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MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU>re citations, prechomsky linguists, john goldsmiths comments and other such things. UCLA has been teaching the history of linguistic theory at both the under grad and graduate level. The last time I taught the course was 1991 -- and surveyed from Greeks through Saussure, and then in more depth 20th c fellows like Sapir, Boaz, Bloomfield (and co.), Pike, Firth, Troubetzkoy, etc etc. We also teach 20th century phonology and 20th century theories. Many important books have been published in this area such as Anderson's splendid book on phonology, Eli Fischer Jurgensen's encyclopedic volume on phonology etc. Our students are not all that ignorant but like in other sciences and disciplines students do learn the paradigmatic theories of their period. While it is good for students to have as ann assignment the job of analyzing data according to, say, Bloomfield or Halliday or Sapir or Swadesh or..... this is not crucial for their on going research. What is crucial is that they know tghe importance of looking at what has been done to gain insights and so as not to reinvent the buggy whip. Relating current theory to alternative theory(s) has been going on for a long time. John, I also published on Firth way back in 1964 (and remember that the British School was the theme of Terry Langendoen's dissertation) attempting to show how and why generative phonology could and should incor- porate some of Firthian system-structure prosodic concepts (my very first article in Language). And I wrote the paper when I was already a died-in- the wool generativist. Incidentally, another interesting point about Chomsky and his contributions to our field. His Cartesian Linguistics initiated a renewal of interest in the history of linguistics as the many many excellent volumes now published attest, including the two series of publications of very early works. Conrad Koerner has contributed mightily to this and we should all be grateful for all our historians. But the Chomsky volume did this to a certain extent because of those who disagreed with his views and began to publish rebuttals. Which I think illustrates the fact that sometimes the questions one asks are at least as important as the answers one provides. I love the quote from Steve Anderson about the need for linguists to stand on the shoulders not the toes of the giants who came before us. Sorry to be so wordy. Vicki FromkinMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
ccvax.as.edu.tw>Talmy Givon is also someone who is quite a prolific writer yet not cited as often as Chomsky. I would be good to remember that one reason for Chomsky's influence in other fields is that he has always published two kinds of books: one type for linguists (e.g. Barriers), and one type for a more general audience (e.g. Language and Responsibility). It would be no surprise if those of us who publish only with linguists in mind are not influential outside our field.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
tira.uchicago.edu>Margaret.E.Winters writes: "I am just completing a course in the history of linguistics where MA students are learning for the first time about Saussure, Bloomfield, Prague approaches, .." What about Panini? And has anyone noticed how closely Chomsky's handling of nominative case resembles that of Boethius of Daccia (fl. 1274). In designing a case theory for autolexical syntax I have been deeply influenced by both of these scholars, though I did gain some insights from Fillmore (1968) too. I think that these fellows had far more useful stuff to say about case (or Case, or Kase, or Khase - whatever) than most of the GB literature of the past two decades. Eric SchillerMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
philologie.fu-berlin.dbp.de>It is curious that someone should have suggested that Chomsky publishes more than any other linguist. I don't have any statistics to offer, but I'm sure that there are scores of linguists that publish more than Chomsky (e.g. Jackendoff, Langacker, Comrie, S. Anderson, Hawkins, Dressler, to mention just a few prominent names, in addition to Wierzbicka and Swiggers). The real difference is of course that not everyone reads (or even notices) what all these people have to say, but everyone reads everything Chomsky ever writes -- so the mistaken impression could arise that he actually publishes more. Even his M.A. thesis became a kind of classic, and his 1992 paper "A minimalist program for linguistic theory", which doesn't look as if it was intended for wider circulation, must be around in thousands of copies by now. My favorite explanation for this unique situation is that many people see Chomsky not as one linguist among others, but as a living legend. (Imagine Marx or Freud were still alive and publishing regularly!) Martin HaspelmathMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
tasman.cc.utas.edu.au>> Date: Fri, 15 May 92 10:05:58 EDT > From: Geoffrey Russom <EL403015Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
dfki.uni-sb.de>I've been reading the discussion following the announcement that Chomsky is currently one of the most frequently cited individuals anywhere, ranking near Shakespeare, Cicero and St.Paul, which is a bit surprising---but I'm even a bit more surprised at lots of the remarks. Granted that C's normally quoted without being deeply understood, and often without even being read, but this has to be true of all the biggies--who reads Cicero anymore? And how many Aristotle citations betray an understanding of what's distinctive in his thought? So I suspect the question originally put (by Alexis Manaster-Ramer) was a bit tongue-in-cheek--why should we suspect that Chomsky is understood just because he's cited a lot? I think the answer to why he's cited often is obvious. Chomsky's cited often because his work--over 40 years--very nearly defines the field of contemporary linguistics, not only in its scientific ambitions and content; but even in the way it is viewed as relating to neighboring disciplines (what makes it exciting and important to nonlinguists); and even, most remarkably, in the way the field divides into competing theoretical approaches (was the REAL genius in "Remarks" or "Lectures"?--but this is Fritz Newmeyer's theme). So his work is cited within linguistics as a base on which to explain one's own ideas, and outside linguistics, as a representative of what's been defining and exciting in our field. Chomsky's cited as elegantly arguing for the important of mathematical foundations, and for concisely showing why they are irrelevant (in different intellectual contexts, to be sure). I even think that the undercurrent of animus I detect in some of the replies to Alexis's question is finally attributable to Chomsky's importance. We as linguists define our ideas in part via their relation to Chomsky's--and not only in order to ease their presentation, as suggested above. We do this also because we find it interesting and valuable to engage the ideas of the most important thinker in our field, and to dispute them. The recent very interesting exchange on this list between Helge Dyvik and others on whether linguistic rules should be viewed as norms was in part interesting because it turned up holes in the view of linguistics as an essentially psychological investigation--a view that's certainly inspired a great deal of useful research (even it turns out ultimately to be less than comprehensive), but a view, again, which Chomsky has most forcefully advanced. A metaremark: even if this is the most civilized net-list I've seen, still, it is a net-list, so I'll anticipate the ad hominem replies lot of us find ourselves involved in (like this one, yes). So: I've never met Chomsky, do not work directly in areas involving his current grammatical ideas, and had to go back 10 papers to find my last citation of Chomsky (two fairly tangential ones originating with a coauthor). --John NerbonneMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue