25.1647, Let's Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014: Neil Smith

Tue Apr 8 15:36:29 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1647. Tue Apr 08 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.1647, Let's Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014: Neil Smith

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Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 11:35:49
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Neil Smith

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Today we are introducing our next featured linguist Neil Smith from the
University College London. If you have ever wondered why you should become a
linguist, read Neil’s story where he tells you why this is the best profession
in the world!

How I Became a Linguist by Neil Smith

It all began at secondary school when I specialised in languages – French,
German and Latin – simply because the man teaching French and German (Leonard
Priestley) was an inspiration. Reading Voltaire’s Zadig was an excuse to
discuss astronomy and the nature of the senses; studying Molière led to
ruminations on hypochondria. Syllabus? What syllabus? So I went to Cambridge
(UK) and read ‘Modern and Medieval languages’.

In my final year I had to select five optional subjects (out of some 77) to be
examined on. I had chosen the History of the French Language, the History of
the German Language, German Literature before 1500, Vulgar Latin & Romance
Philology, and was about to put down German Literature in the 20th century,
when a friend asked if I knew what ‘Linguistics’ was. After we had agreed that
neither of us had the slightest idea, he persuaded me to join him in adding it
as our final option. So in October 1960 we enrolled on John Trim’s course on
“The Principles of Linguistics”, and I have been hooked ever since.

The bulk of the course consisted of phoneme theory, with a healthy admixture
of morphemes and even a smattering of syntax in the form of Immediate
Constituent analysis. Banal by today’s standards, but Trim was an inspiring
teacher and I was soon converted from my desire to be a medievalist to a
desire to understand everything about the phoneme. In fact, my understanding
even of that was minimal. I still remember with stark clarity at the end of
the first term being given a passage and told to transcribe it both
phonetically and phonemically. I had no idea what that meant. Similarly, I
remember endlessly searching in my dictionary for some insight which would
enable me to distinguish ‘syntax’ and ‘semantics’, but again to no avail.
These memories have made me tolerant of students today who have problems with
a much more rebarbative jargon.

We took finals. I got distinctly mediocre marks, and was told unofficially
that my worst paper had been linguistics, which I nearly failed. So I applied
for jobs. Fortunately, none of librarianship, school-teaching or the British
Council would touch me and, faute de mieux, I started a PhD at UCL. I had a
hankering to do field-work and planned to go up the Amazon and find some
unwritten language to study. I was advised that Nigeria was more likely to
leave me alive at the end of my trip and I finally picked on Nupe. The Central
Research Fund of the University of London gave me my air fare, but it seemed
more interesting to go overland so I hitch-hiked to Bida in Northern
Nigeria... The journey lasted two months, took me through 14 countries, and
included every conceivable form of travel – from aeroplane via pilgrim-lorry
to dug-out canoe.

A year’s field-work is wonderful training for any linguist. Being confronted
with a complex tone language, whose syntax was unlike anything I had ever
heard of was chastening, exhilarating, illuminating, educative, and fun. It
was also intermittently very lonely and extremely hard work, but it set me up
with stories to dine out on for life, and it also brought a PhD. Better still,
my new found expertise as an Africanist seemed to have qualified me to become
a lecturer in West African Languages in the Department of Africa at SOAS (the
School of Oriental and African Studies).

SOAS was strange. My colleagues were mostly a delight, but relations between
the Linguistics department and the Africa department were strained, and those
between the Linguistics department and the sister department at UCL where I
had come from were icy. It was ‘not convenient’ for me to use the library of
the Linguistics department or attend seminars there, and some of the students
were warned not to talk to me “in case they get confused”. To escape the
suffocation of the rivalries at SOAS, I applied for a Harkness Fellowship and
went to MIT and UCLA for a couple of years.

MIT was a revelation. There was huge enthusiasm, appallingly hard work, and
remarkable talent. I had gone to MIT because of Chomsky, but when I arrived,
he was away and, to my great good fortune, Morris Halle took me under his
wing. Partly because of this and partly because I am married to a medical
doctor I later wrote a book on the acquisition of phonology. How come? As my
work wasn’t essential like that of a doctor is, it often fell to me to look
after our elder son, Amahl. To stay sane I made endless notes and recordings.
Who but a linguist could sit on the floor playing trains and claim it was
research? It was such fun that I did it again nearly 40 years later and wrote
a book on the acquisition of phonology by his elder son, Zak.

When I had arrived at MIT the place was buzzing with the ideas of Generative
Semantics, and the demise of Chomsky’s ‘Standard theory’ was widely assumed to
be imminent. Chomsky’s response was electrifying. In the spring semester of
1967 he delivered the lectures which became “Remarks on Nominalization”,
widely interpreted as a systematic attack on Generative Semantics. Chomsky’s
arguments were illuminating: at once critical, penetrating and innovative
(X-bar theory first saw the light of day in these lectures), and ultimately
set the scene for much of the linguistic theorising of the next decade. But it
was another thirty years before I thought I understood enough of his ideas and
ideals to write about them.

Being a linguist has brought other pleasures: beautiful people and places to
visit, the chance to straddle disciplines and popularise one’s favourite
findings, wonderful colleagues and co-authors, inspiring students,
awe-inspiring subjects of research like the polyglot savant Christopher. The
list is almost endless. Be a linguist!

Neil Smith

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