Further re title use at Chicago

[Alan Rumsey]

At 07:53 AM 7/23/2003 -0700, Alexandra Jaffe wrote:
>
>At the same time as reciprocal TLN may have been indexing shared
>membership in a community of high-powered scholars (downplaying internal
>status hierarchy) it surely also served to differentiate that community
>from other academic communities that used the (normative) Dr. or
>Professor. The choice of less hierarchy-laden terms acted as a powerful
>assertion of high status in the broader field of American Universities
>precisely by downplaying the need for display of power.

Perhaps so, but from the feedback I have received on my posting it is clear
that there is a lot of diversity in this respect among US campuses, and
perhaps even among fields and departments in them. Nor do all of the
'elite' ones have reciprocal T+LN as the norm. One of my informants says of
Harvard in the sixties that:
those in the rank of "Instructor" (post-Ph.D. but the entry-level
appointment) were listed in the catalogue as well as addressed as "Dr.
...," thus making it an identifiable low-[man-]on-totem-pole designation.
Then people were listed, described, and sometimes even addressed [!] by
rank, "Assistant Professor So-and-So," "Associate Professor So-and-So"
[then a tenured position, by the way], and "Professor So-and-So" [now the
only tenured rank, instructor being now a pre-Ph.D. rank as elsewhere]. It
was refreshing to learn, on a scholarly visit when an undergraduate, that
Yale called everyone "Mr."

Meanwhile, down the road: "MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics in the
old WWII wooden buildings [where Chomsky was based] was indeed the FN club
par excellence", bearing out my surmise that this is where the reciprocal
FN usage came to Chicago Linguistics from.

Another informant reports that at Antioch College in the early sixties,
faculty were addressed as Mr. and Mrs., rather than "Doctor" or Professor,
but this usage was not reciprocally used by faculty when addressing
students, for which first names were used instead.

And another ex-Chicago grad student reminds me that of course, reciprocal
TLN was not used (with a straight face anyway) by students when talking to
each other, but only between faculty and students, thereby distinguishing
that as a special kind of interaction.

All of this once again bears out Ervin-Tripp's point (in the paper referred
to by Mr. Schiffman) that
that the range of pragmatic entailments that develop around such
alternations can be a lot more complex and highly ramified (and, I would
add, a lot more locally specific) than you might expect, given the small
number of contrasting terms involved.

Rumsey (ah, but that's another one again)


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