Re: CHAT: Back on the list; Anti-conlanging bigots

Quoting Matthew Pearson <Matthew.Pearson@...>:

> I hope you don't take this episode as indicative of the feelings of
> generative syntacticians in general. The vast majority of us aren't
> nearly that uptight, and I know of no "marked hostility to conlanging"
> in my field. Sure, there are linguists who treat conlanging as an
> amusing and inconsequential game--but that kind of patronising attitude
> is hardly confined to linguists, nor is it characteristic of the
> discipline, at least in my experience.
Well, I didn't mean to suggest that any hostility was exclusive to
syntacticians.  My experience may be somewhat different than yours,
but I have met a lot of hostility from people in a variety of fields
in linguistics, although it's certainly true, as you point out, that
that's not confined to linguistics.  If anything it's a human failing
in dealing with something you don't understand, but in linguistics,
it may become amplified because the people who really care about
linguistics might tend to define their lives around what they conceive
it to be.

> On another note, I'm somewhat suprised to hear that you're getting
> 'orthodox' generativism in your syntax class at the University of
> Chicago. I tend to associate Chicago with Michael Silverstein and the
> Functionalist crowd.
Well, there've been problems in the department recently, many of
which were health related.  One of our major syntacticians had a
heart attack and died recently, and then our phoneticist, Karen
Landahl, developed tongue cancer. That's an especially horrible
and ironic event to befall a phoneticist because she had to have
her tongue removed, which naturally makes it impossible to teach.
Because of these kinds of problems, the department has had to
hire a lot of new people, which may mean that the need for a good
teacher, the hiring committee felt, was more important than
maintaining Chicago's heterodox tendencies.

As for myself, I can't claim to know enough about the theories
to have a really strong feeling one way or the other.  I'm
interested in taking Jerry Sadock's class on Autolexical theory,
but from what I gather, that has serious problems as well (it's
too powerful and doesn't have enough constraints on its use).

>(The taking-oneself-too-seriously part doesn't surprise
> me, though...)
I think a lot of people at UT had that problem too.  The only
person I can say for certain didn't was Robert King, who liked
to say that if we assert the wrong theory or posit a wrong etymology,
buildings are not going to collapse and people are not going to die.
I once repeated this to another member of the faculty there who
politely rebuffed me by saying effectively that truth does matter,
to which I equally politely blinked and nodded my head.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>
                     "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers