LINGUIST List 5.312

Mon 21 Mar 1994

Disc: Mainstream Linguistics

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1. Megan Crowhurst, Canadian
2. , Mainstream linguistics
3. Anjum Saleemi, Re: 5.309 Mainstream Linguistics

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On the topic of hiring discrimination in Canadian universities, Pat
McConvell comments:

> Re Ian MacKay's comments about Canada's government policy on university
> jobs, I understand and sympathise with Canada's problem with their near
> and powerful neighbour

The policy under discussion extends far beyond jobs in Canadian universities.
(It seems silly to have to point out, in case it hasn't already been, that the
USA has a policy similar to Canada's: For an "alien" to be hired in the
public or private sector in the USA, the law requires a demonstration that no
available American can do the job.)

> In fact the policy discriminates not just against
> US linguists but Australians, Zambians whoever. One might argue that
> free interchange of people and ideas around the world is being inhibited.

One might also consider another of Ian MacKay's comments: The Canadian
government's requirement is routinely circumvented by Canadian universities.
Departments I know well in Canada (linguistic and otherwise) tend to be at
least as international as departments in the USA. Despite the government's
protectionist policies, I seriously doubt that "free interchange of people
and ideas", at least in Canada, "is being inhibited".

Many nations have policies limiting the ability of nonresidents to be
employed. There are practical reasons for these policies. The *Canadian*
policy has apparently been singled out as one which impinges on academic
freedom. This allegation would be contradicted by any informed evaluation
of hiring practices at Canadian universities. Therefore, what is the true
purpose of this discussion? Does Pesetsky's flippant remark triggering
this strand really warrant further attention?

Megan Crowhurst
Yale University

Here's a different perspective on this issue.

One reason why GB linguistics is perceived as the mainstream is that the
competitors tend to move out of linguistics.

The history of Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) is interesting in
this respect. Seven or eight years ago at a meeting of the Linguistics
Association of Great Britain (LAGB), a GB enthusiast greeted me with the
words: "Welcome to the GPSG convention." At the time this was an accurate
comment. Many of the papers were about GPSG, some of the old-timers in British
linguistics were praising GPSG as a return to common sense, and the occasional
GB presentation sounded rather like a visitor from another planet had dropped
in.

It now appears that GPSG is no longer so dominant in this country. GB is
flourishing in several places, and the journals are tending to reflect this.
The GPSG advocates rarely produce papers now developing the theory, or even
assuming it. GPSG always had strong links with computational linguistics, and
many of the key GPSG people from the early days are now doing more computing
and less linguistics.

The same kind of thing happened with Generative Semantics. Its main advocates
either moved into adjacent fields (G. Lakoff), came to eschew theory entirely
(McCawley, Ross) or snipe from the computational sidelines (Postal). These are
not meant as putdowns but as statements of fact. All those named have
continued to do important work - but not as part of a coherent school.

If this is an accurate picture, the interesting question is why it has
happened? Why do developments round Chomsky keep going straight ahead while
the others break up into fragments?

One possible answer is that theoretical linguistics is only viable if it has a
strong foundation which reassures its devotees that they are doing something
important. The GB framework provides this with the assumption that by doing
this kind of linguistics, scholars are finding things about the structure of
the human mind. If there are profound and important principles waiting to be
discovered about how the human organism works, this provides linguistics with
a deeper purpose.

This is not meant as a caricature. Because of these shared assumptions, GB
workers can create a strong and supportive research community with productive
debate and a constant sense of progress being made.

It may be, then, that quite apart from whether GB assumptions are empirically
defensible, they supply the only basis for a lasting research paradigm within
linguistics. Other approaches simply don't have the sustaining power. It is
noteworthy that the two dominant schools in France (to a lesser extent,
Canada), namely Guillaumian PSYCHOMECHANICS and Culioli's OPERATIONS
ENONCIATIVES, both rest on similar assumptions that there are deep principles
to be found which tie language in with human psychology.

What do people think of this picture? Is it accurate?

Raphael Salkie,
The Language Centre,
University of Brighton,
Falmer, Brighton,
BN1 9PH England

Tel: (0273) 643335 (direct line); (0273) 643337 (Language Centre Office).
Fax: (0273) 690710
Email: RMS3UK.AC.BRIGHTON.VMS

Message 3: Re: 5.309 Mainstream Linguistics

Dear colleagues:

I think one of the major problems in the current debate about
mainstream linguistics is that several (related) issues are
simply being conflated, with the resulting lack of focus
engendering unnessary hostility and preventing a possibly useful
exchange of views. Let me make an effort to identify the main
issues, as I perceive them.

 (a) Can the GB-type framework be demonstrated to be better
(in an intellectual sense) than other generative and non-
generative frameworks?
 (b) Is GB (in some sense) the dominant framework?
 (c) If GB is indeed dominant, then are the reasons for its
success academic (qualitative superiority, greater
insightfulness) non-academic (sociological, political), or some
combination of these two?
 (d) Is it really true that most of the (good) jobs are taken
by GB-type linguists?
 (e) If the answer to (d) is in the affirmative, then is that
so because GB is a better framework (see (a) above), or because
of the non-academic factors.

It seems obvious to me that the fundamental academic issue here
is (a). Further, it is evident that a large number of linguists
(even many of those who by no means represent or belong to the
inner circle of the GB community) are convinced that a GB-type
approach is in fact far more insightful than various others that
are presently available. Although communication across
frameworks is notoriously hard, (a) is an issue linguists should
be able to debate effectively, perhaps even productively.

 In regard to issues of the kind represented by (b-e), I
suspect the picture is extremely murky, heterogeneous and complex
(even more so if one were to take a global, rather than a merely
North American or European, perspective). For intance, decisions
to hire faculty, to allow publication in prestigious journals,
to review books, to cite someone's research, etc., may be (and
are) influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by a variety of
factors, which can be educational (training background),
geographical (the country of origin, training, employment, etc.),
sociological-political (affiliation with an informal network,
hobnobbing with the right people), as well as academic (quality
of work, theoretical persuasion). To the extent that the
decisions in question are determined by factors related to (a),
the issues (b-e) can be reduced to (a). As regards the influence
of other factors, there are a number of open questions that can
be discussed with some degree of success, but the discussants
will have to be fairly objective and open-minded to be able to
engage in useful political discourse.

 There is one point which has emerged during the discussion
so far which I think should interest Chomsky as a political
writer (if not as a linguist), and which perhaps may not greatly
interest some others who merely share with him an approach to
doing linguistics. As an avid reader of his political as well
as linguistic writings, I feel that the situation the less
dominant linguistic frameworks consider themselves to be in could
be taken to pose a kind of moral and intellectual dilemma for
Chomsky as an outspoken critic of power and privilege, and of any
attempts by an elite controlling the centre (of power,
intellectual thought, etc.) to marginalize those who lurk around
the periphery. The obvious potential irony appears to be that
whereas Chomsky's politics is peripheral, his linguistics is not.
Moreover, for good or worse, linguistics remains a pluralistic
field, and as in many people's view no approach or framework has
yet been decisively proven to be better than the rest, the
currently dominant approach is inevitably going to affect the
lives of those who (rightly or wrongly, but one presumes on
rational grounds) choose to operate within the less dominant
ones. As someone who appreciates Chomsky's linguistics as well
as his politics, I'd like to know if there is any soltion to
"Chomsky's problem", which is a name I suppose one can use to
refer to the dilemma described in this paragraph.

Anjum P. Saleemi
Dept. of English Language & Literature
National University of Singapore