32.3447, Featured Linguist: Mirjam Fried

Tue Nov 2 20:17:32 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3447. Tue Nov 02 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3447, Featured Linguist: Mirjam Fried

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Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2021 16:17:17
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Mirjam Fried

I was still in grad school when Linguist List was born, essentially as a
discussion forum then. And I remember with fondness what a thrilling leap into
the world of virtual communication it was at that time, and how I devoured
most of the discussions that quickly started to pop up on all sorts of topics
and often among people I was not likely to ever meet in person. Things have of
course developed from there and it’s great to see that we still have this
indispensable and very professionally run service, richer than ever. Please
let’s keep it going!

Especially now that there is some hope of gradually returning to a more normal
academic life. Being reduced to zoom meetings for so long has shown us real
limits of the online mode of communication: e.g. when we need to brainstorm
with colleagues about projects, teach practical hands-on courses, or just
enjoy a friendly gab in between conference talks. But to be fair, this
unwelcome disruption has brought some pleasant surprises, too: mundane work
meetings turned out to be more efficient this way; I saw enrollment almost
doubled in my classes, bringing in students who normally wouldn’t touch
linguistics with a ten-foot pole (did they have more time on their hands now?,
was it easier from the comfort of their homes?, did they feel less ‘on the
spot’ than in the classroom?, or…?); not to mention that the whole experience
has forced us to be more creative in the ways we do things. Nonetheless, I’m
happy at the prospect that this semester could be different, finally, at least
at my Alma Mater here in Prague, allowing me to be face-to-face with my
students again. I also have a small team of MA and PhD students and a few
junior colleagues, all of us eager to continue developing our ideas in
multimodal constructional analysis and to start inviting guest speakers from
other countries again! Plus I see an added bonus: there will be a treasure
trove of material for studying how the virtual communication is pretty
fundamentally different from the normal way and what strategies interlocutors
develop to cope with it. What more can a linguist ask for…

So, why have I become a linguist? Well, because I always wanted to! Which is
not to say it was always a smooth and easy ride; my life story may seem like
an exercise in searching for silver linings…. I was born and grew up in a now
non-existent country (Czechoslovakia) at the time when one couldn’t plan much
of anything, least of all one’s professional future. Success depended on
ideological prostitution and that was not how I was brought up. But that
didn’t stop me from forming a life-long plan at the age of thirteen. When – in
seventh grade – we were introduced to the basics of dependency grammar and
learned to diagram sentences, I discovered my calling. On the way from school
that day I informed my mother that when I grow up I want to be a syntactician.
Structure absolutely fascinated me and the idea of dissecting complex
sentences into different parts that can be classified (neatly, they had me
believe then, haha) by function got me hooked. All my career-related decisions
from that point on were driven by this goal – to become a syntactician. Little
did I know… Accordingly, I chose the so-called humanities track in high school
because there was more emphasis on language(s), including obligatory Latin, in
spite of being chastised for it (apparently, kids with good grades were
supposed to take the math-oriented track). I was lucky, though, to have a
teacher who supported my interest and helped me find books by Czech linguists
which broadened my horizons in various disciplines, from syntax to
sociolinguistics. 

After graduation, the first hurdle emerged. As politically suspect and
unreliable, I wasn’t allowed to enroll in the university double-major program
I chose (Czech Linguistics and Classics). On the way from learning this
unsurprising piece of news, I bumped into my middle-school French teacher who
was at that time running a popular educational program for kids, and she was
sufficiently appalled by this turn of events to give me a job in her program
and then work through her connections to make sure that the next year I do get
in. Which I did. Since my primary interest was actually in diachrony, I found
my way into an RA-ship in the Old Czech department in the Academy of Sciences.
This job introduced me to morphosyntactic variation, opened up a whole new
world of research questions and especially of data (a humongous database, all
in the form of excerpts on index cards – imagine that!, a roomful of drawers
upon drawers), and this experience eventually led not only to my MA thesis,
but many years later also to a series of articles, when grammaticalization
research provided me with a tangible theoretical perspective. 

At the same time, my search for ‘real linguistics’ landed me in the Math
Faculty of Charles University, where I for the first time got a taste of
transformational grammar and formal semantics, but subsequently also the work
of Charles Fillmore, which I could relate to the easiest. This particular
RA-ship was practically a clandestine operation, the group led by Petr Sgall
and Eva Hajičová was politically out of favor to such a degree that they all
had been chased out of the Faculty of Arts, where I was regularly enrolled,
and basically in hiding among the mathematicians. It was sheer luck that I
managed to sniff them out and learn about their seminars. As their RA, I was
helping in preparing material for what eventually became the valence
dictionary, to this day a crucial part of the Prague TreeBank. By the way,
while working on this, I came to the firm conclusion that I would never get
into semantics because it’s too messy, too intractable, simply too difficult
and not for me. Granted, Czech aspect is all those things, but still. Little
did I know again…

And another hurdle, this time really serious. Even before graduating from
college, it was made very plain to me that if I didn’t join the communist
party, there’d be no hope for an academic career. In fact, for the likes of
me, not even school teaching was “in the interest of the state”, as the
all-purpose phrase went. I was getting myself mentally ready for a career of
dish washing or window cleaning… But through one of the great ironies of life,
I met my future husband (an American, then a grad student of Slavic
linguistics at Yale) during a summer school in Slovenia, where my greatest
political tormentor had sent me, I guess in the hopes that I would eventually
relent in a show of gratitude for this trip (not normally allowed in those
days). Instead, after four years of correspondence, I married this American
students and emigrated to the US, on Christmas Eve of 1982. It was like
landing on Mars and I couldn’t even dream of simply continuing with my
academic pursuits. Not right away, anyway. But hey, learning to live in New
York, soaking up the environment, enjoying the unimaginable freedom, and later
working as a computer programmer (for the Fed, of all places) was not a waste
by any stretch. Three years later, after having taught myself the most arcane
programming languages, the innards of the PC hardware (then a freshly emerging
miracle in computers), and in my free time reading linguistic literature, I
felt ready to go back to grad school and the biggest decision of my
professional life was before me: I liked the East Coast (not knowing anything
else, of course) and imagined I’d like to go to MIT, while my husband saw
himself in the Silicon Valley, which was just taking off then. We each did a
detailed ‘feasibility study’ along the same (long) set of criteria, he won by
about 3 points out of more than 70, and I think it was the best thing that
ever happened to me. 

At UC Berkeley, Chuck Fillmore opened up a completely new world to me.
Semantics suddenly didn’t feel so daunting and intractable, syntax became even
more interesting and infinitely richer, and most importantly – it was also the
beginning of introducing the cognitive perspective into linguistic analysis. I
remember joint workshops with folks from UC San Diego, which were a lot of fun
and eye-opening experiences. Through all this, I saw construction grammar as
the way of thinking about language that made by far the most sense to me and
it has become my chosen field. Additional hurdles – some open, some more under
the surface – were of course presented by the job market; it wasn’t easy to be
a cognitive linguist, a woman, and a foreigner to boot. After a pretty
satisfying one-year visiting job at U of Oregon, which brought me in contact
with the world of typological research, I landed a job in the Slavic
department at Princeton University. PU wasn’t exactly known for pursuits in
cognitive linguistics and I felt a bit isolated, but it helped that I found a
way to hang out with people in the psychology department. It was again useful
new food for thought. 

At PU, I was also required to teach Czech, which I took almost as a necessary
evil. But this less than perfect match again turned out to be a useful turn in
the long run, as I sort of stumbled into research area I’ve been pursuing ever
since – the grammar of spontaneously produced language. Once a student in my
Czech class asked about the meaning of a word that in dictionaries is defined
as a subordinating conjunction, but in spoken language it has evolved into a
polyfunctional discourse marker that had not yet been analyzed and described.
In trying to answer the student’s question, I realized I’d have to write a
whole book to capture its full nature, including the phenomenon that a few
years later became known as insubordination, in Nick Evans’s work. So, I’ve
been writing articles on this and other similar markers, and since they are a
feature of spontaneous interaction, they necessarily pose questions about the
interplay between lexico-syntactic, phonic, and even gestural patterns, which,
by definition, is something construction grammar was designed to handle by
providing the conceptual and analytic tools to capture language in its
multilayered complexity. My latest adventure thus involves the search for
prosodic and segmental correlates of specific linguistic patterns, with the
indispensable contribution from my phonetician colleague.

And so here I am. Still dealing with syntax, but in a much more interesting
and theoretically satisfying way, which takes seriously both the cognitive
perspective (brought to me through my Berkeley years) and the interactional
grounding (my Prague School background). Needless to say, it is extremely
rewarding and encouraging to see how the constructional approach, including
its link to lexical semantics (through Frame Semantics) and discourse has
become part of the ‘mainstream’ and informs linguistic research not just in
synchronic syntax, but also in diachrony, in morphology, and in a growing a
number of specific domains: acquisition, computational modeling, language
teaching, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, etc. And most recently
extending also into questions about multimodal patterning and, hence, also the
scope of grammar, the scope and nature of speakers’ linguistic knowledge…
It’ll keep us busy.

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