The End of Linguistics

[Ronald Kephart]

Kerim Friedman writes:

>...I personally don't really care if what I am doing counts as
>science or not. We certainly don't get paid what scientists get paid!

Ain't it the truth!  But on the other hand, I do care. I always tell
my intro students, right from the start, that what we are doing is
the *scientific* study of language. I then go on to explain that what
I mean by "scientific" is that the conclusions that we arrive at,
about English (or any other language) in particular, or about human
language in general, will be supported by empirically acquired
evidence. We will not accept as true, for example, the myth of the
Tower of Babel, because there is no empirical evidence supporting it.
Nor will we accept the prescriptivists' argument against multiple
negation (or rather, negative concord, as I prefer to call it) on the
grounds of logic, because the empirical evidence falsifies it.

Why is this important?  Because, ultimately, the part of the course
that I consider the most important for most of my students is the
unit on variation; this is where we talk about English dialects,
including Ebonics. Many of the students in my classes are or soon
will be teachers. I want to be able to show them, scientifically,
that there is nothing about Ebonics (and other devalued varieties
they might encounter) that makes them *linguistically* unusual. They
have all the features of human language (UG, or however you want to
tally it) in the same "amounts" as do Japanese, or Yanomama, or any
other variety of language.

I want students to leave my class understanding that if they are
going to be prejudiced against Ebonics, or Appalachian English, or
whatever, they can take no comfort in the existence of any
*linguistic* support for their prejudice. Nor can they accuse me of
simply being "PC," because I have the facts on my side, facts which
they can discover for themselves if they choose to do so.

Ronald Kephart
Assistant Professor and Coordinator
Program in Foreign Languages
University of North Florida