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Re: SIL (was: A project)

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Sunday, September 16, 2001, 22:49
Jesse Bangs wrote:
>> D. At least in the olden days, SIL was wedded to Kenneth Pike's >> Tagmemic theory, resulting in a lot of their publications being >> incomprehensible to present-day linguists. > >What in the world is Tagmemic theory?
My point exactly :-). Essentially it arose out of Bloomfieldian structuralism, but with Pike's unique twists. Beyond that, deponent saith not; I am a rare product of that era at Michigan, who never took a course with Pike. To be fair, early transformational grammars of this-or-that language, based on a "Syntactic Structures" model, or even an "Aspects" model, probably now stike us as equally quaint.
> >> To be fair, I've seen >> fairly recent work that is more up-to-date, but still idiosyncratic. >> They tend to be good at old-fashioned phonemics with a hint of >> generativism; don't know about OT. > >Isn't this good for what they're trying to do, though? Their job is to >document and translate previously unrecorded (or poorly recorded) >languages, and phonemics is a good way to give a base description which >future theorists can tear apart at will. It seems to me that giving a >broad, comprehensive description of a language will be a lot easier with >the well-established (if slightly outdated) theories of phonemics than >with the uncertain, changeable theories of OT.
Absolutely, yes.