linguistic questions

[Laura Miller]

Regarding Galey Modan's comments:
I don't happen to think that linguistic anthropologists label themselves such "for the purpose of bolstering credentials."  There are established programs in the US that train people in this very subfield. The areas of interest and concern to linguistic anthropologists are not often mirrored in linguistics departments. An example would be questions about the origins of language, which Chomsky and his followers have gone on record as claiming are not worth studying.

There is a very good reason why linguistic anthropologists are interested in maintaining this distinction. Many anthropology departments are eliminating the linguistic anthropology slot with the idea that it is merely reduplicating whatever their linguistic department is doing. But as we all know, this is not usually the case at all.

There is intense competition over the few bona fide linguistic anthropology positions, and some concern among those who are trained in linguistic anthropology to see slots given to PhDs in linguistics, thereby representing a confounding of the distinction among anthropology colleagues while conferring a devaluation of the subfield.

>>> Gabriella Modan <modan.1 at osu.edu> 04/18/03 10:59 AM >>>
Chomsky's dissertation was on the morpho-phonemics of modern Hebrew, and
I'm pretty sure he's done work on and/or speaks Yiddish.  Regardless of his
bi/multilingualism (which it's worth pointing out that we don't even know
if we're working with similar definitions of bilingualism), it's patently
ridiculous to claim that Chomsky has nothing of interest to say about language.

I'm interested in these discussions about who is a linguist and who is
not.  I would argue that people who are good at learning languages as
adults can be seen as linguists  in some sense, because they have to go
through the same kinds of explicit structural and pragmatic analyses as the
people who do it for a living in the process of becoming competent
speakers/signers/writers.  So what makes a linguist a linguist?  Getting
paid for it?  And what's at stake for us in who we allow into the
definition?  I've been noticing for the last few years that this issue
always seems to be brewing beneath the surface of the annual Society for
Linguistic Anthropology meetings, where people, depending on the year and
on the issue, want to either separate Linguistic Anthropology from
Linguistics, which seems to serve the purpose of bolstering credentials as
anthropologists, or to emphasize Linguistc Anthropologists' identity as
linguists (this played out last year in the discussion about whether or not
the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages was gonna meet with AAA
or LSA); promoting an identity as linguists *also* seems to work to bolster
our credentials vis-a-vis the rest of anthropology, as people who have
difficult technical skills which are critical to the work of anthropology
(something along the lines of, you need us, otherwise anthropology will
have no rigor, so we're worthy of respect).  This stuff also often seems
somehow to segue from or into how many linguistic anthropologists are on
various AAA committees.  In light of this, I would be interested to hear
other people's thoughts on how our definitions of "linguist" tie into
material concerns, and what the implications of that are for the work of
linguistic anthropology (and linguistic anthropologists, broadly construed).

Galey Modan

At 10:16 AM 4/18/2003 -0400, Ronald Kephart wrote:
>At 6:02 PM -0400 4/17/03, hmfaller at umich.edu wrote:
>
>>And thank goodness my invocation of snot caused such a flurry of
>>activity. I actually was thinking about Jakobson in comparison to Chomsky
>>(for all his good politics)...
>
>But didn't Chomsky grow up speaking both English and Hebrew? As I
>understand it, his parents were both involved in the movement to
>revitalize Hebrew, his father was a respected scholar of Hebrew, and
>Chomsky himself taught Hebrew as a young fellow and wrote his masters
>thesis on Hebrew. So I think it's a bit unfair to claim Chomsky as
>"monolingual," whatever else you might think of him.
>
>And, while I'm here, I also disagree with whoever stated that all people
>who have language are linguists. I do agree that people have what I would
>call folk theories of language, and also culture, and probably even
>digestion. But I don't think that makes them linguists, or cultural
>anthropologists, or gastroenterologists.
>
>Hiding under my desk now...
>
>Ron
>
>--
>Ronald Kephart
>Associate Professor
>English & Foreign Languages
>University of North Florida
>http://www.unf.edu/~rkephart