[ANTHRO-L] The End of Linguistics

[John McCreery]

The following is in response to a post on Anthro-L. It is being cross-posted
to linganth.

At 2:08 PM -0500 3/30/2001, Ronald Kephart wrote:

> On the other hand, I can teach, in the space of a class hour or so,
> the *kinds of* morphemes that are found in *all* the world's
> languages. And we can apply that terminology across the board: free
> morphemes, bound morphemes, clitics, prefixes, suffixes, infixes,
> inflectional, derivational. We can also apply terminology related to
> lexical classes: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pre/postposition,
> determiner, pronoun, particle, etc.  Moving up to syntax, we have
> structural terms such as sentence subject, predicate, complement,
> modifier, specifier; and processes such as merge, movement,
> embedding, negation, and so on.... all of which can be applied to any
> language.
>
> This is why I can give my students a set of data in a language as
> weird (to them) as, say, Hungarian, and ask them to find the
> allomorphs of the plural morpheme and state their distribution in
> terms of a phonological rule. I can ask them to do exactly the same
> thing in English. There must be some similar things going on in
> English and Hungarian, or I couldn't even ask them to do it.
>

Having been snarsty in other messages in this thread, I would like to be the
first to offer a round of applause. This is, indeed, to my mind the way to
answer Halpern's first charge: To say that he has failed to grasp that the
people doing all of the different things he mentions are, in so far as they
are linguists, united by technical training in how to do this sort of thing.
This training allows them to speak with great precision and replicability
about core aspects of language that other disciplines treat sloppily if at
all. This precision and replicability enable linguists, at least in
principle, to make important contributions to other disciplines where the
manner in which people speak is taken to be evidence for other
"larger-scale" phenomena, i.e.,virtually all of the other humanities and
social sciences--wherever inferences from how something was said to history,
motives, or social distinctions are called into play.

To follow this line does, of course, raise important issues in the history
and sociology of knowledge: In particular, why is it that, following the
brief explosion of interest in linguistic models ("structuralism,"
"ethnoscience," that sort of thing) in the sixties and seventies, the
potential described above has remained large unrealized? What intellectual
currents or political processes have lead to linguists' isolation in
intellectual ghettoes, pursuing issues that seem only esoteric to people in
other fields? Why, when our friend and mentor Mike Salovesh went to Chicago,
for example, was training in linguistics considered an essential part of the
anthropologist's tool kit, while now, in many departments--or so I am
told--it is possible to do a Ph.D. in anthropology with no linguistics at
all?

Or, the counter-question, has that potential I mentioned in fact remained
unrealized? Occasional flashes appear on the intellectual horizon: Deborah
Tannen, for example, on gender differences in speech or George Lakoff, et.
al., on metaphor. One suspects (only suspects, not having kept up with what
is going on), that there may be a substantial group of folks involved in
cognitive science and natural language processing in non-English languages.
Is there, in fact, a lot going on that we are simply aware of because of the
on-going proliferation of micro-disciplinary boundaries and sheer inability
to keep up with even the smallest fraction of what is actually going on?

I would appreciate comments from anyone who feels able to shed some light on
these issues.





John McCreery
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