thomas leverett weblog

New Year's resolution

I have a lot going on in my life: I've started peddling my own books, and writing four or five of them a year; I am still tutoring for Texas Tech, although that has died down a little; I am raising three teenagers, having just sent another off to college at New Mexico State (requiring occasional drives across the White Sands and Tularosa Basin), and we're basically still trying to maintain a kind of rural outpost where my wife can ride horses and I can look several directions without seeing anyone or anything but pine trees and mountains.

But I still have my eye on linguistics, because I feel my purpose in life is not complete until I address one major question. the world of linguistics is still relying on Chomskian universals, even though nobody has come up with any, except for recursion, which is a kind of nebulous idea that I don't quite buy. In other words, now that universalism is reduced to claiming that recursion is the main thing that sets us apart from animals, and makes our languages more complex (read: better?), we have a system that is based on a number of false precepts. Besides, and this is what I've said all along, we don't know anything about animal languages, or alien ones for that matter. How do we know if they have recursion? And what is it about recursion that makes it a masterful enough stroke of genius that it moves us up as a species into a class of our own? I just don't buy it.

What I'm saying is that linguistics at this point is like a glass castle. Once they start in on morphology, phonology, and semantics, they know what they're talking about, but when they start out, the first two weeks, with this universalism and recursion kind of stuff, I think they're learning to skip over it real fast before people start asking questions. And when I look back at my linguistics training, I find that I'm still asking those questions and not getting good answers.

To get back to my New Year's resolution, it is, to put it bluntly, to set the record straight. I hope to finish my book this year, and when I do, you will be the first to know. If Chomskian linguistics is a glass castle, it's time to build a realistic framework from which people can study the science of language. Let's let go of the "language acquisition device" until we find a device that actually teaches people language. Let's let go of "restrictions" that are supposedly genetic, that just tell you that you can't use a noun this way or that way. The genetic world does not go around making pointless restrictions; it doesn't do that with blue eyes or five fingers, so why should it do that with language? If you are trying to describe nature and natural actions scientifically let's start with what we know about human behavior and then say that language is a phenomenon that fits into human behavior as we know it. And there is order in this world, I swear to it. It's my resolution to show it to you.

Labels: chomsky, language, linguistics, personal, self-organized systems

posted by tom @ 9:24 PM