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man.ac.uk>Most of you out there who teach linguistics encounter students, perhaps one or two a year, sometimes more, sometimes less, who either excel at linguistics or are intent to pursue (post)graduate research in linguistics, or both. (And others of you reading this list are those students.) The discovery of these students is one of the most satisfying things in university teaching---after all, we were once those students, and they share our passion for our chosen field. But I have a moral dilemma in advising them about pursuing a linguistics research career. On the one hand, these students' inclinations and abilities mark them out as future linguists, and for the most part that is what they want to be. On the other hand, the current job market has been dreadful for the two decades I have been doing linguistics, and doesn't look like it is about to change. I have real ethical problems recommending students to devote several intense, poverty-stricken years to come out at the end with little if any prospect of a career---even for the best students. Another, morally problematic factor that we must consider is---to put it most frankly---self-interest, both short- term and long-term. In the short term, most of us are under pressure by our universities to admit more research graduate students; this is true in at least the US and the UK. If we don't, our departmental funding might be cut, our Ph.D. program (and their courses) may be eliminated, and perhaps our department (or our job) will be eliminated as well. These facts pressure us to encourage not-so-brilliant students who want to pursue an academic career, or brilliant students who haven't considered the option, to pursue PhD study, in order to keep our department an economically viable segment of the university. In the long term, these students are the future of our field, especially for those of us in less popular subfields. Discouraging them, or not encouraging them, may lead to the decline or even demise of our subfield, or even the field as a whole, and none of us wants that either. So my questions are: (1) What advice do you give to students in the following three categories? (a) an outstanding undergraduate student who wants to pursue a PhD in linguistics. (b) an outstanding undergraduate student who has not expressed an interest in pursuing a PhD in linguistics. (c) a good but not outstanding undergraduate student who wants to pursue a PhD in linguistics. [The advice I currently give is as follows: (a) I tell them what the job market is really like, and what academia is really like, and advise them that if they really love what they are doing and want to spend the next 4-6 years doing it with the real possibility of having to choose another career, they should go ahead. This pessimistic perspective has not stopped any of my students yet, incidentally. (b) If they have other career interests, I don't try to talk them into an academic career. (c) I give them the facts of academic life as for the (a) group, but I don't encourage them. However, I haven't actively discouraged them either.] (2) For those of you in small or "non-mainstream" areas of linguistics, what do you tell students in (1a)-(1c), including students who have started their PhD courses and say "I want to do [your subfield], but I don't know if it's worth it because there are no jobs in it". [I actually haven't had to give such advice because those who have come to me have been pretty firm about their interest in my subfield(s), but I've heard of others in this situation.] (3) Are there *sound* reasons for thinking the economic situation in higher education in the US and/or western Europe will change significantly for the better in the near future (i.e. by the time currently finishing undergraduates would receive a PhD)? [I should note that for 15 years now I have been reading that there will be a big improvement in the academic job market "just around the corner", and I'm still waiting.] I should make clear that I am referring to advising students about pursuing a PhD in linguistics. Advising students to take an undergraduate degree in linguistics is another story of course, and one that has already been discussed on this list on a number of occasions. I will summarize responses to the list (plus my assessment of whether I should change the advice I give). Bill CroftMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
las-inc.com>Question: I am looking for information regarding the sonority hierarchy. What I would like, ideally, is a table showing a specific value for each English phoneme rather than the broad grouped values I have access to now. The closest thing I have been able to find to what I am looking for so far is Elizabeth Selkirk's 1982 article entitled "On the Major Class Features and Syllable Theory" which appeared in a volume entitled _Language Sound Structure: Studies in Phonetics Presented to Morris Halle by his Teacher and Students_. In this article, Selkirk divides English phonemes into groups according to manner of articulation and voicing. Voiceless stops are the lowest in the hierarchy, carrying a value of 0.5. Voiced stops come next with a value of 1.0, and so on, with liquids and glides toward the higher end of the spectrum and with vowels appearing at the top. This is really good information. The only problem is that affricates and [sh] and certain other sounds are not included. Also, I believe that there must be data out there somewhere that presents a specific value for each sound rather than simply presenting broad values based on groups of sounds. For example, it is said that [sh] is more sonorant than [s] yet a grouping of all voiceless fricatives together into one group and assigning them all one value does not capture this fine distinction. Thanks for whatever information you can give me in terms of actual data or references. I understand that either Jakobsen and Halle's _Preliminaries to Speech Analysis_ (1952) or Bloch and Trager's _Outlines of Linguistic Analysis_ (1942) may have such information, but I have been unable to track down these sources as of yet. It may be that more modern equipment is able to measure the data more accurately, anyway, so I would prefer to have access to something fairly recent if it's available. Incidentally, similar information in the form of a chart or table for any other languages (especially Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese) would be very helpful, as well. Thanks in advance, David Harris dharrisMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue