[ANTHRO-L] The End of Linguistics

[John McCreery]

At 10:12 PM -0800 01.3.31, Ronald Kephart wrote:

> 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.


For what it's worth (Chris Pound knows better than me, I am sure),  I doubt
that many anthropologists who weren't already intrigued by linguistics got
that far along. My sense is that structuralism died of Levi-Strauss'
excessive dependence on Hegelian dialectic (the old
thesis-antithesis-synthesis schtick) and ethnoscience seemed to limit its
practitioners, as apostate Stephen Tyler said, to incredibly trivial
problems. There is still a lot of untapped potential in both approaches, I
think; but the promise will only be realized through better, more powerful
representations of underlying processes. Where are those computational
anthros now that we really need them?

> 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."

Sounds cool.

> 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.
>

Ron,

Can you do us interested bystanders a favor and recommend a primer. Is
Duranti's textbook (not the reader--that's something else) the place to go?
Or is there something better?

Cheers,

John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
Tel +81-45-314-9324
Fax +81-45-316-4409
email mccreery at gol.com

"Making Symbols is Our Business"