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watarts.uwaterloo.ca>I am gratefully ambivalent about being the opening target for the Book Discussion on LINGUIST (4.644, and 4.649), and would prefer eavesdropping on the conversation over elbowing in, but some comments by John Lawler and Stephen Murray require a response. I'll address each in turn, quoting where necessary. ---------------- Lawler Since his words are very generous, and since there is only one response to generosity, the bulk of his commentary calls only for "thank you." He was, however, annoyed by the notes and the index (and Murray shared both annoyances): >It must be said, however, for the benefit of those who are interested in >looking up themselves and their friends and enemies, that the book's >index is, alas, incomplete, in that it covers the extensive footnotes >only sketchily. In addition, most irritatingly, and unnecessarily so in >a book produced and published by electronic means, all of these foot- >notes are placed at the end of the book instead of on the page where >they refer. Most unfortunately, I have to agree with his assessment of the index. Oxford contracted the job out, and the person they hired did a really splendid job--plenty of detail, lots of cross-references, all of the major topics, people, and technicalities covered--with the very glaring, and galling, exception of completely excluding the endmatter. I caught this in the proofs, and the production was held up a month and a half while she was allegedly fixing this problem. But she did a very sketchy job, and the release couldn't be delayed any longer, and the notes are very poorly covered in the index. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience this causes, particularly as a good deal of the technical discussion, and much name dropping of potential friends and enemies, is in the notes. (There are some other small problems with the text, mostly concerning layout, but Oxford generally did very well by me, except for this one rather serious failing.) On the notes, however, I'm afraid I don't share Lawler's dissatisfaction. I intended this book to be interesting and informative for linguists and historians of linguistics, but I also want it to be accessible to non-linguists. It is meant to be a book of "popular science," to sit with generalist books about quantum mechanics and selfish genes and chaos theory. Notes (some of mine are several pages long and quite dense with references) at the bottom of the page might have been a little forbidding. One of the reading options for the book is notes-free. ---------------- Murray I'm glad Murray was entertained and felt that the central focus of the book (the life cycle of generative semantics and its implications for current work) was "even handed." But the bulk of his remarks are devoted to negative criticisms of parts that he terms "peripheral." It is perhaps somewhat small of me to take up cudgels for the periphery of the book (and Murray's adjective is accurate), but Murray implies that those criticisms bode ominous for the rest of the text. Since he knows those issues well, and finds me so out-to-lunch about them, maybe I'm out to lunch about the issues he doesn't know well, maybe I only *seem* to be even handed about generative semantics and its period. >I want to write a positive review of Randy Harris's often-entertaining >Linguistic Wars, but (unlike John Lawler) the parts I know about independently >from Harris's representations don't inspire confidence. Let's look at a few of those parts (WARNING: the following has a high tedium factor; skip if easily bored, or uneasily bored). Here is what Murray says about my use of the notorious Joos passage on languages varying without limits (which Chomsky took to represent "taxonomist" practices generally in his 1962 ICL assault on his predecessors): >Like Chomsky, Harris is >willing to quote as someone's position what the author was writing about as >someone else's, e.g., the infamous Joos (1957:96) varying without limits in any >direction statement. It is probably true that Chomskians thought that was a >Bloomfieldian tenet expressed by Joos, although it was Joos's (I think apt) >characterization of Boasians (and in a text where Joos rejects the label >"structure" in favor of "description"). Murray was good enough to give me some very extensive, and very useful, comments on two earlier versions of the book, and we have corresponded (congenially) for some time about issues concerning them. We talked about the Joos quotation at some length, beginning with his accusation that I repeated what he takes to be Newmeyer's sin of quoting Joos out of context. Newmeyer can defend himself (and has; see his exchange with Murray in the pages of _Historiographia Linguistica_ 8:107-11, 9:185-7). For my part, the text (p.64) is I think quite clear that I am paraphrasing Chomsky's use of the quotation, not using it myself to indict the anyone. Further, the quotation is preceded by the comment that pre-Chomskyans *were* interested in universals. Further yet, the quotation has the following note attached to it: Joos here is paraphrasing what he sees as the Boasian tradition, not taking the tradition to its extreme himself. ... (p.271n22) Somehow Murray missed this note (both passages, by the way, are indexed), but I trust that more responsible readers won't be so hasty to tar it as misrepresentation. On an offhand remark I made (evidently more than once) about Sapir, Murray complains (using it as another example of a part where I am misguided): >Or that Sapir was not the sort to sponsor a school (repeated). I think that I >have documented that he tried plenty, but World War I blocked his Canadian >efforts and the Depression his American ones. His failures don't establish that >he wasn't the sort. This is another matter we discussed, and it seems just to be problem with the construal of "sort". My remark isn't supposed to imply that Sapir didn't *try* to sponsor a school (though I am mute on this question, and I probably should have cited Murray, or Darnell's biography here). But Sapir's much less methodical approach (than Bloomfield's) made his work very difficult to emulate. The context of the first not-the-sort mention (p.21), at least, should make this clear. I repeat it (featuring a reappearance from Martin Joos): But he was not, even though there were linguists sometimes known as _Sapirians_ into the forties and fifties, the sort to sponsor a school; Joos (1957:25) cites him not for "the developing of any method, but rather the establishing of a charter for the free intellectual play of personalities more or less akin to his own," and, in fact, Joos wags his finger a bit at "the essential irresponsibility of what has been called Sapir's 'method'." Sapirians (almost entirely comprised of Sapir's students) were distinguished mostly by their unorthodox interest in the mental life of language, for a certain methodological elasticism and for their occasional critiques of the orthodoxy, not for a specific body of unique postulates and principles. (p.21) Another Murray grievance: >Or that Pike and tagmemics (and stratificational grammar) are entirely >missing from the account, as if no attempts were made to develop Bloomfieldianism and its environs are *not* my story. I try to give a relatively full picture of pre-Chomskyan work, but it is still only background. Pike, tagmemics, and stratificational grammar (along with later developments, like GPSG, LFG, Montague Grammar, Functional Grammar, and much else that I necessarily slight) would have taken me way too far afield. The most serious part of Murray's remarks for me, though probably the most trivial for others is the personal offence he took at my recounting of a rather typical academic incident, in which I was asked to write a review, which was then rejected, partly on Murray's recommendation. (I know this seems like a pretty petty thing to include in a book; but, trust me, it serves a point.) >Personally disturbing to me is the implication (256, 308n20) that I recommended >not publishing his review in Historiographia Linguistica because it was too >pro-Chomsky (and that I want Chomsky dead!). From his review it appeared that This response is already very long, so I won't quote the offending passages, but I do recommend reading them (and, for that matter, almost anything of Murray's that concerns Chomsky) before taking Murray's outrage too seriously. Certainly, I don't say that Murray has tried to poison Chomsky's tea, or sent him a letter bomb, or anything of that sort. He did recommend my review (of George, 1989) not be published, and he did snarl about my supposedly pro-Chomskyan comments. The complaint continues: >As for the reference to my work in Harris's review "complicating matters," I >objected to the choice of verb "vilify" in regards to my review of Newmeyer and >suggested several possible substitutes (like "excoriate") that are far from >bland. Harris contended that "vilify" does not connote "slander," so presumably These remarks will probably be mystifying to anyone who has read the offending passages, and even to anyone with the patience to ferret out the review in question, since there is no reference at all to Murray or his critique of Newmeyer in the published review. In any case, by "complicating matters" I meant only that the editor's (Konrad Koerner's) choice of Murray to referee the review seemed calculated for rejection, since (in the draft Murray saw) I said that Newmeyer (1980) "was vilified" by Murray. Just a little more: >this had nothing to do with recommending rejection of Harris's review. The book >and review were outside the journal's field and Konrad Koerner got it placed in >a more appropriate venue (Word). Koerner invited me to review the book, and when he subsequently rejected it, largely for what he took to be its uncritically pro-Chomskyan stance, he recommended I try _Word_. I did, and it was taken, but I didn't regard this as "placing" the review. Koerner has subsequently told me that he wrote a letter to Sheila Embleton, the book review editor for _Word_, recommending she take the review. I appreciate the recommendation. In a personal note to me, Murray has also objected that I (and, long before, Koerner) revealed his identity as the referee, suggesting that the appropriate ethical conduct would have been to clear permission to attribute from what was supposed to be a privileged reviewer-to-editor communication. I apologize here publicly (as I have privately) for taking the liberty, but I really didn't anticipate a problem. Murray and I had aired these issues enough in our correspondence, and he is not shy about owning up to his words, so I didn't foresee an objection, and, more generally, I'm opposed to anonymous reviews. I think criticisms should circulate freely and openly, with all labels attached, as they are, now, on LINGUIST. My apologies also for the length of this response, but then you didn't read it all anyway, did you? ---------------- References George, Alexander, editor. 1989. _Reflections on Chomsky_. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Harris, Randy Allen. 1991. Review of George (1989). _Word_ 42:327-35. Joos, Martin. 1957. _Readings in linguistics_. Washingon: American Council of Learned Societies. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1980. _Linguistic Theory in America_. New York: Academic Press. (Second edition, 1986.) Murray, Stephen O. 1981. Review of Newmeyer (1980). _Historographia Linguistica_ 8:107-11. (Newmeyer's response, followed by a reply from Murray, is in _HL_ 9:185-87.) 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