I love reading books that fill in enormous gaps in my
knowledge and provoke more questions, provided, of course, that they are
well-written. The book The Linguistic Wars by Randy Allen
Harris was published in 1993, so a large gap remains. However, the two transformational grammar
classes I took in the ‘70s and the one in grad school nine years ago failed to
communicate the dynamism in the field, the sectarian warfare between, first,
Noam Chomsky and his predecessors, linguists influenced by Leonard Bloomfield,
and, second, between Chomsky and his students, who wanted to take his syntactic
structures into the turbulent world of meaning.
I became a high school history teacher because I discovered
in high school that historians fiercely argued with one another. My college linguistics teachers did a
disservice to me and the field by pretending that deep structure and
transformations were settled matters.
Allen tells the story of internecine warfare brilliantly, with a lively style and explanation of the technical issues that illuminate without recourse to my old textbooks. He adeptly draws the personalities involved, reminding me of my beloved Civil War histories, replete with depictions of generals blue and gray that seemed larger than life. There is no Rosecrans, though—this is a story of generals who love a fight. In keeping with Montaigne’s view that conversation, as a battle, burnishes our ideas and gets us closer to the truth (or, perhaps, further from error), Allen concludes that the in-fighting was useful: “Rhetoric is extremely productive” (252). Later, he quotes John Stuart Mill, who shares Montaigne’s military analogy: “Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field” (259).
George Lakoff, one of Chomsky’s enemies in the field, went
on to write books that helped birth cognitive grammar. In Metaphors
We Live By, he proposes (with Mark Johnson) that the argument as battle is
a paradigm for how we think in clusters of metaphors. My students, on reading an excerpt of
Montaigne’s “On the Art of Conversation,” often shy away from the combat
conception, but if you like science war stories (cf. The Double-Helix), Allen’s book shows how the battle over
linguistic models might be considered paradigmatic for science.
A short stroll through a more recent collection of essays on
cognitive grammar reveals that consensus is just as unrealized now as it was in
the early 1990s, which Allen summarizes in his last chapter. Relational grammar, corpus linguistics,
construction grammar, radical construction grammar, frame semantics, conceptual
metaphor theory, Langacker’s grammar, and apparently many other conceptions of
what to study and how each works occupy researchers these days. Domain boundaries seem fluid, with
philosophers, linguists, cognitive psychologists, and rhetoricians cooperating
and contesting. It seems the notions of
“deep structure” and “surface structure,” even rule-bound generative grammar
itself, are out.
The linguistic bee hive speaks to the arena’s continual
dynamism, but also to the feeling among English teachers that, as interesting
as it all is, it may be, for us, beside the point.
Resources
Broccias,
Christiano. “Cognitive Approaches to
Grammar.” Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications
and Future Perspectives. Ed. Gitte
Kristiansen, et al. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006.
Harris, Randy Allen. The Linguistic Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
Caesars Casino and Racetrack – 2021 New Jersey Gambling
ReplyDeleteCaesars Resort Casino & worrione Racetrack is the poormansguidetocasinogambling.com latest casino in New Jersey to undergo a deccasino comprehensive https://febcasino.com/review/merit-casino/ safety review. The ventureberg.com/ casino is owned by Caesars