[ANTHRO-L] The End of Linguistics

[bryllars at concentric.net]

Thank you.

 If one looks historically, the whole linguistic models business began with
Jakobson
who inspired the whole of "Structuralism" - Levi-Strauss began his thinking
by listening
to a course of lectures Jakobson gave at the Lycee Francaise in New York
City when
he was an emigree just off the boat from Norway looking for work.

I was lucky enough to take one of Jakobson's early courses on this at
Harvard (1951) (see his
Six Lectures). Halle was involved. Chomsky Halle adopted him , but not
really. They couldn't
stand the fact that his stucturalism was only at the end a search for
universals. It began
by search for particular structures. This was not really a discovery
proceedure - simply
an angle of vision that Chomsky - later - did not share.

    Hymes combined Jakobson'ism' with a basic training in descriptive
linguistics via
Hoijer. And in fact the empiricist bias of Anthropology at that time made
some kind
of 'objective' desciption seem a necessity - if you wanted to be heard.
Although in spite
of what Chomsky says no one I knew at that time was ever a 'behaviorist'.
We all regarded
Skinner as a joke.
   Chomsky really committed a morally dubious rewriting and caricaturing of
history to
further his own purposes. (He also had his, and all his students', papers
circulated only
in ditto which at that time was unxeroxable, and faded after a hundred
copies. He thus
created an inner circle that was 'in the know' and gave power to his
disciples to lord it over
those who had other things to do and just wanted to keep up. Chomsky's excuse
was that there was no money to use xerox or some other way of printing. He
told me this
when I confronted him on the issue. This was disingenuous as money was
found for
other things. What was really involved was a choice between the ethics of
equal access
to knowledge vs a couple of dollars. Since he was on Navy contracts the
whole matter is
questionable.  For many years the major works in the field were available
only as working papers
in blue ditto - and not published until they were well out of date.)

     Hymes protested Chomsky's radical separation of "linguistics" from the
rest of
anthropology. And in doing so formalized the relationship which before had
been
mostly based on the tradition of Sapir and American Indian work, plus
Bloomfieldian
fieldwork.

    Chomsky contributed some essential things - awareness of the latent
behaviorism
underlying most of the work, separation of linguistic knowledge from
"discovery proceedures"
(although even here there was a combination of research and CONCERN for
individual
cultures that Chomsky was happy to abandon and disguise).  and much else.
   But he did it in such a way that one had to reinvent basic tools known
for centuries
and put them in his language. So did the descriptivists before him in some
ways.
But his colonization of the field was more radical.
.
    Eventually his formalism revealed its basic poverty and introduction of
unecessary complications
to simple description of what was known and discoverable.  And the school
blew apart.
    But his hiding of history was quite successful.
    And all the later developments were done in his terms.

    In the end the person who knew the most about language and its 'fluidity'
was James Joyce in Finnegans Wake - as you might enjoy taking a listen at
if you have not already.  (He knew all the 19th century Indo-European studies,
Boas, and Schuchardt's Creole and pidgin studies.)

Karl Reisman
Bryllars at concentric.net





At 10:12 PM 3/31/01 -0800, you wrote:
>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
>
>