The End of Linguistics

[Ronald Kephart]

Karl Reisman wrote:

>...science cannot provide the authority for your or my view of
>language varieties. That involves a moral view of the world. Racists
>will not accept the value of African American varieties no matter
>how much "science" is invoked.

I agree, of course they won't. All I'm saying is that the science of
linguistics takes away one set of possible rationalizations for their
beliefs.

And, showing that a devalued language variety, say any Caribbean
Creole, displays all the identifying characteristics of human
language is not asking science to make a moral judgement, I don't
think. For example, one often disparaged feature of Creoles (and
Ebonics) concerns sentences like:

(1) That my pen.

Where the predicate contains a noun phrase, but nothing identifiable
as a "verb." If we show people, using empirical evidence, that this
sort of sentence is not "deviant" from the perspective of what can be
a human language, e.g.:

(2) Russian:
      Ona studyentka.
      she   student
      'She is a student.'

(3) Malay-Indonesian:
      Ini   kuda.
      this  horse
      'This is a horse.'

We can conclude that (1) is not bizarre, from a global perspective.
This is not a moral statement; it's a statement of fact. At least,
that's how I see it.

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