly sown in that earlier turf.

Well, anyway, *I* find it compelling. And, to reiterate, I'm deeply
interested in the other things, too, what Hymes is talking about and
so on. But unlike many, I guess, for me the pieces all fit into a
seamless whole. Face it: I must be weird.

Ronald Kephart
English & Foreign Languages
University of North Florida