The Scope of American Linguistics

213 Pages·16.353 MB·English

by  Robert Austerlitz

THE SCOPE OF
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Papers of
The First Golden Anniversary Symposium
of the Linguistic Society of America,
Held at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
on July 24 and 25, 1974
Edited by ROBERT AUSTERLITZ
LISSE
THE PETER DE RIDDER PRESS
1975
© Copyright reserved
No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint,
microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the author.
Printed in Belgium by NICI, Ghent
CONTENTS
EINAR HAUGEN
Introductory Remarks: The First Golden Anniversary Sympo-
sium 5
KENNETH L. PIKE
On Describing Languages 9
W. P. LEHMANN
The Challenge of History 41
RAIMO ANTTILA
Comments on K. L. Pike's and W. P. Lehmann's Papers . .. 59
CHARLES A. FERGUSON
Applications of Linguistics 63
WILLIAM LABOV
Empirical Foundations of Linguistic Theory 77
CHARLES J. FILLMORE
The Future of Semantics 135
NOAM CHOMSKY
Questions of Form and Interpretation 159
BARBARA HALL PARTEE
Comments on C. J. Fillmore's and N. Chomsky's Papers . . 197
Editor's Statement 210

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS:
THE FIRST
GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY SYMPOSIUM
EINAR HAUGEN
Friends, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen: My role in this meeting is
purely honorific, and I shall make it as painless as possible. I am here as
chairman of a Committee on the Golden Anniversary of the Linguistic
Society of America, which was appointed in 1971 by Charles A. Ferguson,
then president of the Society.
Anniversaries are purely arbitrary gateposts that we set up on our
way, and should properly be presided over by the Roman god of en-
trances, Janus, with his two faces. One face looks back to the past,
asking what the road was like that we as linguists and a linguistic society
have traversed; the other face looks forward to the future, asking where
we are going and what the goals of our society should be. Only by looking
both forward and backward can we tell where we are, and perhaps
whether we are where we ought to be.
In any such rite de passage we must distinguish clearly between the
Linguistic Society as a body of scholars and Linguistics as a body of
scholarship. Linguistics in America did not begin in 1924, and it would
not end if the Linguistic Society should disband tomorrow. Young
people are understandably impatient with the mechanics of organization,
and for such impatience there is no cure but time and experience. We
have set aside just one evening for the Society itself, probably December
27, when past and present secretaries will reminisce as informally as
possible about the problems and pleasures involved in keeping this
society going over the past fifty years. As everyone knows, presidents
come and go, but the secretary-treasurer is the kingpin around whom
everything turns.
Most of the plans made for the Golden Anniversary, however, go
beyond the Society itself to the field for which it was organized. We want
the occasion to be not merely reminiscent or self-congratulatory, but also
a probe in depth of the state of American linguistics and a boost to its
onward progress. As the program in your hands indicates, we have
6 EINAR HAUGEN
planned three scientific symposia. Please do not imagine that these are
just so many arbitrary occasions. They are a closely interlocking set of
explorations, from which we may hopefully gain enlightenment as well
as inspiration. The tripartite organization permits a kind of triangulation,
in which each symposium zeroes in one one aspect of American lin-
guistics.
Our first symposium, here in Amherst, looks at the scope of American
linguistic theorizing, from structuralism to transformationalism to
sociolinguistics. Our second symposium, under the chairmanship of
Wallace Chafe, will be held in Berkeley on November 8 and 9, focussing
on that inexhaustible pool of linguistic data which is unique to America,
the languages of our aboriginal population of Indians and Eskimos.
Our third symposium, chaired by Henry Hoenigswald, will be held on
December 28, at New York, and deal with "the European background
of American Linguistics". This is just a way of saying that it will consider
American linguistics in its wider context as part of the western tradition
in linguistic science, from Panini to the present. In the interaction of
Europeans and Americans within a common scientific enterprise it would
be hard to say which is background and which is foreground.
In designing these symposia within the general theme of "American
Linguistics - Past, Present, and Future" each chairman has had a free
hand in the selection of participants, giving us a remarkable representa-
tion from the active scholars of our time. But we also look forward to the
contributions of the audience, by your presence as well as your contribu-
tion, and beyond that to the publications that we expect will result, as a
tribute to the Linguistic Society of America and a part of its golden
harvest.
The President of the Society has received a letter of congratulations
which I feel is worthy of bringing to all of you as a tribute to the last
fifty years of the Linguistic Society of America:
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 7
Instituto de Idiomas Yázici
Centro de Lingüística Aplicada (Founded March 3, 1966)
Diretoria
Sao Paulo, June 29 1974
Dr. Morris Halle
President
The Linguistic Society of America
Department of Linguistics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
U.S.A.
Dear Dr. Halle:
May we, on behalf of this Center's staff, extend our most cordial greetings
to you as well as to all of LSA's Officers, Committee Members, Regular and
Life Members on the auspicious occasion of the Golden Anniversary of an
organization which, besides rendering outstanding services to its membership
throughout a half-century, has proven to be inspirational to the dissemination
and progress of the language sciences beyond the frontiers of the United States.
The Linguistic Society of America, among its manifold achievements, has
helped universalize linguistic thought. Congratulations.
Sincerely yours,
[signed]
Prof. Dr. Francisco Gomes de Matos
Director
Centro de Lingüística Aplicada
Finally, it remains only to present to you the chairman of the first
symposium, Robert Austerlitz, professor of Linguistics and Uralic
Studies at Columbia University. Though his specialty is Uralic, he
speaks virtually any language and always with a special twist of wit and
good humor.

ON DESCRIBING LANGUAGES
KENNETH L. PIKE
ABSTRACT
First are listed some developments of the past decade of special interest to this author.
For practical phonetics, the contrastive status of fronting of the root of the tongue;
for classical phonemeics, the postulation of phoneme of process ('downstep') to
accompany phonemes of item ('segments') and of relation ('tone'), in a theory of
particle, wave, and field; for classical morphology, the semantics of a system for
handling overlapping blocks of formatives, rather than classical morphemes, where
no simple segmentation is elegant (but where historical reconstruction of the shape
of the blocks seems possible, even when phonological relation is obscured). For any
one perspective, how have criteria changed over time, to convince one that he is
right: historical, structural, heuristic, generative?
Next, some items currently under development in tagmemic theory are mentioned.
The grammatical hierarchy is divided into pairs of form-meaning composites. A
tagmeme on any level is seen as an intersection of function and filler, with form
(arrangement) and meaning (situation) leading to slot, class, role ('case') and category.
These structures comprise the nodes of a grammatical tree. The crisscrossing of rule
and class is shown for the sentence nucleus. Then is given a report of search for
grammatical structure above the sentence by means of experimental syntax - the
deformation and re-formation of stories, paragraphs, and sentences.
Finally, in respect to the near future, mention is made not only of describing lan-
guages by mathematics, but also of describing mathematics by linguistics, via tag-
memics. This leads to the use of the relation between mathematics and physics as an
analogue of various approaches to linguistic description, and to particularization
versus generalization. The four-cell notation for the grammatical tagmeme is extended
to the phonological one, and to a proposed semantic tagmeme, in a single total design.
And non-verbal behavior is shown as having language-like characteristics of wave
segments and smearing - showing that non-verbal and verbal descriptions must be
theoretically integrated.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Linguistic Society
of America, it is a privilege which I value highly to be able to acknowl-
edge my personal indebtedness to the founders of the Society. Three
of them - Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, and Charles Fries -
taught me, encouraged me, and demonstrated a pattern of character of
gentleness and human dignity which I have long sought to emulate but