In this interview, we talk to Beijia Chen about the citation networks binding the Neogrammarians as a school.

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In this interview, we talk to Ian Stewart about modern ideas surrounding the Celts and how these relate to historical-comparative linguistics.

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JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:21] Today we’re talking to Ian Stewart, who’s a historian of Britain and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries and a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. [00:32] Ian’s latest book, The Celts: A Modern History, is coming out in March 2025 with Princeton University Press. [00:42] In this book, Ian offers a path-breaking, and at the same time magisterial, account of how the modern notion of the Celtic nations took shape. [00:51] Linguistic evidence and theorizing, as Ian shows in his book, played no small part in these developments. [00:58] Ian’s also looked at the early history of historical-comparative linguistics in Britain and suggested some key revisions to the standard narrative of how this field took root there. [01:10] The stories of the modern notion of the Celts and of early historical-comparative linguistics in Britain have many points of contact, and this is what Ian will be talking to us about today. [01:21] So, Ian, who are the Celts? [01:23] What was the significance of identifying the so-called Celtic nations in the modern period? [01:30]

IS: Hi, James. [01:32] As you know, I’m a big fan of the podcast, and so it’s really exciting to be here. [01:36] Who are the Celts? [01:38] Well, that depends on who you ask and when. [01:42] It’s a question that’s been asked in many different ways over the last two and a half thousand years, at least. [01:48] To begin with, the Celts are a people who started to be mentioned in classical sources in about 500 BCE. [01:56] Herodotus, for example, refers to them as a people living somewhere in Western Europe. [02:02] In the 4th century BCE, people like Plato and Aristotle refer to them as a warlike people. [02:07] This is especially after a Celtic group sacked Rome in about 387 BCE, and then 100 years later, another group invaded the Balkans. [02:18] And so, you see, the Celts remained the steady presence as a bellicose people somewhere in Europe, but they became sort of less feared as the Romans grew in power. [02:30] Caesar’s famous Gallic Wars, obviously written in the middle of the 1st century BCE, is about the conquest of Gaul, one of whose parts is called Celtica. [02:40] And so, as we move into the first few centuries of the Common Era, references to the Celts start to become fewer, and by 500 CE, you know, they stop altogether. [02:49] So, to sum up, basically, from the classical sources, the Celts are a barbarian people who were fearsome enemies, with their own complicated social, cultural, and religious structures, who feature strongly in the literary record between about 500 BCE and 500 CE. [03:08] The details about this group, or groups, are really hazy. [03:12] They’ve been argued about in all sorts of different ways. [03:15] We don’t know, you know, how much sort of common identification among groups there was, but what we can basically say is that there were people speaking Celtic languages in most of Western and Central Europe, including Britain and Ireland, modern France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Central Europe, Southern Germany, and as far east as Anatolia. [03:38] And so even though the Celts didn’t have their own literary cultures, and even though the historical record left by classical writers is pretty imperfect, the Celts left behind all sorts of evidence — including linguistic evidence, as you alluded to — that later scholars would make use of to construct this picture that we now have. [03:56] Now, why they become important in the modern period is, basically, they become rediscovered during the Renaissance [04:04] — when the predominant approach to history was genealogical, and the origins of nations, regions, cities, dynasties, all sorts of institutions, take on huge importance in establishing legitimacy — [04:19] and so scholars devoted considerable energy in tracing the migrations and conquests of ancient peoples [04:26] in order to give their own nation, or whoever they were writing for, a prestigious pedigree. [04:32] And basically, because of what I just mentioned about their extensive presence in the classical sources, and through their close association with the Gauls especially, the Celts retained this important place in the historical imagination. [04:45] So basically, from the early modern period, it’s off to the races, and they become claimed as prestigious ancestors in all of the countries I mentioned. [04:56] And so, my book is basically about this Celticism, which is basically why people in different places around Europe, from the early modern era to the present, have answered the question, who are the Celts and the way that they did, usually in favor of their own nation. [05:12] They’re usually trying to claim the Celts as their particular special ancestor, and the wranglings over the Celts basically change… [05:23] I sort of say that they’re determined by… basically, that these pictures of national images of ancestry change as a result of scholarly imperatives, but also political imperatives. [05:35] So it’s not just that nations are invented from scratch. [05:39] You know, in the modern period, as some of the literature, some of the classical literature — you know, classical in terms of history of modern nations and nationalism — basically, nation builders work with materials at hand. [05:50] But at the same time, scholars are often nation builders, and their political commitments shape their scholarship. [05:56]

JMc: And why is genealogy the dominant model for nation building in this period? [06:02] Why is the key thing to trace your nation back to a particular set of ancestors? [06:08]

IS: Basically, I think it’s a pretty simple equation that primacy was really important, so being the first people somewhere, having had, you know, the most extensive territory or the most glorious conquest. [06:25] And so basically, pedigree meant prestige, and we have to remember that before the rise of modern scholarship, you know, before modern historical linguistics, archaeology, folklore I suppose, and things like that, you’re basically working with the classical sources, [06:43] and so if a people is mentioned extensively in the classical sources, like the Celts are, there’s a lot more you can do with that. [06:50]

JMc: So you mentioned that the Celts left behind a certain amount of linguistic evidence. [06:55] How much of a role did this linguistic evidence play in the modern project of constructing Celtic identity, and was it the main kind of evidence, or was archaeological evidence just as important, for example? [07:09]

IS: Things change over time, but I would argue that language has been the most important and consistent thread in tracing the history of the Celts over the last five centuries. [07:20] Basically, linguistics is crucial in the Celtic case for two reasons. [07:26] The first is that it’s only through linguistic scholarship that the entirety of the modern Celtic family was recognized, [07:33] so in other words, that the speakers of the two linguistic branches — so Welsh, Breton, and Cornish speakers — are related to speakers of Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx Gaelic. [07:46] And that’s realized about 1700. [07:48] And the second is that it was only through comparative linguistics that the Celtic nations were recognized to be a part of the wider Indo-European family, as opposed to an indigenous population that was pushed further west by invading Romans or Goths, etc. [08:05] And so I can unpack those two things for you. [08:08] On the first point about providing a more holistic picture of the Celts, the interesting thing is that in the early modern period, neither the Welsh nor the Irish, their dominant linguistic tradition isn’t thought to be Celtic, and they actually weren’t thought to be related to each other, and I think this is particularly striking because these are probably now seen as two of the most Celtic nations. [08:32] But basically, native Irish tradition held that the language derived from the ruins of Babel, where the best parts of all languages were cobbled together, and then taken by the Scythians, who became the Scots, to Egypt, Spain, and then Ireland. [08:46] And it’s really complicated, but the point is that it definitely wasn’t Celtic. [08:50] Meanwhile, Welsh tradition held that it derived from Hebrew. [08:54] So before the 18th century, the Celts are sort of most associated with Gaul, and therefore France, and more surprisingly, with Germany. [09:02] So Toon Van Hal has shown how French and German humanists argued over what language Gaulish really was, and which of their modern vernaculars was closest to it, and so the languages of Britain and Ireland aren’t really into the picture. [09:16] It’s more of a Continental argument until about the end of the 17th century, and in fact, no classical sources refer explicitly to the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland as Celts. [09:28] But basically, the important thing that happened was that Caesar had actually described many of the cultural links between Gaul and Britain, and one of those that he’d mentioned was language. [09:37] So as soon as scholars in the early modern period started to get their hands on Welsh vocabularies, they were able to trace links between the few Gaulish words that they had and Welsh, [09:49] and the person who provided the most crucial work was the Dutch scholar Marc van Boxhorn, who recorded that he was so pleased to receive a Welsh dictionary that he kissed it. [09:59] And if the ancient Celts spoke Gaulish, the thinking went, and, according to Caesar, the ancient Britons spoke a similar, if not the same, language as the Gauls, then because Welsh was descended from the language of the ancient Britons, it was probably Celtic too. [10:16] And it was already recognized that Breton and Cornish were related to Welsh, so they all became seen as this cohesive group with likely ties to the ancient Gauls or Celts. [10:26] This is hammered home increasingly towards the end of the 17th century, especially by a Breton monk named Paul-Yves Pezron, who got many things wrong but really succeeded in driving that point home. [10:38] But at this point… [10:39] So in the 1690s, the Brittonic languages and the Gaelic languages were still seen as unrelated. [10:46] The key move here was made by a Welsh scholar named Edward Lhuyd. [10:50] He’s a real hero in Celtic studies. [10:53] He travelled around Britain and Ireland doing fieldwork for several years at the turn of the 18th century, and he actually recorded words from speakers of these languages and drew up vocabularies. [11:06] So in late 1699, he had composed a comparative vocabulary of Welsh, Irish and English words, and there he noted that there were a number of sound correspondences, and the most famous of these is the P and C or Q distinction in Celtic. [11:23] And this is a quote from Lhuyd. [11:24] He said, “I cannot find the Irish have a word purely their own that begins with a P and yet have almost all of ours which they constantly begin with a C.” [11:36] So some of the classic examples of this distinction are pen and ceann (so pen is Welsh for “head,” and ceann is obviously Irish) or pedwar and cathair, which is the number four. [11:50] But it can also be mac, which is the Irish word for “son,” and mab, which is the Welsh word. [11:56] This is now called the P and Q Celtic distinction, and this gave rise to the terrible joke that Celticists have to mind their P’s and Q’s. [12:05] But so it was Lhuyd’s achievement to show that these two branches of language were related and could be referred to as Celtic. [12:16] And so for the second part, connecting the Celts to the Indo-European family, it was comparative philology, obviously, that did this. [12:23] And so after the Celts become established as this cohesive group, there are still lots of opinions flying around in the 18th century. [12:32] We’re still in the era before comparative and historical linguistics became a cohesive discipline with recognized principles and dogmas, really, if you like, [12:42] and actually, some people might have recognized that the Celts were a distinctive family, but they started to doubt whether it was a family that belonged to the larger Indo-European family, because the Celtic languages have some strange features. [12:57] Its vocabulary is quite different. Its grammar also seems strange. [13:02] So, most obviously, it’s a VSO grammatical system, so verb, subject, object. [13:07] It also has, and this is probably the most famous thing, a system of initial mutations where the first sound of a word changes based on its grammatical function in relation to the word before it. [13:18] This can be for grammatical purposes or just euphony. [13:22] And so some people doubted that together these features could be reconciled with the other Indo-European languages, and people like A. W. Schlegel, so no mean philologist, was someone who doubted the position of Celtic. [13:36] And just to make a long story short, in the 1830s, three works were published by the English scholar James Cowles Prichard, by the Genevan Adolph Pictet, and by the German Franz Bopp, who published work explaining these differences and showing how they fit within the European… Indo-European framework. [13:55] Prichard compared Welsh and Sanskrit, Pictet, Gaelic and Sanskrit, and Bopp showed the principles and operation behind the initial mutations, and so these three works together definitively established that the Celtic languages were Indo-European, and therefore that the Celtic race, as it was starting to be called at this time, was part of that larger Indo-European family or race. [14:17]

JMc: So one of the key figures that you mentioned just there was the Englishman James Cowles Prichard. [14:23] So what exactly was his contribution to demonstrating that the Celtic languages are part of the larger Indo-European family, and how exactly did his proof work, and what methods did he use to construct it, [14:37] and did he have any priority over any of the other scholars working at the time on the problem of Celtic as an Indo-European language? [14:46]

IS: That’s a really, really interesting question, one that I’ve worked on for a long time. [14:51] I think he… [14:52] Well, he was someone that was overlooked both in Celtic studies and in the history of Celtic philology, and therefore in the history of Celticism. [15:00] He’s most recognized for having been Europe’s leading ethnologist, so kind of the first phase of anthropology. [15:08] He’s like a physical and cultural anthropologist, but really his largest concern was to ensure that the Celtic nations were — in this instance, his largest concern — was to show that they were part of the Indo-European family for two reasons. [15:23] The first one is biblical orthodoxy. [15:25] He was raised a Quaker, he converted to Anglicanism, but he still obviously adheres to the biblical account. [15:32] And the second reason is that he’s Welsh. [15:34] His mother was descended from a Welsh family, at least is what I think we know, but accounts kind of differ on this. [15:41] Some say that he could speak Welsh with his patients, where he was a physician in Bristol, but it’s clear that he could read Welsh, and he was connected to Welsh cultural circles. [15:50] But the thing that I think that’s most interesting about him in this case is that he was recognizing the sort of the full import both of the Indo-European idea, and of the possibilities for comparative philology, before the major developments in Germany, above all. [16:06] So in 1813, he said that “[i]t’s only an essential affinity in the structure and genius of languages that demonstrates a common origin. [16:15] This sort of relationship exists in the Sanskrit, the ancient Zend, as well as the modern Persic, Greek, Latin, Germanic dialects; and is found, though not to the same extent, in the Celtic and Slavonic.” [16:26] And so basically, what you have there is a pretty clear paraphrase of the philologer passage from William Jones. [16:34] So I think Prichard comes to that as… [16:36] That’s an early conclusion, both in the context of Celtic comparative philology, and I think in the history of comparative philology writ large, but basically, he puts off… [16:47] He says he’s going to publish a work about the Celtic and Slavonic dialects, as he calls them, but he puts this off until 1831. [16:55] He did publish an essay in 1815 where he showed some of these proofs that would appear in his later work, but these were mostly just comparative vocabulary, [17:06] but once you see everything that he puts together, it’s pretty clear that this needs to be explained, and that if it’s not borrowing, you know… [17:17] If it’s borrowing, then there’s a lot of explaining to do, because there is a ton of similarity, but what he eventually does is, he shows some of the grammatical similarities in 1831. [17:28] So he shows that verbs — that’s his main point of evidence — he shows that verbs are conjugated in the Celtic languages in essentially the same way as we’re familiar with in, you know, with the Indo-European languages. [17:40] He shows that verb endings come from abbreviated pronouns, and he’s really riffing off of the work of Franz Bopp here. [17:48] But Prichard was working with modern Welsh, and so he couldn’t really construct a historical grammar in the way that Grimm had for German, but his vocabulary proofs, like I said, are very convincing. [17:59] And Grimm himself announced as soon as he read this work that he had decided… that Prichard had shown this was Indo-European. [18:06] Now, at the same time, Adolph Pictet is working in Geneva on a proof using mainly Irish and Scots Gaelic to show similarities with Sanskrit, and he’s really targeting A. W. Schlegel, and he publishes this proof in a series of three open letters. [18:22] And it’s really funny, Pictet definitely owned Prichard’s work because his copy exists in the Cornell Library, but he never references him, and just over 20 years later, he writes to an Irish scholar who is reviewing a work by Johann Kaspar Zeuss, who wrote the first historical grammar of the Celtic languages. [18:43] This Irish reviewer had written that Zeuss proved the Celtic languages to be Indo-European, and Pictet actually wrote that, “No, no, no, I showed this many years ago, and it’s not fair that you’re saying it was Zeuss.” [18:58] So it’s ironic because Pictet was himself being unfair to Prichard. [19:02] And so, while I think Prichard is recognized to some extent in the 19th century, once we get to the 20th century he’s really written out of the story for reasons that we’re familiar with in the history of linguistics: because as soon as someone’s proof is superseded, they become basically dismissed. [19:21] And so I think part of what I’ve tried to do is recover Prichard both for Celtic studies and for the history of linguistics as part of this sort of new narrative… well, a revision to the standard narrative that you said earlier about what’s happening in the field, and he’s a good example of how approaching the history of the subject in this way can show new things, I think. [19:43]

JMc: So Prichard’s been forgotten in the standard narrative that we tell these days about the history of historical-comparative linguistics. [19:53] How does restoring him to his proper place in this narrative challenge this received story that we usually tell in the history of linguistics? [20:03]

IS: Well, basically, I focus on Prichard because he’s the best linguist out of all the British scholars I’ve worked on, but he actually comes at the end of this line of scholars in Britain who realized the significance of the Indo-European idea well before the sort of German developments. [20:26] And they were all Scots, actually, except for Prichard, though he studied at the University of Edinburgh, and I think that’s really important, because it’s the Edinburgh Review where a lot of this stuff is aired. [20:37] And so this is significant for a couple reasons, one of which is that the history of comparative philology or historical-comparative linguistics in Britain hasn’t really moved on from Hans Aarsleff’s book in 1967, The Study of Language in England, and there, you know, he includes some Scottish developments as part of the English story. [20:59] But so basically, what I’ve tried to do is add Scottish scholars to the picture, and also tried to show that, against Aarsleff’s narrative, that there were people aware of basically the importance of the Indo-European idea, and what comparative philology could do, well before the 1830s, but they were all doing different things with it. [21:21] So Alexander Hamilton, who’s famous for having taught Friedrich Schlegel, he constructed a comparative vocabulary in 1810 in the Edinburgh Review, which Prichard then picked up on, but he was more of a philologist than a comparative philologist, and ultimately, he wrote a really big work on Indian mythology. [21:40] John Leyden was another comparative philologist, but he was far too ambitious, and he was more interested in South Asian and Asian languages, and he died before he could complete anything substantial. [21:51] His friend Alexander Murray completed a big magnum opus, where he clearly recognized the Indo-European idea, and he included the philologer passage, but he was trying to trace the origin of language, which he reduced to nine sounds, which made his book kind of ridiculous at the time. [22:06] But the point is that he was interested in the origin of language and not necessarily the comparison of language for its own sake. [22:13] And all of these guys came before Prichard, who I said had reached this sort of Indo-European recognition by 1813, but his main interest was ethnology. [22:23] And so, what I think I’ve shown is not that British scholars invented comparative philology or anything like that, but basically that they were better than they’ve been getting credit for, and they were interested in many other things, and they died before they could produce anything substantial. [22:38] And British scholars, in this respect, I think, fit into this larger story where, since we’re moving beyond the standard narrative where Jones discovers the Indo-European connection and then it sort of is built from there, [22:52] there’s obviously this revised story that’s developed over the last few decades, like Daniel Droixhe and Toon van Haal are two people who have shown that there was a great deal of what could be called comparative philology going on in early modern Europe. [23:04] Okay, the grammatical aspect wasn’t developed, but the framework is definitely there. [23:09] And our friend Floris Solleveld has been rewriting the history of linguistics in the 19th century and showing how that similar ideas that we think of with the Indo-European family were being developed in relation to families like the Malayo-Polynesian group. [23:25] But Floris has really shown also just how difficult it was to get linguistic samples, and that scholars actually had to have the material with which to work. [23:36] And so, if you read Wilhelm von Humboldt or Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, two early 19th-century linguists, they weren’t talking about the philologer passage. [23:45] They were praising, you know, Adelung and Vater and the Mithridates, you know, for bringing much more linguistic evidence beyond Europe to light, and Prichard actually also reviewed the Mithridates, and that’s where he lays out his idea of the Indo-European idea fairly early. [24:03] And so with this… the revised standard narrative is part of realizing that people were using language and linguistic studies for things far beyond just, you know, the intrinsic language of… language itself. [24:16] I think it should help us to realize that language was… is, was and has always been, you know, a central point of consideration in definitely the Western intellectual tradition from the ancient period onwards. [24:31] So I think it’s, you know, it’s helpful for us to realize that with the study of language, we can learn a lot more about the human sciences and the humanities, and I think also that the humanities and human sciences, social sciences, have a lot to learn by considering the history of linguistics. [24:46]

JMc: Great. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [24:50]

IS: Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Thanks for having me, James. [24:52]

In this interview, we talk to Judy Kaplan about universals in American linguistics of the mid-20th century.

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Emmon Bach & Robert T. Harms, Universals in Linguistic Theory (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968)
Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).
Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Joseph Greenberg, “Some Universals of Grammar with Special Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements,” in Idem (ed.), Universals of Language (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1963), 73-113.
______ “The Nature and Uses of Linguistic Typologies,” IJAL 23: 68-77.
Roman Jakobson, Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze. (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1941).
Linguistic Society of America, Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation, “The Need for the Documentation of Linguistic Diversity,” June 1994. (https://old.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/lsa-stmt-documentation-linguistic-diversity.pdf)
Janet Martin-Nielsen, “A Forgotten Social Science? Creating a Place for Linguistics in the Historical Dialogue,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47(2): 147-172.

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, [00:09] and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, [00:13] online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:20] Today, we’re talking to Judy Kaplan, who’s a historian of the human sciences and a Curatorial Fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. [00:30] One of Judy’s current projects is to investigate the notion of universals in American linguistics of the mid-20th century. [00:39] Why is it that various competing schools of American linguists in this period converged [00:44] on universals as the target of their research, despite their fundamental differences in scientific outlook? [00:50] What did they mean by “universals”, and what role did universals serve in their respective theories? [00:57] So, Judy, can you sketch the scene for us? [01:01] What was happening in American linguistics in the mid-20th century? [01:04] Who were the leading figures, and what positions did they take? [01:09]

JK: Thanks so much. [01:10] Viewed from above, we can see that the mid-20th century was a time of remarkable growth and expansion in American linguistics, [01:18] so funding went up, the first university departments were established, and the ranks generally grew. [01:25] These markers corresponded to a handful of different programs or positions. [01:30] As far as those leading figures and positions, most people concentrate on two dominant approaches to the study of language at this time: structuralism and generative grammar. [01:42] I should say that both were internally heterogeneous. [01:46] On the structuralist side, there were students of Edward Sapir in the anthropological tradition and Leonard Bloomfield on the more strictly linguistic side. [01:54] Structuralists focused on speech, a sort of self-conscious departure from 19th-century philology, on form, [02:01] on abstractions — ultimately, as the name suggests, on structure. [02:06] In terms of evidence, they were heavily invested in the study of Native American languages. [02:12] By the post-war period, the so-called neo-Bloomfieldians or distributionalists were at centre stage. [02:19] So, figures here are people like Charles Hockett, Zellig Harris, Bernard Bloch, Martin Joos, and others. [02:26] To your question, their position was basically that linguists should be looking at how linguistic forms show up in different speech environments. [02:33] They insisted on the distinction of different levels of analysis — so, phonology, morphology, syntax, these were all different levels. [02:40] And these points of emphasis pretty much bracketed meaning and the mind, which is important. [02:47] Much of the work was really mathematical in terms of its look and feel. [02:51] Emerging in a sense from this tradition, but also deeply critical of it, was Noam Chomsky and the study of transformational grammar. [02:58] This program elaborated transformational rules, and that was a term that was adapted from Harris, so you can see that there’s this kind of emergence. [03:06] So, it elaborated these transformational rules to link fundamental deep structures of language to surface manifestations, allowing linguists to turn from empirical data toward the study of grammar and the mind. [03:19] The emphasis was on theory construction, evidence of linguistic competence, and the definition of rules. [03:25] Though this program subsequently splintered into groups dedicated primarily to syntax and semantics, it did come to define a new mainstream. [03:35]

JMc: So, how do universals fit into this picture? [03:39]

JK: In a very broad sense, I think universals trace back to the supposed liberation of linguistics from philology — the question being, was linguistics going to be about language or languages? [03:49] So, if the former, then one might reasonably be on the lookout, at the end of the day, for features or phenomena that are universal in scope. [03:59] Just circling back then to the general lay of the land, it’s interesting that historians of science — so I come out of history of science — that they have tended to write about this with different points of emphasis, as opposed to linguistic historiographers or historians of linguistics, first and foremost. [04:16] Historians of science have characterized the relationship between these two approaches (the structuralist and the generative) as the contrast between behaviourism and mentalism, which was given all sorts of ideological overtones in the post-war period. [04:31] Linguists writing about their own history have wrestled with whether or not the remarkably swift emergence of transformational grammar constituted a scientific revolution in the Kuhnian sense. [04:42] It was unquestionably a remarkable turn, so participant accounts, institutional changes, interdisciplinary engagements, and citation patterns all make that really clear, [04:52] but there were also many linguists who were already trained and working in the structuralist tradition who felt that transformational grammar was not really for them. [05:01] And I might locate Joseph Greenberg somewhere in there, right? [05:05] So he was coming out of anthropology, first and foremost, he received his PhD in anthropology, and became really well-known by the 1950s for working on the genetic classification of African languages. [05:19] He was quite well regarded for that work. [05:22] He first turned to the study of African languages because he had been interested in Arabic and Semitic and had been approaching these from an anthropological standpoint, [05:31] and in 1957, he started to write about typology, and typology in connection to universals. [05:38] So Greenberg is taking a typological approach to the study of language universals, and he is leaning pretty heavily on the work of Roman Jakobson, who had introduced them in connection to the acquisition of child language. [05:52] One of the things that he says here is that it’s really important to consider implicational universals, so of the form “if X, then Y,” [05:59] and he sets out on a kind of data-gathering mission with this in mind. [06:04] And, you know, when he tees up the program — this was launched in a 1961 conference at Dobbs Ferry — [06:11] when he tees up the program, he says, you know, We have accumulated so much data at this point in time that the time is ripe to turn to the study of language universals. [06:22] Coming back to the question about how universals fit into the general topography or the landscape of post-World War II American linguistics, historians of the human sciences have shown how, in the wake of World War II [06:38] — which, you know, perpetrated unprecedented violence based on these racist and eugenic ideas that some human groups were distinct and less valuable than others — [06:47] liberal biologists and anthropologists, also psychologists, also I would add linguists here, came together to try to define a rosier and more inclusive picture of human nature. [06:59] So this was a picture that celebrated our best features as humans, our intelligence, our technological prowess, our cooperation, and also our common inheritance. [07:11] So I think that this is really important for understanding why this turned to universals in the mid-20th century. [07:17] That said, the way that Greenberg and Chomsky defined and operationalized universals research could not have been more different. [07:26] So Greenberg edged up to the study of universals defined in this typological way in a 1957 paper for the International Journal of American Linguistics. [07:36] This previewed his 1961 contribution to the Conference on Language Universals at Dobbs Ferry, “Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful events.” [07:46] This became known as the word order paper. [07:49] It’s really important and sort of set the agenda for this approach to the study of universals. [07:55] It gives a clear sense of what this research program was going to be all about. [07:59] It talked about things like sampling procedures, empirical evidence, the typology of word order of course, and it also offered some thoughts on the relationship between linguistics and other human sciences. [08:11] It was guided by the idea that the best, and you could say really the only, way to study universals was inductively. [08:19] So I mentioned before a debt that Greenberg had to Roman Jakobson, this idea of implicational universals, which appears I think in the first paragraph of that paper. [08:29] And so this, again, is this idea of “If you have this feature, you’re also going to have this feature,” or, you know, there’s going to be some other kind of constraint. [08:36] And this is just to point out maybe something that people haven’t necessarily thought about. [08:40] This is really a different way of saying what is commonly held as opposed to a statement like “All languages have Z.” [08:49] I think it’s also important to say something about the social organization of Greenberg’s research program. [08:56] As this was an effort to coordinate empirical generalizations on a massive scale, an army of researchers was needed. [09:03] They also needed to think carefully about how to manage their data, [09:06] so he was invested in the creation of some sort of cross-cultural file, he called it. [09:12] Greenberg said that coordinated efforts beyond the scope of individual researchers were going to be necessary to establish on firm grounds the actual facts concerning universals and language. [09:23]

JMc: So do you think this inductive approach of Greenberg is an example of this contrast that linguists often make between, you know, empiricism and rationalism in their approach to linguistics? [09:34] I mean, the generativists love to talk about that. [09:37]

JK: Yes, I think it’s important to differentiate between empiricism as a theory of mind and empirical research methods. [09:45] Mostly what I’ve been talking about here are empirical research methods and rationalism versus a sort of logical way of going about doing things. [09:54] So just to differentiate between the theory of mind and the methodology is important. [10:00] But yes, these do sort of map onto those basic traditions. [10:05]

JMc: Do you think it’d be fair to say that it’s part of generativist propaganda to conflate these two things and to set up this opposition? [10:13]

JK: Yeah, probably. [laughs] [10:15] I mean, I think the rationalist, in the sense of a theory of mind, description, applies to Chomsky. [10:22] It’s just that the empiricism, empirical method doesn’t necessarily apply to Greenberg. [10:28] But if you are in the generativist camp and you’re looking at what the linguists who are using empirical methods are trying to do, yeah, to sort of suggest that conflation does important work, [10:40] because it maybe consigns everyone who’s looking at actual attested language data to maybe this behaviourist tradition, which by the mid-20th century was sort of much maligned. [10:52]

JMc: How does Chomsky then fit into this picture? [10:53] So you’ve mentioned Greenberg. So did Greenberg start talking about universals and Chomsky sort of tried to catch up to him? [11:01]

JK: They both arguably were publishing on universals in 1957, [11:06] so there’s a real kind of direct coincidence here. The- [11:10]

JMc: And they both use the term “universals.” [11:12]

JK: Not exactly. So Chomsky uses it a little bit later. But the universals that Chomsky and his colleagues were interested in, [11:19] so this is on the other hand, they didn’t pertain to languages so much as they had to do with those internal aspects of linguistic theory that might be then regarded as universal [11:31] — so, for instance, the very idea that transformational rules can get you from meaning to sound via the grammar. [11:39] If these could be established, then these would call for some kind of further explanation, and this ends up being a claim about innateness, which is sort of characterized as a biological endowment. [11:51] Chomsky started talking about universals in an explicit way, to your question, in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. [11:58] Here he links linguistic universals to the idea of explanatory adequacy and draws a really bright line between formal universals, that’s what he’s going to be interested in, and substantive universals, and this is more of the Jakobson-Greenberg cast. [12:14]

JMc: Okay, so does “formal universals” mean universals pertaining to theory construction about what linguistic grammars look like, whereas substantive universals are empirical findings about the structures of actual languages? [12:30]

JK: Exactly. He says early on in that text that “the main task of linguistic theory must be to develop an account of linguistic universals”, so this is a pretty clear statement, [12:41] and he urges that this account needs to be able to stand up to the actual diversity of human languages, while at the same time also accounting for the rapidity and the uniformity of language learning in rich and explicit ways. [12:53] So here he’s gesturing again to that kind of species-level endowment. [12:59] He gives examples of reducing or absorbing, I think he uses the word “abstracting”, phonological rules in English. [13:08] So here’s a, you know, what might be considered a substantive universal in the way that you just described, to the formal universal that a transformational cycle universally links phonological rules to syntactic structure. [13:22] And then this would have the advantage of explaining away funny-looking exceptions in terms of deeper underlying regularities. [13:31] If you look at the papers that were presented at the conference that was held on universals of linguistic theory… [13:36] So I’ve been thinking about these camps in terms of two organizing conferences. [13:40] So there was the one in Dobbs Ferry in 1961, and this other conference that was held, actually weirdly, on the same day, but just a few years later. [13:50] It was held, I should say, at UT Austin. [13:53] The kinds of universals, just to give a feel again, the kinds of universals that were up for discussion were very general things like case and modality. [14:03] They were derived primarily from common-sense intuition. [14:06] So if you contrast that again with the kind of empirical way in which Greenberg was working, they were mostly offered up by native speakers and they were mostly having to do with English language usage. [14:16]

JMc: So common-sense intuition, you mean these intuitions about grammaticality judgments? [14:21]

JK: Exactly. [14:22]

JMc: So whether you can say this or not, and put a star in front of it if you can’t. [14:25]

JK: Exactly.

JMc: Yeah, OK. [14:27]

JK: Yeah, and just to give one example of that, in his contribution to the conference, Paul Kiparsky suggested that rule addition and rule simplification might be called or considered universal processes of human language. [14:39] So you can get a sense of the feel that these are very, very different approaches. [14:42]

JMc: Yeah. OK. [14:44]

JK: The introduction to the proceedings that was published from that conference mentions that it was all tape recorded, and I’ve been trying to find the tapes [laughs] because, you know, yeah, the generativists are known for having these really rowdy conferences, [14:59] and I really want to hear what was actually said, but I haven’t been able to find them. [15:02] So if anybody listening knows where to find those tapes, please let me know. [15:06]

JMc: OK. So these two conferences, Dobbs Ferry and then UT Austin, who were the participants in these conferences? [15:15] So like, what was the sort of character of them? [15:18] So was the Dobbs Ferry conference more anthropological in orientation? [15:22]

JK: Yeah, so the Dobbs Ferry conference was funded by the SSRC, so the Social Science Research Council. [15:28] It grew out of conversations that were happening during… I want to say the academic year of 1958–59 at Stanford. [15:35] And, you know, as it’s described in the notes, there’s this sense that psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists all needed to be talking about kind of universal phenomena. [15:48] So in terms of the participants at Dobbs Ferry, it was a very interdisciplinary group. [15:53] I think Greenberg says at one point that if we edge up to the universal, we’re going to go over this tipping point into psychology and anthropology. [16:02] As for UT Austin, Emmon Bach was there, Paul Kiparsky, I’m going to forget other names. [16:08] But just, you know, this was largely drawing on a pretty intimate group of actors in the transformational-generative school. [16:16]

JMc: And Greenberg’s statement about if we, you know, keep pursuing universals, we’ll end up doing psychology, is that intended as a reductive statement? [16:24]

JK: I don’t think so. [16:26] You know, again, he was really keen to work in an inductive way, so to amass a long list of generalizations, to take a step back from those to maybe elaborate even deeper fundamental principles, at which point you would be thinking you would have to confront psychology, [16:43] I think that’s more the spirit of in which he’s talking about this interdisciplinary engagement. [16:47]

JMc: You’ve sort of already touched on this idea when you mentioned that there was a movement among liberal scientists in America after the war to try and claw back some notion of our common humanity after the horrors of World War II, [16:59] but could you say a little bit more about why this idea of universals and this term “universal” was such a powerful concept for linguists? [17:08] And this was true of the broader social sciences, I take it, and even biology and medicine? [17:16]

JK: Yeah, well, focusing on linguistics for a second, I see the move towards universals, and both empirical and formal here, as an expression of sort of extraordinary disciplinary self-confidence in the middle of the 20th century. [17:27] So I talked at the beginning about how the discipline was on the rise, basically, and I think you have to be in that sort of powerful position to be able to take on or attempt to tackle something as ambitious as the universal. [17:39] It reminds me actually of the way that professional historians have sometimes put down antiquarian traditions. [17:45] So yeah, so just to say “We’re not going to look at these narrow phenomena; we’re going to look at something really ambitious and broad.” [17:52] In the writings of both Greenberg and Chomsky, you get the sense that describing the idiosyncrasies of language can be interesting, but that this is somehow too quaint. [18:01] So to come back to this idea of self-confidence, Greenberg says in his introduction to the Dobbs Ferry volume, and I’m paraphrasing here, that synchronic and diachronic linguistics has achieved sort of a high level of methodological sophistication, [18:15] and that also — and I think this is really important — that it has amassed a huge amount of data, such that the time was going to be really ripe for generalizing on a wide scale. [18:26] Chomsky says something similar, which is that traditional and structuralist grammars have provided extensive lists of exceptions and irregularities, but for him that meant that it was time to start moving beyond these to talk about underlying regularities. [18:40]

JMc: So how does this notion of universals — and the term “universal”, you know, which as you have just demonstrated, is actually being used in very different ways by people like Chomsky and Greenberg — how does this fit into what the broader human sciences were doing? [18:56]

JK: Other human sciences were talking about human nature, so I think that that’s where the point of connection is. [19:01] I haven’t necessarily seen universals as a term of art in other disciplines, but I think it’s really important to note — just with respect to this relationship between linguistics and the other social sciences, where it fit into the picture — it’s really important to note that linguistics was very successful. [19:19] It was really attractive to the folks, say, at the NSF who were holding the purse strings after World War II. [19:26] So the National Science Foundation, it might be helpful to clarify here, it made awards to both Chomsky and Greenberg. [19:34] So clearly this term, “universals”, was attractive to folks who had control of the money. [19:43]

JMc: So why did the NSF like linguistics so much? Was it because linguistics has the appearance, you know, with its sort of mathematization of grammar, has the appearance of a hard science, like of a real natural science, or could it be something else? [19:58]

JK: [laughs] That’s very intriguing. [20:00]

JMc: [laughs] [20:01]

JK: So… Right, so when the National Science Foundation was first established, it was not going to touch the human sciences. [20:08] It was not going to touch the social sciences at all. [20:11] It was established specifically for the physical sciences and engineering disciplines like this, [20:15] and so that’s how linguistics kind of snuck in, and with it, all of the social sciences. [20:22] So the first award that was ever made by the NSF to a project in the social sciences went to Chomsky, in fact, and the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. [20:33] This was in 1956. [20:35] And, you know, it came as part of an initiative to support computation centres and initiatives and research having to do with numerical analysis. [20:45]

JMc: But did the NSF describe Chomsky’s project, like did they categorize Chomsky’s project as social sciences or as engineering? [20:53] Because, I mean, it’s in the research lab for electronics. [20:56]

JK: Yeah, as a computational initiative. [20:58]

JMc: Yeah. OK, so the NSF didn’t think of it as social sciences at all. [21:02]

JK: No, but it set up this precedent. [21:04] So the NSF was interested in funding linguistics because it was associated with computation and mathematics, and, you know, this set up a precedent where an emphasis on formalism and connections to engineering and the natural sciences — also, machine translation — were really, really at the top of the list of priorities. [21:25]

JMc: OK. So this sort of actually ties into a recent interview that we had with Chris Knight, you know, and Chris Knight, of course, has formulated the thesis that Chomsky, you know, deliberately made his work in generative grammar so abstruse so that it couldn’t be used in practice. [21:43] But he was being… Chomsky was being funded precisely because it could have practical engineering applications. [21:50]

JK: Yeah. Computer scientists saw a great deal of promise in what Chomsky had to offer, but he pretty quickly turned against computational projects, which is interesting. [22:03]

JMc: So, I mean, there’s this mathematization and possible applicability of linguistics [22:08] or possible engineering applications of linguistics, but are there any other features of linguistics as a discipline, as a social science discipline, that made it attractive to funders? [22:19] Perhaps the fact that it was, you know, so abstract and, you know, and mechanical? [22:26]

JK: Yeah, I think that’s really important. [22:29] As these federal funding agencies for scientific research were first getting set up, there was a desire to not be too overtly political, so the very, very abstract nature of linguistic research, and particularly, I would say, research on language universals, it fit the bill, [22:47] whereas projects in sociology or anthropology could have direct relevance to what was going on in the Cold War, say. [22:57] So there is something that was highly attractive about the really abstract nature of linguistic research. [23:03] I think… I’ve looked at correspondence from the Ford Foundation, and, you know, you have these sort of these program officers who are writing back and forth, trying to explain to each other what the linguists are doing, and they have a really tough job of it, and I think that’s actually really productive [laughs] for the field. [23:21] Another thing to say here is that in 1958, there was a really important piece of legislation that was passed, the National Defense Education Act, [23:29] and this is all, you know, sort of the history of big science. [23:34] And historians of science have really emphasized the way in which this led to, you know, expanded educational initiatives and funding for science and technology. [23:45] The piece that is often left out of that conversation is that it also sent a lot of money toward linguistics and linguistic training. [23:53] So the idea was that Americans had not bothered to learn other languages, and in the effort to sort of persuade international actors to join up with the American cause, that it’d be really, really helpful to actually be able to communicate. [24:13] And, you know, that might seem like a very practical goal, but there was a lot of research into how people actually learn languages and how this can be facilitated that was very abstract and basic and fundamental in nature. [24:26]

JMc: Was this discussion of universals a contained episode in the history of linguistics? [24:32] Did this universals discourse die down, or has it morphed into something else in contemporary linguistics? [24:39]

JK: I don’t know about contained, but I do think that the 1960s and early 1970s were a high watermark in the study of language universals. [24:48] You can see this… You know, so basically the argument that I’m trying to make with this research project is that if we think of linguistics as centrally having to do with this tension between the diversity of human languages and language as a species-defining function, or faculty I should say, those things are always in tension, but at the same time, when you look across time, I think that they sort of ebb and flow in terms of priority and succession. [25:14] You know, early 20th century before World War II, say, in American linguistics, this is a period that’s really defined by particularist interests in language. [25:23] By the time you get to Greenberg and Chomsky, it’s very, to use the word “universal”, universalist, [25:31] and, you know, following that time, there’s a return to a primary commitment to the particulars of human language, [25:39] and, you know, this gets bound up with concerns about linguistic diversity and the documentation of linguistic diversity. [25:47] One of my favourite sources on this is the 1994 statement on “The Need for the Documentation of Linguistic Diversity” that was put out by the Linguistic Society of America, and there, you could see that they’re looking back on this period in the 1960s and ’70s, and, you know, maybe even edging into the ’80s to some degree, although it gets messy, where typological research and generative research are really, you know, at the top of the discipline’s priorities. [26:15] And I think that that’s really interesting. [26:17] And so in this statement, you know, there’s this sense that these kinds of research programs (so the typological, the generative) need to somehow be folded into and inform a return to a primary interest or commitment to linguistic diversity. [26:35] So that tells me that this is a period that’s coming to an end. [26:38] It was unique. [26:39] It was bounded in some sense. [26:41] But yeah, that nevertheless, these were really, really important projects at the time. [26:46]

JMc: Well, thanks very much for answering those questions. [26:49]

JK: Sure.

In this interview, we talk to Randy Harris about the controversies surrounding the generative semantics movement in American linguistics of the 1960s and 70s.

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Chomsky, N. (2015/1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax (50th Anniversary edition.). The MIT Press.

Harris, R. A. (2021/1993). The linguistics wars: Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff, and the battle over Deep Structure (2nd ed.). Oxford.

Huck, G. J., & Goldsmith, J. A. (1995). Ideology and linguistic theory: Noam Chomsky and the deep structure debates. Routledge.

Katz, J. J., & Postal, P. M. (1964). An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions. M.I.T. Press.

McCawley, J. D. (1980). Linguistic theory in America: The first quarter-century of transformational generative grammar, by Frederick J. Newmeyer (Book Review). Linguistics, 18(9), 911-930.

Newmeyer, F. J. (1986/1980). Linguistic theory in America: The first quarter-century of transformational generative grammar (2nd ed.). Academic Press.

Postal, P. M. (1972). The best theory. In S. Peters (Ed.), Goals of linguistic theory. Prentice-Hall.

Postal, P. M. (1988). Topic…Comment: Advances in linguistic rhetoric. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 6(1), 129–137.

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, [00:14] online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:17] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:21] Today we’re talking to Randy Harris, [00:24] who is Professor of both English Language and Literature and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. [00:32] Among other things, Randy is the author of The Linguistics Wars, [00:37] the classic account of the generative semantics controversy that engulfed generative linguistics in the 1960s and ’70s. [00:45] A second edition of Randy’s book came out in 2021, and I’ve been wanting to talk to him about it since then, [00:52] but as a history podcast, we are by definition behind the times, [00:57] so it’s only appropriate that we’re only getting to his book now. [01:01] So, Randy, can you tell us, what were the linguistics wars? [01:05] Who were the chief combatants, and what were they fighting about? [01:09]

RH: Well, first, thanks for inviting me on. I’m a big fan of the podcast. [01:13] It’s a really important and interesting podcast about the history of linguistics, [01:18] and I’m also a fan of your work, your Ogden book, Language and Meaning. [01:22] It is really, really valuable, and I’m looking forward to the new one that you’ve got coming out on the history of modern linguistics. [01:30] So, maybe the best way to start is just to talk about how I entered the project in the first place. [01:35] So, I was a PhD student, and I just discovered a field called rhetoric. [01:41] My other degrees were in literature and linguistics before I got there, [01:46] and I was casting around. I’d originally gone to do communication theory, [01:50] but it turned out that the department wasn’t as strong in that as I thought, [01:54] and they had a really good rhetorician, and he was doing something called rhetoric of science, [01:59] which is basically the study of scientific argumentation. [02:03] I started reading in that field quite a bit and studying under him, Michael Halloran, [02:08] and then when it came time to write a dissertation, I started casting around for scientific episodes. [02:14] One of the themes of rhetoric of science at that point was mostly looking at controversies, [02:19] looking at how scientific disputes get resolved or fail to get resolved through warring camps. [02:25] I read Fritz Newmeyer’s book, Linguistic Theory in America, [02:29] and one of the key chapters is about this group called the generative semanticists and Chomsky coming at odds with each other, [02:39] but I’d also read a review of the book by James McCawley, [02:42] who was one of the people associated with the linguistics wars on the generative semanticists’ side, [02:47] and it was fairly polite, but said that basically Newmeyer’s book didn’t tell the whole story. [02:53] So I thought, “Well, I’d look into this a bit,” and I wrote basically all of the major players. [02:58] So I wrote Chomsky, of course, and the major players on the generative semanticists’ side were Paul Postal, [03:06] who was a colleague of Chomsky’s just before that, George Lakoff, John Robert Ross (Haj Ross), [03:13] and Ray Jackendoff, who was aligned with Chomsky in this dispute, [03:17] but also a lot of people around the dispute [03:21] — Jerrold Katz, Jerry Fodor, Thomas Bever, Arnold Zwicky, Jay Keyser, Robert Lees, Morris Halle, Jerry Sadock, Howard Lasnik, [03:30] just everybody who had seemed to have something to say about that dispute and about the theories around them — [03:37] and I got just an overwhelming response. [03:40] Everybody wanted to talk about it. [03:43] I can’t remember the exact order in which it happened, whether it was a response to a letter that invited me to call or a phone call as a response to my initial letter to Lakoff, [03:52] but Lakoff and I were on the phone for like an hour and a half one night, [03:56] him just going through what everything was all about. [03:59] So this was 20 years after the dispute, more or less, and everybody was still wanting to talk about it. [04:06] There were still hurt feelings and incensed attitudes and so forth, [04:10] and I was coming at it from a completely different discipline and a PhD student, [04:16] not anybody really in the field, and all of them wanted to talk to me. [04:20] So it grew into a kind of oral history project. [04:22] I travelled around and interviewed them all. [04:25] I ended up with like 500-some-odd pages of transcripts of interviews. [04:29] I met Lakoff in a bar in Cambridge. I talked to Chomsky for hours in his office. [04:35] I went to the University of Chicago, and one of the sociological centre points of the generative semanticist side was the University of Chicago, [04:42] especially all of the conferences and publications out of the Chicago Linguistic Society, [04:47] and talked to McCawley and Sadock and so forth there. [04:50] So everybody wanted to talk about it. [04:52] It was a really interesting story. [04:54] What was it? I’ll give you the scientific development story first. [04:58] So Noam Chomsky and his collaborators, most prominently Paul Postal and Gerald Katz, [05:06] developed a theory coalesced in the book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965 [05:12] that had this central notion of deep structure. [05:16] The model itself was structured as a process model where you generate sentences, [05:22] and it was a sentence grammar, not an utterance grammar. [05:25] All of the proponents denied that it was a process. [05:28] They just talked about it as an abstract model of linguistic knowledge in some way, [05:32] but it was shaped as a process model in which you had a set of syntactic rules, [05:37] phrase structure rules, that generated a syntactic structure [05:41] and a bag of words, a dictionary, a lexicon, that then populated the structure. [05:48] And then what you got was the deep structure, which wasn’t what we speak with [05:55] or write with, but an underlying representation that somehow crystallized [06:00] essential aspects of how we speak, one of them being semantic. [06:05] So a paradigm case would be the passive transformation. [06:09] The phrase structure rules and lexicon give you something like [06:13] “John walked the dog,” and that might percolate through with a few adjustments [06:18] in terms of morphology and then percolate through to the surface structure, [06:22] which was a much closer representation to how we talked, [06:25] or it might go through a passive transformation and come out as [06:28] “The dog was walked by John.” [06:31] The arguments around that focused on the fact that both “John walked the dog” [06:36] and “The dog was walked by John” have essentially the same semantics, [06:40] the same role, the same walker and walkee, agent and patient. [06:45] And so the claim developed that transformations don’t change meaning, [06:51] that meaning resides in the deep structure. [06:55] That’s the 1965 Aspects case. [06:58] So several linguists — most notably Lakoff, Ross, and Postal — [07:06] started enriching the semantics of deep structure, [07:10] making it more and more semantically responsible until it effectively became, [07:15] for the generative semanticist, the semantic representation. [07:18] The Aspects model had a set of semantic interpretation rules that looked [07:23] at the deep structure and found out what the meaning was, [07:26] but the generative semanticists said that the semantic representation was deep structure, effectively. [07:31]

JMc: So what exactly is a semantic representation in this model? [07:34] Is it propositional semantics only, or does it include even details of what we would now consider pragmatics? [07:42]

RH: Well, still in the immediate aftermath of Aspects, just propositional semantics entirely, [07:49] but the argument started to coalesce around dismantling deep structure. [07:54] So one set of arguments around the verb “kill,” for instance. [07:58] “Kill” could be seen as “cause to die.” [08:01] “Cause to die” could be seen as… or “die” could be seen as “not alive,” [08:05] and so “kill” could be seen as “cause to be not alive.” [08:10] And then in the generative semanticist approach, [08:13] these were assembled into the surface structure, assembled in bits and pieces. [08:19] So things like “cause,” “not,” “alive,” were all semantic primitives, [08:25] semantic predicates in and of themselves that got assembled [08:27] into the words that we spoke with. [08:30] And if that’s the case, you can’t have a level of deep structure that inherits words. [08:36] It’s building words. [08:38]

JMc: And can I just quickly ask, what was the nature of these semantic primitives? [08:42] Are they like what Wierzbicka was talking about in the ’70s? [08:47]

RH: Yes, very close, yeah. [08:49] In fact, Wierzbicka was associated with the early generative semanticists as well. [08:53] I think she visited MIT when this stuff was starting to develop and sort of mutually influenced at that point. [09:01] But there were also some quite arcane arguments around the level of deep structure [09:06] that led to lots of vituperation. [09:08] OK, still sticking with the scientific story, Chomsky apparently thought this was wrong, [09:15] that the deep structure shouldn’t be deeper, but in fact should be shallower, [09:21] and he built some arguments around things like nominalizations. [09:24] So the Aspects theory would relate a sentence like, [09:28] “Russia destroyed Mariupol” with the noun phrase, [09:32] “Russia’s destruction of Mariupol.” [09:35] So Chomsky wanted to put this process into the lexicon. [09:39] So transformations had been used to build nominalizations out of verbs, for instance. [09:44] So his approach was to weaken transformations, [09:48] whereas the generative semanticists wanted to strengthen them, [09:52] undercut their lexical powers like the assembly into “kill” from “cause to be not alive,” [09:59] retrench the semantic interpretation rules, enrich the semantics of the surface structure. [10:04] So, wholly opposed to the generative semanticists’ move to take semantics deeper and deeper. [10:10] So at this point in, say, 1967, ’68, you’ve got two fairly distinct theories: [10:18] generative semantics (Lakoff, Ross, McCawley, Postal, also Robin Lakoff), [10:25] and interpretive semantics (Chomsky, mostly Chomsky, also Ray Jackendoff) [10:31] building a lot of arguments around semantic interpretation rules [10:34] and X-bar syntax, which was introduced at this point also to, in part, undermine transformations like the nominalization transformation, and Ray Dougherty and others. [10:45] So that’s the scientific story. [10:47] Generative semantics seemed to be taking charge, leading the field, [10:53] but then Chomsky’s retrenchments and developments ascended, [10:58] and the kind of conventional version, especially at the time, [11:01] was that Chomsky and interpretive semantics had simply won the argument, [11:06] and linguistics should favour this kind of interpretive grammar that Chomsky was advocating. [11:14] The label he was giving it at the time was “Extended Standard Theory,” [11:17] which was in a way sort of accurate, but also a kind of nifty rhetorical move, [11:23] because he rebranded the Aspects theory as the standard theory, [11:27] and generative semantics as one deviation of it, [11:30] the wrong-headed deviation of it, [11:32] and the Extended Standard Theory as a way of taking it in the right direction. [11:35] So, again, that’s just the basic scientific story. [11:38] The sociological and rhetorical story is that Ross, and especially Lakoff, were deliberately outpacing Chomsky [11:48] and trying to dominate the theory by taking it in a given direction, [11:54] and, again, that direction was perceived to be fairly popular, [11:57] fairly responsible at the time. [11:59] Chomsky apparently was allergic to Lakoff, [12:03] just really disliked him intensely. [12:06] Again, this is based on this kind of quasi-oral history project, [12:10] everybody talking about the way things flared up. [12:14] Chomsky attacked Lakoff in his class, Lakoff attacked Chomsky in his classes at Harvard, [12:21] but the real centre point of the dispute early on was in Chomsky’s classes at MIT. [12:28] Lakoff attended them, not a student. [12:30] Ross attended them, not really a student any longer either. [12:34] He was Chomsky’s student, but at that point he wasn’t signing up for courses. [12:38] Robin Lakoff attended them, who was a student at Harvard at the time. [12:43] Jackendoff and Daugherty were there. They were direct students. [12:46] It’s not unusual, by the way, for Chomsky’s classes to be attended by lots of people who aren’t his students. [12:53] His syntax classes were quite famous, and people would travel in from all over the place to take his syntax classes. [12:59] Howard Lasnik was telling me [13:01] he had kept an apartment in Cambridge, teaching in Connecticut, [13:05] kept an apartment just so he could go back and attend the lectures. [13:08] MIT would schedule Chomsky’s classes on the basis of the enrolment, so just a standard kind of classroom, [13:15] and it turned into the Black Hole of Calcutta, [13:18] with everybody lining the walls, and sort of standing room only. [13:21] And so they, after that, MIT started scheduling his courses in lecture halls and stuff. [13:25] In any case, it’s not unusual for people not directly studying under Chomsky to be there, [13:30] but the classes were reputed to be really cantankerous. [13:34] From Lakoff’s perspective, Chomsky would misrepresent the generative semanticists’ proposals [13:40] and distort them, and then he would politely stand up and oppose them, [13:44] but Chomsky would shut him down, Jackendoff would weigh in, [13:48] and they were just kind of remembered as very cantankerous, [13:51] mostly with Lakoff on one side and Chomsky on the other, [13:55] but everybody else weighing in in various ways, and it fanned out from there. [13:59] So it really took over the discipline for seven, eight, ten years or so, [14:04] affecting peer reviews and publication and hiring and conferences. [14:11] There was a famous plenary session at the LSA where Jackendoff and Lakoff [14:16] were hurling obscenities at each other, and… [14:18] So, very, very cantankerous, and took over the entire discipline of linguistics, more or less, [14:25] in North America in particular, for about ten years. [14:28]

JMc: But does that mean that all of linguistics in North America was bound up with the generative school by this stage? [14:34]

RH: No, not all, but the bulk of it, for sure, [14:38] and that, in part, is because of how popular Chomsky’s work was [14:43] from Syntactic Structures on to Aspects. [14:46] So linguistics expanded really dramatically in the ’60s and ’70s, [14:50] lots of money pouring into it, lots of departments starting up and expanding [14:55] and so forth on the basis of popularity of Chomsky’s theories. [14:58] And so, overwhelmingly, it was the generative program that was being developed in most places. [15:05] There were certainly lots of existing linguistic programs before that, [15:09] but even those ones were generally dominated by generative approaches. [15:14]

JMc: Are the linguistics wars interesting to anyone who isn’t a linguist? [15:18] I mean, apart from being an example of the rhetoric of science, is there any interest that we can draw from them? [15:25] I mean, the central actors, Chomsky and Lakoff, and especially Chomsky, are, of course, quite famous [15:30] for the roles they’ve played outside disciplinary linguistics, [15:34] so for their participation in and commentary on political discourse. [15:38] But do these arguments over deep structure have any broader repercussions? [15:43] Are they anything more than inconsequential theoretical debates within one branch of American linguistics? [15:51]

RH: Now, in some sense, no, [15:53] certainly not the debates around deep structure that started everything off. [15:58] So a typical argument around deep structure, for instance, [16:01] so, again, transformations were held not to change meaning, [16:07] and that was a position that was developed most directly by Paul Postal [16:12] and Jerrold Katz, so it was called the Katz-Postal Principle. [16:16] So there were lots of arguments around the Katz-Postal Principle about deep structure. [16:19] One of the most famous is around sentences like, “Everyone in Canada speaks two languages,” [16:26] and “Two languages are spoken by everyone in Canada.” [16:30] That looks like a transformation has changed meaning, [16:33] because it’s either that at least two languages are spoken by everybody, [16:37] versus there are two languages that are spoken by everybody. [16:41] There was an attempt to kind of save the phenomena by saying, [16:44] well, that both interpretations are latent, both meanings are latent, [16:48] and it’s only context that highlights one. [16:51] So that was the kind of generative semantics approach to kind of save the Katz-Postal Principle, [16:56] where on the interpretive semantics side, it was proof that transformations did change meaning, [17:00] so the Katz-Postal Principle had to be rejected, [17:03] and if you reject the Katz-Postal Principle, then you can’t have a deep layer of semantics, [17:07] because the transformations are going to rearrange things, and that destroys generative semantics. [17:12] What happened out of that argument was basically people stopped talking about it, and the passive transformation was abandoned. [17:18] So the arguments around deep structure, not so much, [17:21] but they kind of sponsored a divergence that took much, much larger dimensions. [17:28] So in terms of the substance of the debate, [17:33] one of the most immediate consequences is that transformations lost their appeal and eventually just went away. [17:40] They were the major mechanism of linguistics for about 15 years, [17:44] and then because of this debate, [17:47] people started developing all kinds of alternative grammars, [17:49] like Lexical Functional Grammar and Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, [17:53] Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and so forth. [17:55] Other things like Relational Grammar and Word Grammar all kind of developed as alternatives to a transformationally driven grammar, [18:04] and eventually even Chomsky abandoned transformation. [18:07] So it reshaped linguistics really substantially, even though it seemed to start on a quite minor technical matter. [18:13] But it also enveloped a lot of quite a bit more substantial issues as the debate went on. [18:18] So the nature of cognition with respect to language. [18:22] The generative position was, there’s a universal grammar, [18:26] a language acquisition device, [18:28] some kind of genetically wired module [18:31] that just needs a little bit of exposure to language to grow a language. [18:36] It was literally one of the terms that Chomsky used about how language developed was, it just grew in the same way that an Adam’s apple will grow, or… [18:45] His argument was that humans grow arms and doves grow wings [18:48] because of genetic predispositions in the same way humans grow a language. [18:53] So all more or less hardwired, whereas arguments against Chomsky began to align against that position, this innate mechanism, [19:03] and notions of general-purpose cognition, [19:06] categorization, the influence of analogy and correlation, [19:10] pattern biases, embodiment, force dynamics, [19:14] the role of attention and memory, context. [19:17] All of those things began to develop in opposition to Chomsky and developed into full-fledged and interesting theories of linguistics, [19:27] the nature of meaning and representation. [19:30] So on the transformational grammar side, the Chomskyan side, [19:34] meaning was effectively propositional, compositional, [19:39] dictionary kind of meaning where you inserted words into propositions [19:43] and had rules that told you what those propositions meant, [19:46] versus an encyclopedic kind of sense of meaning [19:49] that any given use of a word calls upon a frame of knowledge around the use of that word. [19:55] So non-compositionality in terms of the representation of meaning, [20:00] even the representation of syntactic meaning, [20:04] which had traditionally been basically a kind of item-and-arrangement program [20:08] where you had rules that aligned words which sponsored propositions and so forth, [20:14] the whole notion of the relevance of rules versus kind of a symbolic attraction amongst terms. [20:20] So a lot of very substantial territory was covered that sort of developed out of that initial debate around deep structure. [20:29]

JMc: So if we turn specifically to your book, [20:32] what changes have you made between the first edition and this new edition, [20:37] and why did you think that a new edition was necessary? [20:41]

RH: Well, Oxford asked for a new edition. [20:44] The first one was quite popular, and I think, frankly, [20:48] although it was never articulated, I think, frankly, [20:51] there was also a sense that Chomsky is a major figure [20:55] who’s not going to be around forever, and when he passes, [20:59] there’s going to be a lot of attention paid to his work, [21:01] and Oxford, I think, wanted to be prepared by having this book about him [21:06] that had sold and got reviewed quite well in a new edition. [21:11] But for my purposes, it just struck me as an unfinished story. [21:16] I guess all history is unfinished. [21:18] But so the first book ends on two sort of notes. [21:20] One, the right of salvage, a really good term that Postal coined [21:25] in an interesting article called “The Rhetoric of Linguistics,” [21:28] “rhetoric” being used there as a pejorative, [21:30] not a way that a rhetorician would use it as a study of argumentation and persuasion, but still a really fun and insightful article. [21:37] So it ends on these two notes: the right of salvage and the greening of linguistics. [21:42] The right of salvage was mostly about Chomsky’s program adopting many, many positions that were either proposed or arose directly out of the work by generative semanticists. [21:53] So logical form, for instance, was a semantic representation that was developed by McCawley and Lakoff mostly, [22:01] and it starts to play a much bigger role in Chomsky’s linguistics after this. [22:06] Even such things as a logical form rule of quantifier raising [22:10] is basically an inversion of a rule of Lakoff’s called quantifier lowering. [22:16] So it’s basically a mirror image. [22:19] Also, the entire framework of Chomsky’s approach, [22:23] this is when the minimalist program with its basic property gets proposed, [22:28] which is effectively that grammar connects meaning and an output of some kind, [22:34] which is basically the model of generative semantics, the model that Postal in one of his papers called Homogeneous I. [22:40] So it’s basically a homogeneous series of transformations that take you from meaning to articulation. [22:47] Also, he abandoned deep structure eventually. [22:50] He abandoned transformations. [22:52] He adopted many of the claims. And when I say “he,” I mean his program. [22:56] So there was a type of rule that the generative semanticists proposed called global rules. [23:02] What global rules did, again, was a way of kind of saving the Katz-Postal Principle by being able to sort of give the semantic representation a kind of peek into the transformational cycle in certain sorts of ways. [23:15] And it kind of maintained the power of transformations that the Chomskyans were attempting to reduce, [23:21] and they were attacked really, really vociferously. [23:24] This is one of the clearest roles of obvious rhetoric in the debate, [23:29] in that virtually all the sins of generative semantics were hung around this notion of globality, [23:33] which was claimed to make the grammar and transformation in particular much, much more powerful when they needed to be restricted. [23:41] But Chomsky and the Chomskyans adopted many of these global proposals without calling them global proposals. [23:48] They attacked globality as a rhetorical phenomenon, [23:51] but still salvaged many of the developments in that line of argumentation. [23:56] So the basic structure of the Minimalist Program [23:59] — logical form, aspects of globality, the abandonment of deep structure, the abandonment of transformations — [24:05] all virtually without acknowledgment, or just very minimal acknowledgment [24:10] — things that came out of generative semantics. [24:12] I mean, the… Generative semantics began by arguing for the abolishment of deep structure. [24:17] Chomsky abandons deep structure and doesn’t even reference these arguments, just kind of sets it aside. [24:24] So that’s the right of salvage, the fact that much of the technical machinery of generative semantics lived on, [24:33] but lived on in Chomsky’s program. [24:36] The greening of linguistics is the inverse direction, the opening up of linguistics, [24:41] as opposed to the kind of retrenching of Chomskyan positions [24:45] — so, a kind of cracking of the Chomskyan hegemony. [24:49] I overstated that, I think, considerably in the first book, but… [24:52] So the greening of linguistics is the move away from the Chomskyan hegemony. [24:57] So the development of pragmatics, which you mentioned, that became really instrumental in generative semantics. [25:02] Many of the earliest pragmatic linguists came directly out of generative semantics. [25:08] The welcoming of functional and sociolinguistic argumentation, [25:12] which had been pretty much banned from the generative program as inconsequential, not fundamental to linguistics, [25:19] especially not fundamental to competence, linguistic knowledge, [25:23] which the Chomskyans focused on. [25:26] Evidence from psycholinguistics became considerably more important. [25:30] The generativist program tended to cherry-pick psycholinguistic argumentation. [25:35] So if it supported their positions, they would cite it, and if it didn’t support their positions, they would ignore it or denounce it, [25:41] and their positions might change in something that they endorsed, [25:45] they would then reject a little bit later on. [25:48] Whereas in this generative semantics outflow, the linguists that were moving in that direction would allow psycholinguistic arguments to drive their linguistic theories, [25:59] as opposed to only support it if they could manage to cherry-pick it in the right way. [26:03] Evidence from corpus studies, it was positively discouraged and scorned in the Chomskyan program, [26:10] but now evidence from corpus linguistics became important. [26:13] So all of that is the end of the story in the first edition of Linguistic Wars. [26:17] And what I wanted to do, but it just sort of caps it off as, this is a… The greening of linguistics is a sort of direction that’s opening up without any kind of consolidation, really. [26:28] But what I wanted to do was tell the story of how it did consolidate [26:33] into things like construction grammar, and frame semantics, and cognitive linguistics generally, [26:40] and also follow up the generativist story through a minimalism, [26:45] the FOXP2 story that looked like it supported universal grammar for a while, [26:49] looked like there was a grammar gene, and that got a lot of press. [26:54] The Daniel Everett Pirahã story that looked like it undermined recursion, [26:59] which is pretty much all that was left of the Chomskyans’ notion of universal grammar by the early 2000s. [27:06] And then, again, to follow up the development of frame semantics, construction grammar, cognitive linguistics more generally. [27:15] I also discounted Lakoff’s role, I think, Lakoff’s subsequent role, and I wanted to kind of restore that in a sense. [27:22] I presented Lakoff mostly as a kind of gadfly with a lot of intellectual insights, but no coherent program at all, [27:31] and that comes pretty directly out of Newmeyer’s Linguistic Theory in America. [27:36] And that’s, I think, pretty much how he looked in the early ’90s when I wrote Linguistics Wars, [27:43] but Lakoff, in correspondence and discussions with me, insisted that he was a much more influential linguist than I took him to be at the time. [27:51] And certainly, history has proved him right. [27:53] The cognitive linguistics program around things like image schema, [27:57] so-called conceptual metaphor theory, things of that sort, [28:00] Lakoff has been incredibly influential in. [28:03] So I wanted to acknowledge his role in the subsequent development of the field. [28:07] Also, Robin Lakoff, by the way. My treatment of her in the first edition is continuing the standard misogynist approach of downplaying the role of female scholars, [28:18] and in a sense, I kind of inherited it, but I should have known better. [28:22] And again, that’s something that George Lakoff insisted on in our correspondence, [28:26] especially after the dissertation that the book was developed on, [28:29] that I just didn’t give her enough credit. [28:31] But I continued not to give her enough credit in the first book. [28:34] I wanted to revisit that and give her more credit, especially on the influence of the field afterwards. [28:41] So I follow up the story further, and I attend to some of the players in more detail than I did initially. [28:48]

JMc: What changes do you think there’d be if there was a third edition in another 30 years? [28:54]

RH: Well, I’d have to look back in 30 years, right? [28:56] I don’t think I would have predicted — in fact, I didn’t predict — the kind of consolidation of cognitive linguistics in the first edition that transpired. [29:03] There were hints of it, but I thought it was mostly Langacker going to sort of have an alternate theory that was going to grow. [29:14] And Langacker certainly had been important, [29:17] but I wouldn’t have… I didn’t predict the kind of developments that followed. [29:22]

JMc: Or maybe I could put the question like this. [29:25] A lot of the central actors are still alive and more or less active, although, as you mentioned, people are starting to disappear. [29:35] Do you think that it’s still all too recent for us to really look back on this episode insightfully, [29:42] or do you think that when dusk descends and the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings and takes flight [29:48] that we’ll have a better view of what actually took place, what the actual significance of this episode is? [29:55]

RH: I guess at some point, history ends and we can maybe look back. [30:00] But no, I don’t think this moment doesn’t bring us a lot of insight into what came out of that dispute. [30:07] Again, I think a lot of important developments in linguistics of the 21st century, the shape it has, comes out of that debate, [30:15] so I think we can see what the effects have been. [30:18] And whether or not they continue or branch off in another direction, I wouldn’t want to speculate. [30:26]

JMc: OK, great. Well, thanks very much for answering those questions. [30:30]

RH: Thanks again for having me. It was fun. Again, I love the podcast. Thanks. [30:35]

In this interview, we talk to Chris Knight about Chomsky, pure science and the US military-industrial complex.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Radical Anthropology Group. YouTube channel | Vimeo channel

Allot, Nicholas, Chris Knight and Neil Smith. 2019. The Responsibility of Intellectuals; Reflections by Noam Chomsky and Others after 50 years, with commentaries by Noam Chomsky. London: UCL Press. Open access

Chomsky, Noam. 2016. ‘Chomsky responds to Chris Knight’s book, Decoding Chomsky’ Libcom

Chomsky, Noam, and Chris Knight. 2019. ‘Chomsky’s response to Chris Knight’s chapter in the new Responsibility of Intellectuals book’. Libcom

Knight, Chris. 2016. ‘John Deutch – Chomsky’s friend in the Pentagon and the CIA’. Libcom

Knight, Chris. 2016. Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics. Newhaven: Yale University Press Google Books

Knight, Chris. 2023. ‘The Two Chomskys: The US military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought?’ Aeon

Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1988. The Politics of Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:18] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re joined by Chris Knight, who is a senior research fellow in anthropology at University College London and a long-standing political activist. [00:33] These two strands of his work and striving come together in the Radical Anthropology Group, which Chris co-founded. [00:41] Among the group’s activities are a regular series of talks and lectures, which can be watched online on the group’s Vimeo channel. [00:49] The link is available on the podcast page. [00:52]

In a recent update on the podcast, we promised that we’d look at the history of linguistics in the Cold War period, [00:59] with a focus on how the social and political climate of the time may have helped to shape the field of linguistics [01:06] — that is, how this climate influenced what linguists took an interest in, how they approached their subject matter, human language, [01:13] and how they marketed themselves and their work. [01:17] Chris has produced some very provocative work that explores the relationship of the research of Noam Chomsky, perhaps the key figure of linguistics in this period, [01:27] to the U.S. military-industrial complex of the Cold War. [01:31] Chris has written about this most extensively in his 2016 book Decoding Chomsky, [01:37] but also in a number of articles that are referenced on the podcast page. [01:41] The great conundrum Chris seeks to resolve in these texts is how Chomsky could reconcile the fact that his research was paid for largely by the U.S. military [01:51] with his activism in opposition to the Vietnam War and in support of other left-wing causes. [01:58] So Chris, could you outline your views for us? [02:01] What was the relationship of Chomsky’s linguistic research at MIT to the U.S. military-industrial complex, [02:09] and what effect did this have on Chomsky’s approach to studying language? [02:15]

CK: Well, Chomsky was initially employed at MIT rather than, say, a more posh place such as Harvard because, being Jewish — and, as Chomsky put it, the anti-Semitism around being as thick as soup — it was easier for him to get a job at MIT, [02:33] and his initial employment was to work on a kind of craze of the time, actually: machine translation. [02:39] Chomsky, from the outset, realized that for machine translation to work, you’d have to have computers far more powerful with far greater memory than anything that was around at the time, [02:51] and he realized that, really, you just need a vast number of sentences, and you kind of average them out and work out what the probable meaning of it is. [03:00] I say “you,” “you” being a computer here. [03:04] And he wasn’t interested at all, and what was much more exciting to him, but also very exciting to the U.S. military, [03:12] was the idea that just possibly the human mind is itself a digital computer of some sort, [03:19] and that underlying all the world’s different languages was this simple code. [03:25] So Warren Weaver had — this great fixer and founder of all sorts of things going on in U.S. military, industrial plus intellectual relationships — argued that possibly… [03:37] He actually used the analogy of the Tower of Babel, that underneath all the differences, if you delve right down to the very basis of language, you’d find a simple kind of underlying code, [03:47] which Chomsky before long called universal grammar. [03:51] And why that was exciting to the military would mean that you could just possibly ask the generals during, say, a nuclear war to kind of talk to their missiles. [04:03] I say talk, probably they meant type on a keyboard to their missiles, [04:07] but you could talk in any of the world’s languages, and the missiles would kind of get it [04:11] because installed inside the missile or inside the bomber or other form of technology would be this kind of black box containing the principles of all the world’s different languages. [04:23] So that was an extraordinarily exciting and ambitious idea, and when Chomsky was invited to work on it, he more or less said, [04:31] “Well, I’ll work on the principle. I’ll work on the science. I won’t work on any practical applications. I won’t try to operationalize what I’m doing. [04:41] Anyone else wants to do that, that’s up to them.” [04:44] But because this is intellectually exciting and thrilling, in fact, that underlying all the world’s languages is a simple universal grammar, he promised to work on that. [04:54]

JMc: But isn’t it the case that Chomsky’s approach is rather formalist and that he’s interested in the structures of languages, [05:02] not necessarily in any semantic aspects? [05:05] So even if he could describe an underlying universal grammar of all languages, it would actually not be something that could be used in practice for the purposes of communication or for instructing machines. [05:20]

CK: Well, exactly. And actually, in order to clarify this, Chomsky was very anxious to draw a very sharp distinction between language’s social use — social conversation, social communication — and language as formal structure, [05:39] and in fact, sometimes argued that possibly the very word “language” was misleading. [05:43] His interest was, if you like, grammar. [05:46] And yes, I mean, that’s absolutely right, but the point I think I would make is that there was a cost to this, [05:55] because in the end, in order to draw the sharpest possible distinction between language as use and language as grammar, [06:05] he argued that language is essentially not communicative, that essentially language is the language of thought [06:12] and that the first human on the planet ever to, if you like, [06:16] speak in his own words was talking to itself. [06:20] So in order to absolutely ensure that he kept his politics apart from his work for the military, he stripped language of everything social. [06:31] And you can sort of see why that was kind of necessary, because anything social in language is likely to be not just social, but political, [06:39] and if it’s political, it’ll be political in a context which Chomsky would have thoroughly disapproved. [06:47] So to make quite sure that he wasn’t colluding with the U.S. military on a political or social level, strip out the social from language and leave just the forms. [06:58] And so language is, if you like, the language of thought. [07:01] Language isn’t for communication. [07:03] But of course, the moment you do that, you then wonder, well, [07:06] what’s grammar for, if it isn’t to make thinking externalised and therefore accessible to others? [07:12] I mean, do we really need grammar when we’re thinking to ourselves? [07:15] Obviously, that’s a huge philosophical debate, but I think most cognitive scientists these days would say, well, no, [07:21] grammar is precisely to make sure that what’s in your head gets out to other people — in other words, make sure that it’s externalised. [07:29] And of course, language for Chomsky is I-language, internal language. It doesn’t get externalised. [07:34]

JMc: But the formalist turn that Chomsky made wasn’t necessarily original to him, was it? [07:40] I mean, you know, what is often called American structuralism that immediately preceded his work in generative grammar – in particular, the school of the Bloomfieldians – already had a very formalist approach to language, [07:53] and that was couched in behaviourist terms, which Chomsky argued against. [07:57] But the actual processes of analysis where you concentrate just on the forms of language and describe the distribution as the Bloomfieldians did, [08:06] but then Zellig Harris, Chomsky’s teacher, and Chomsky himself, you know, talking about it in transformational terms, [08:12] this focus on pure form in language, without any consideration of meaning or use, you know, was something that the Bloomfieldians were already doing. [08:23]

CK: Well, yes, no doubt about that. [08:25] And of course, Zellig Harris, in many ways Chomsky’s teacher, [08:30] his project was to make text accessible to a computer, to make texts legible, and that was the whole point of his formalism. [08:39] So there’s no doubt that different forms of formalism were around. [08:43] And of course, in my book, I explain how actually you can trace that right, right back through Jakobson, right back to the Russian formalists, Russian formalism, [08:52] including the extraordinary poet Velimir Khlebnikov. [08:56] And that whole idea of formalism is to try at all costs to kind of rescue science, and linguistic science in particular, rescue it from politics, [09:06] because if you just have pure form, you can argue that you’re doing something on the level of astronomy. [09:13] I mean, E=MC2; is not politics, it’s just pure science. [09:17] And there’s something clearly liberating and inspiring about the idea of doing pure science uncontaminated by politics. [09:26] The point I’m making is that if we go to the extreme in that direction, [09:32] you just haven’t got language. [09:35] I mean, all I’m saying is that at the end of the day, language is social, it is communicative, [09:41] and if you strip away not only the politics, [09:43] but the social dimensions, what you’ve got is some form of computation. [09:49] But I would argue, and I think most people these days would argue as well… Including people who’ve been taught by Chomsky. I mean, Steven Pinker, I can think of hardly any linguist these days who would argue that language hasn’t got some necessary and intrinsic connection with communication. [10:04] So if we take it too far, what you’ve got might be interesting, but it’s just not language. [10:10]

JMc: Has Chomsky responded at all to your account? [10:14]

CK: Yes. I mean, we’ve had a very difficult relationship over the years. [10:20] I was one of the founders of EvoLang, along with Jim Hurford, and we had a big conference in 2002 in Boston at which Chomsky made the final sort of massive contribution at the end of the whole week. [10:32] And yes, he has responded. [10:35] When my book came out, he described it as a “vulgar exercise of defamation, a web of deceit and misinformation”. [10:44] “The whole story is a wreck… complete nonsense throughout.” [10:48]

JMc: That’s a direct quote, I take it. [10:50]

CK: These are direct quotes, yes. That’s right. [10:53] And I kind of rather proudly put those comments in the front of my book, because at least it was a response from Chomsky. [11:02] He argued that the reason why he’s legitimately describing it as a wreck is because, quote, no military work was being done on campus during his time at MIT. [11:16] Which is fine, except that he also says the following: [11:19] “There was extensive military research on the MIT campus. In fact, a good deal of the nuclear missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus.” [11:29] So what I’m saying is, the point I’m making about the just inescapable involvement with military technology and missile guidance technology, it’s not a point that Chris Knight makes. [11:42] It’s a point that Chomsky makes on numerous occasions. [11:45] And for some reason, I don’t know how to put this exactly, but Chomsky’s political admirers [11:51] — and of course I’m a huge admirer of his politics — [11:55] they’re always trying to find some connection between his linguistics and his politics. [12:00] They’re always trying to sort of say, Well, there must be something liberating about his linguistics and left-wing about his linguistics, in many cases. [12:07] And every time Chomsky came across activist supporters who asked him to explain that connection, he just got more and more impatient. [12:13] He just sort of shook his head. [12:14] “You’re not going to find anything politically inspiring in my linguistics. Forget it.” [12:18] And the Left just couldn’t kind of cope with this. [12:22] So how do I put this? [12:24] I mean, what I’m saying is that if you are a left-wing activist working in this military lab, [12:30] you’re going to need to draw a line between the two sides of your work. [12:38] I mean, just let me… I mean, a passage from my book, actually. [12:42] I describe how he became a friend of somebody called John Deutch, who before long was to become director of the CIA. [12:55] And Chomsky recalls, “We were actually friends and got along fine, although we disagreed on about as many things as two human beings can disagree about. [13:02] I liked him. We got along very well together. [13:03] He’s very honest, very direct. You know where you stand with him. We talked to each other. When we had disagreements, they were open, sharp, clear, honestly dealt with. I had no problem with him. I was one of the very few people on the faculty, I’m told, who was supporting his candidacy for the President of MIT.” [13:05] And so I’m just saying we need to appreciate the glaring contradiction here, because this is Chomsky’s view of the CIA. [13:31] “The CIA does what it wants. [13:33] It carries out assassinations, systematic torture, bombings, invasions, mass murder of civilians, multiple other crimes.” [13:39] In Indonesia, as Chomsky rightly points out, in 1965, the CIA organized a military coup to prevent the Communist party, described by Chomsky as the “party of the poor,” from winning a key general election. [13:53] The ensuing repression resulted in a staggering mass slaughter of perhaps half a million people. [13:58] So I mean, you know, you’re friends with a future director of the CIA, who’s a chemist involved in fuel-air explosives and other weapons of mass destruction. [14:10] You’re aware that the CIA is, from Chomsky’s point of view, a criminal organization. [14:16] You’re friends with, you have lunch with these people. [14:21] And then in the evening, you have a meeting with anarchists and revolutionaries and anti-capitalists and anti-militarists. [14:29] And I’m simply saying, can you see, you’re meeting with these people at lunchtime, in the evening, [14:34] you’re meeting with the opposite camps. [14:36] You wouldn’t want the anarchists present in your discussions with the future director of the CIA. [14:41] And when you’re at your anarchist meeting in the evening, I don’t think you’d want the director of the CIA to be publicly present in that meeting either. [14:47] You’ve just got to keep those two things apart, [14:50] and keeping them apart meant keeping apart different parts of Chomsky’s passion, Chomsky’s, if you like, his mind, his brain [14:59] — to the extent that when an interviewer said to him, “Well, there seem to be two Noam Chomskys. What do they say to each other when they meet?” [15:07] And Chomsky says there’s no connection. [15:10] There’s no connection between the two of them. [15:13] The connection is almost non-existent. [15:15] There is a kind of loose, abstract connection in the background, but practical connections are non-existent. [15:20] So he’s basically telling us that the two Noam Chomskys aren’t really on speaking terms. [15:26]

Okay, I mean, you’re in a difficult situation. [15:29] You want your job. You can do very good work in that job, but there are institutional contradictions. [15:34] And I’m not even saying that Chomsky should have not taken the job. [15:38] I mean, because by taking that job and becoming such a star figure in linguistics based in MIT, he then gained a platform from which to launch his assault on the U.S. military, beginning with the invasion of Vietnam. [15:53] So had he not had that job, he might have been like any other sort of activist on the street somewhere without that powerful voice. [16:00] By the way, I need to say how much we right now miss that voice. [16:06] It’s well known, of course, that for over a year now, Noam has been not well, and we have lost a voice of sanity in what I regard as an increasingly deranged political world. [16:21] It’s a huge loss. We would have benefited so much from Chomsky’s voice, [16:25] particularly in connection with Palestine and what’s going on today in Gaza. [16:30] I’m saying that simply to stress, I’m not even criticizing Chomsky. [16:34] I’m saying in a difficult situation, all of us have to make a living. [16:37] We all have to have a job. Whatever job we take, mostly it’ll be financed by some kind of corporation or capitalist outfit or another. [16:45] More than others, perhaps, Chomsky is just, his contradictions, if you like, all of us experience those contradictions — in his case, to an extreme extent. [16:57]

JMc: But I think Chomsky would perhaps argue, and you’ve touched on this point in a few of the things that you’ve said, [17:03] I think Chomsky would argue that there is such a thing as pure science, [17:08] that is, science as an activity that’s pursued without any political implications or interference, [17:15] and that whether someone is a good or a bad scientist has nothing to do with their politics. [17:22] And, I mean, if we follow this line of reasoning, we might even say that explicitly mixing politics and science [17:29] leads to such ridiculous outrages as the German physics of Nazi Germany, [17:34] the Lysenkoism of Stalinist times, or in linguistics to such things as Marrism. [17:40] So do you think that Chomsky is being disingenuous in insisting on pure science, [17:45] or do you think that he’s just mistaken? [17:49]

CK: I think the most important thing today is the autonomy of science. [17:56] Science is a collectivist form of knowledge. It’s accountable. It works on the basis of peer review. [18:02] If you take, say, for example, climate science, I mean, how much do we need science these days to have its own autonomous, independent voice? [18:13] I would think, and Chomsky would certainly agree with this point, which is that probably the survival of our species as well as the rest of the planet may depend on freeing science from politics, [18:25] and in particular making sure that genuine scientists accountable to one another, [18:30] to the scientific community, have a voice. [18:34] In order for climate science to have its voice, climate science itself has to be respected by political activists as the source of their inspiration. [18:45] In other words, we need politics to be subordinated to science. I think science needs to guide politics. [18:53] When it’s the other way around, when it’s politics which distorts and guides science for its own purposes, [18:58] of course that leads to the idiocies of Stalinism, Lysenko being, of course, the most famous example. [19:05] But how can science be autonomous without having some, if you like, political agency? [19:12] That’s the point I’m trying to make. [19:14] Now, Chomsky certainly wanted science to be autonomous, but he said that science has got no relevance to politics, [19:22] it’s another thing altogether. [19:24] Science, he argued, can make contributions as tiny fragments of knowledge, but it can’t put together any kind of big picture. [19:31] Climate science is putting together a big picture of what it means to be a living planet, what it means to be alive, [19:37] how we humans even exist today with our minds and bodies and languages as one of the many species on this planet going right back to the origin of life four billion years ago. [19:46]

JMc: So is your account of Chomsky’s linguistics essentially psychoanalytic in nature? [19:53] And by that I mean, do you think that Chomsky has subconsciously moved into abstract theorising to escape the possibility of his work ever being used in practice, for military purposes, [20:03] or do you think that he actually made a conscious decision to move into the abstract and away from any practical applications? [20:11]

CK: Well, I certainly don’t feel we need psychoanalysts to work these things out. [20:16]

JMc: I just mean, do you think that he’s made a conscious decision, or do you think that he’s not even aware of it himself [20:22] and you have revealed this underlying conflict taking place in his brain subconsciously? [20:28]

CK: I think Chomsky himself found it easier to do his science and to do his politics [20:37] and not worry too much about the connection. [20:41] When he was asked about it, he would usually discourage people from thinking there was a connection. [20:47] As you know, I regard the connection as not a simple one. [20:51] It’s a connection between opposites. [20:53] His science is doing one thing, his activism is doing a different thing. [20:58] His science is for one part of society, essentially for the U.S. military. [21:01] His activism is to contribute to the opposition to that same military. [21:08] And so we have a connection between opposites, if you like. [21:11] We have, of course, the classic term for that is the dialectic. [21:14] I quote in my book, Chomsky is saying that when he hears the term “dialectic,” he says, “I reach for my gun.” [21:20] He doesn’t like that whole concept. [21:21] Well, okay, I can see why you wouldn’t want to think that your science is the opposite of your politics. [21:27] But okay, to me, it’s just crystal clear that he’s right to say they have no connection, but he’s wrong to sort of deny this paradoxical connection. [21:38] Okay, Chomsky does say — and again, I quote it in the book — [21:42] he says, “One of the things about my brain,” his brain, “is, it seems to have separate buffers, like separate modules within a computer. [21:50] I can be on an aeroplane going to a scientific conference, and meanwhile, [21:55] I’m writing notes about the speech I’m to make at an activist event. [21:59] So my brain can be doing these opposite things at once.” [22:02] I mean, all of us can do that to an extent, of course, [22:04] but I would simply say, again, it’s not explicitly conscious. [22:08] It’s not out there. If it was out there, Chomsky would be proud of it, happy about it, explain it. [22:13] But you can see, can’t you, it would be very difficult for him to be public about it and out there. [22:19] I mean, it’d be very difficult for him to be explaining to an activist audience what he’s doing for the U.S. military. [22:24] It’d be very difficult for him to be having a meal with John Deutch and discussing his political activism against everything that John Deutch stands for. [22:32] It’s difficult. I can do it because I’m not directly involved. [22:35] I think for Chomsky it was difficult, but not for psychological reasons. [22:38] I think for essentially social, political, I think the best word is “institutional.” [22:42] I think it was an institutional conflict. [22:45] To some extent, all of us are involved in those conflicts. [22:47] We live in a certain kind of society, conflict-ridden society. [22:50] But Chomsky is probably the most extreme example of the consequences of those institutional contradictions and conflicts. [22:59]

JMc: So are the facts of your account contested at all? [23:01]

CK: No, not really. It’s all on record. [23:05] I don’t think there’s a single thing I’ve said about the military priorities of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, [23:14] I don’t think there’s a single thing in my book that hasn’t been said perhaps more cogently and powerfully by Chomsky himself. [23:24] But I first became aware of it many years ago, and it was Fritz Newmeyer’s book, The Politics of Linguistics, which drew my attention to all of this. [23:34] He quoted Colonel Edmund Gaines. [23:36] He interviewed this colonel to ask why the U.S. military at the time was sponsoring transformational grammar, Chomsky’s research and the research conducted by Chomsky’s colleagues, [23:50] and he said, “We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.” [24:01] So in the course of writing my book, I decided to ask some of Chomsky’s students working in the MITRE Corporation. [24:09] And of course, the MITRE Corporation is not exactly the same thing as MIT, but it’s closely connected with MIT. [24:15] It’s where the theoretical accomplishments in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, particularly the Electronics Research Laboratory, [24:23] get operationalized, get turned into practical applications. [24:26] I asked Barbara Partee what she was doing supervised by Noam in the MITRE Corporation, [24:32] and she told me that the idea was that “in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things,” [24:41] and “it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than teach the generals how to program.” [laughs] [24:49] It’s just such a beautiful quote. I mean, really, everybody knew what they were doing. [24:54] And Barbara Partee said that “we had sort of feelings of anxiety about the work we were doing,” because Barbara, as all Chomsky’s students, I think, were all pretty anti-militarist, [25:05] weren’t at all happy about what was going on in Vietnam at the time. [25:08] But there you are, they were doing this, and somehow, they managed to square what they were doing with their consciences [25:14] on the basis that it would be a very long time before you could actually, in practice, kind of talk to a missile and tell it, [25:22] “Go right. Go left. Hit the Viet Cong. Not there, you idiot. Go there,” [25:25] and talk to it in any language or type out on a keyboard in any language. [25:30] It was so far off in the future that somehow it didn’t matter too much that what they were doing was politically suspect. [25:37]

JMc: Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [25:40]

CK: Thank you very much, James. [25:42]

In this interview, we talk to Nick Riemer about how linguistic theory and political ideology can interact.

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JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:18] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re joined by Nick Riemer, who’s lecturer in linguistics and English at the University of Sydney in Australia, and also associated with the Laboratory History of Linguistic Theories in Paris. [00:35] Nick has a broad range of interests in the study of language, [00:39] most notably in semantics, history and philosophy of linguistics, and the politics of linguistics. [00:45] It’s these political dimensions of linguistic scholarship that Nick is going to talk to us about today. [00:51] His current project is a monograph on the politics of linguistics since Saussure. [00:58] So Nick, what have the politics of linguistics been like since Saussure? [01:02]

NR: Thanks a lot for inviting me on the podcast, James, and obviously, there’s no single answer [01:09] to that question. In fact, many linguists since Saussure have denied that there is any [01:16] connection between linguistics and politics. It’s a surprisingly common declaration that [01:22] you come across linguists making throughout the 20th century that these two things actually [01:28] have no connection. And it’s sort of reflected, I think, in the conventional historiography of linguistics. [01:36] I mean, you can tell me whether you agree with this, but it seems to me that the way we usually [01:41] talk about linguistics and politics is by talking about how particular ideas and theories [01:46] and frameworks in linguistics might reflect external trends in society and politics. It’s [01:54] often struck me that that’s a sort of overly passive way of construing the relationship, and it ignores [02:00] the fact that linguistics doesn’t just reflect what’s going on outside. It also contributes [02:06] to it, shapes it, plays an ideological function in reinforcing or challenging it. And that’s what [02:13] I’m interested in, in the period after Saussure. And I think the… to answer, to try and answer, your question a little bit [02:22] because the connections are just so vast and manifold, I think the key is to seeing linguistics [02:27] as a social practice, to seeing it not in idealist terms as a body of doctrine or discoveries [02:36] which unfolds according to its own internal logic, and in which the theorists and the [02:43] participants are these purely disinterested truth-seekers, but to see it as something [02:50] which unfolds largely in the context of higher education, in a social context where the players [02:56] themselves are engaged in political tussles internally within the field, but where the [03:02] discipline also does arguably perform various ideological and political functions. [03:10]

JMc: But why focus on linguistics? I mean, it’s a fairly niche discipline, isn’t it, within the university landscape? [03:17]

NR: Because I had the misfortune or the folly to become a specialist in part of linguistics, [03:24] and from that got on to taking an interest in the history and the philosophy of the discipline. [03:29] So, you know, to the man with the hammer, everything looks like a nail. So I’m just, in embarking on [03:35] this project, I’m, as we all do, working on what I know and what I feel I can make some [03:40] contribution to. Obviously, you can’t separate the history of linguistics from the wider [03:45] history of the human sciences and from wider intellectual history, even though for much [03:51] of the 20th century, especially its later part, I would say there has been a certain [03:56] isolationism in the discipline. [03:59] And it’s certainly notable, I think, that linguistics in the West was, to a large and surprising [04:08] extent, immune, for instance, from the waves of social critique and political critique [04:15] that swept over the rest of the humanities and the social sciences from the 1960s. [04:19] I mean, there were versions of that that did touch linguistics, but it has been a quite [04:25] sort of technical and scientific and rather sort of isolationist discipline, and I think that [04:32] performs an ideological function in itself, actually. [04:35]

JMc: OK, but do you think that that represents linguistics as an entire discipline or just [04:39] particular schools of linguistics? [04:42] Because, I mean, you could argue that linguistics as [04:45] a field has actually served as a model science, as a model to many of the other human sciences, [04:52] especially in the 20th century, and in fact that a lot of post-structuralist theory is a reaction [04:57] to structuralism, a body of doctrines that have come out of linguistics. [05:03]

NR: Yeah, absolutely it is, and there’s no doubt that structuralism was a pilot science, as it was [05:09] often called for… and had a massive influence, and there was this sort of linguistification of [05:15] the world that happened in the wake of structural linguistics, where it looked as though for [05:21] a while everything could be treated as though it was a language which operated on structuralist principles. [05:27] I mean, I suppose Lacan is the most celebrated version of that. [05:31] But at one point in the ’60s and ’70s, it looked as though everything had a grammar. [05:37] Music had a grammar, dance had a grammar, urban planning had a grammar—everything had a grammar. [05:42] And I think that’s one of the things that makes asking questions about the politics [05:46] of our ideas about language interesting, that language is a sort of model, as you say, [05:54] for a whole lot of other symbolic and also maybe non-symbolic domains, [06:00] so it’s interesting to inquire into the underlying political assumptions that might drive research into language structure. [06:12] Because if I… Perhaps I can just elaborate on that slightly. [06:15] I mean, you know, when we talk about language and politics and language in society, I think we’re really used to looking [06:21] at the obvious things, so we’re looking, we look often at the contribution of language to, [06:26] of linguistics to colonialism. [06:28] So, you know, its use as part of expert knowledge among, [06:34] among colonizers in the, in the service of control of colonial populations. [06:39] We look at language standardization, which is about a similar dynamic within the West, [06:47] the dispossession, the linguistic dispossession of subaltern classes by particular, you know, [06:54] certified registers of national languages, which were typically not the ones that were [07:01] spoken by, you know, rural and working class populations, but which was imposed on them as part of the project of, you know, universal primary education. [07:12] Language planning, you know, the way that language planning is done to serve particular political ends. [07:17] So that’s all very interesting, and I think in linguistics in general, we do have [07:23] a reasonable understanding of that. [07:24] And it’s certainly very salient, you know, linguistics and racism, linguistics and class exploitation. [07:31] These are well understood, but what we have less of a interest in, I think, [07:35] and which I myself find really worth exploring [07:39] is the way in which our basic structural ideas about the nature of grammar might be the product of, and might also [07:47] reinforce, particular ideological settings, which play a role in, for want of a better word, [07:54] Western European or Anglo-European capitalist modernity, [07:57] and I think there are a lot of interesting things that we can say about that. [08:01]

JMc: So if I might just query the specifics of your historiographic scheme, why do you start your discussion of the modern field of linguistics [08:11] with Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics? [08:13] So, I mean, there’s, of course, a tradition of treating Saussure’s Course as the founding scripture of modern synchronic linguistics, [08:20] but there’s also plenty of historical scholarship that shows that this is largely a convenient myth, [08:26] that there’s a great deal of continuity between Saussure and what came before him—and what came immediately before him, that is—namely the Neogrammarians, [08:37] and also that a lot of what is considered Saussurean is, in fact, later interpretation that people have made in setting up [08:48] Saussure’s Course as the scripture that they base, you know, all of their ideas on. [08:54]

NR: Yeah, I mean, it’s clear that, you know, there are lots of continuities, as you say, between the [08:59] Course, which of course wasn’t from Saussure’s own pen, but which was a retrospective reconstruction [09:04] by his colleagues on the basis of lecture notes, as we all know. [09:09] There’s an obvious continuity between that and the Mémoire on the vowel system. [09:14] There are similar sort of structuralist, for want of a better term, ideas that you can see in both of them, I think. [09:21] But to the extent that any starting point for any project is arbitrary, as of course it is, [09:28] I still think there are good grounds for starting with Saussure, because [09:33] retrospectively that text was imbued with an enormous weight in the structuralist period. [09:39] You know, maybe not immediately, but, you know, in the ’50s, certainly, people looked back to, [09:45] and earlier as well, people did look back to, you know, Saussure as the sort of founding charter of [09:51] this new intellectual movement, which was by no means just Saussurian, but which did appeal to [09:58] many of the ideas in the Course in General Linguistics as the starting point for this [10:03] exciting new way of thinking about language. [10:06] And I mean, if we just look at two aspects of Saussure, [10:10] I think we can, you know, see that there is a reason to take the Course seriously as a starting point. [10:18] One is the concept of synchrony, you know, the idea that there needs to be a break with the [10:24] predominantly sort of historical mode of investigation of language, which was true of [10:31] the comparative-historical method and then of Neogrammarians, [10:36] and the other is this abstraction that Saussure, you know, really popularized, or that the Course really popularized, [10:44] which is langue, you know, the idea that there is some kind of abstract formal structure at the heart [10:53] of language which can be meaningfully studied out of connection with actual acts of language use, [11:00] actual discourse, actual linguistic interchange. [11:04] And that really set the stage, I think, in important ways for the whole formalization, for the whole abstraction that became such a feature and [11:14] hallmark of ‘linguistic science’, quote-unquote, in the subsequent decades. [11:21] And there’s really interesting things, I think, that we can say about the ideological valency of both of those things, [11:29] this divestment that Saussure accomplished of language from the historical flow, the situated [11:37] historical flow of temporal, you know, human interaction embedded in all of those things which, [11:45] you know, give human interaction its particular characteristics: you know, our gender, [11:50] our ethnic background, our particular position in whatever speech community and society we’re in. [11:56] All of these things, Saussure was seen as providing a licence to ignore, or at least to background, [12:04] and I think we can see in that, you know, a particular, a recognizable move that we see widely, I would say, in bourgeois culture, [12:16] which is just a backgrounding of social conflict and social tensions and the class character of society, [12:23] and also particularly the problems of racialization and the racialization of different linguistic subjects. [12:29] All of that is largely backgrounded by the decision to look at this thing which is called langue, and to take language out of [12:37] the social contexts that it really surely belongs in, in a significant way. [12:43] So that’s one, I think, interesting way in which what became doctrine in linguistics did contribute to this image that [12:50] liberal society, that bourgeois liberal society, has of itself in the West, which is this [12:56] fantasy of a social homogeneity, and this backgrounding of society as this dialectical, [13:03] conflict-ridden, intrinsically contradictory thing, out of which, you know, transformative social [13:09] change could arise if we only let it. [13:13]

JMc: OK, but I mean, a counter-argument, or perhaps it’s not a counter-argument, [13:18] but one thing that has been said about this idea of la langue, or as it later became, in generative theory, competence—or at least Chomsky has argued that his notion of competence is a version of la langue (although that, of course, is controversial)—but one argument that has been made in support of that, which you may simply dismiss as bourgeois rationalization, [13:43] is that having this notion that everyone, all people, have exactly the same [13:50] linguistic ability, which manifests itself in competence, or in a langue, means that everyone [13:57] is the same. [13:58] So it’s a radically egalitarian move. [14:01] One way in which this argument has been deployed is in defence of Creole languages. [14:06] So Michel DeGraff, who is a generativist at MIT, [14:10] has argued that all humans have this capacity for language, and that it’s the same, [14:16] means that Creole languages are legitimate languages of the same kind as any standard [14:21] European language that might have lexified them, or any other language in the world. [14:26] So what would you say to an argument like that? [14:29]

NR: I mean, I think that’s certainly true. [14:31] It’s certainly true that, you know, the starting hypothesis of the generative enterprise is that [14:37] there is this thing which we have in virtue of our membership of the human species, which is this [14:42] unique uniform language acquisition device, or universal grammar, or whatever we want to call it. [14:48] I mean, some people have interpreted that as a sort of anti-fascist gesture, or anti-racist gesture, and I think it certainly lends itself to that, [14:56] although Chomsky has been very sort of toey about strongly drawing that connection between what he thinks of as his scientific enterprise, [15:06] and any kind of ideological or political conclusions that you could draw from it. [15:10] But I think the connection is there, and it’s obvious, and he doesn’t deny it either. [15:14] It’s also worth saying that it’s not unique to generativism. [15:17] I mean, there are plenty of people you can find in the history of linguistics before Chomsky [15:21] asserting strongly the universality of human language, and challenging the idea that some languages were primitive or less developed than others, so… [15:32]

JMc: Sure, but I raised this question at this point because I think that it [15:37] ties into the critique you made of langue, and by extension competence, as a bourgeois rationalization. [15:46]

NR: Yeah, the extent to which I think… I mean, it’s interesting to see what [15:51] led Chomsky into his distinctive mode of approach to linguistics. [15:57] And of course, what got him into it in the first place was his connection with Zellig Harris, [16:04] who was strongly identified with socialistic politics in the US in the ’40s. [16:12] So the very impetus for Chomsky’s whole model was a stringently left-wing one, which was about collectivism, and which was an anti-Bolshevik kind of socialism, I think. [16:28] So historically, to tie it to bourgeois politics in that way [16:32] does miss something important about at least the impetus that Chomsky had to get involved with that whole sort of project or to initiate that project in the first place. [16:44] And even if we can recognize that there’s this hypothesis of equality, which is just embedded there in the generative approach, [16:52] there’s another way in which it really does buy in, I think, to a characteristic ideological formation in late capitalism, [17:01] which is just its individualism, right? [17:04] It’s a highly individualistic way of approaching language, to the extent that Chomsky has quite often said, or Chomskyans have quite often, I think, said, that really, [17:14] we all have an individual idiolect. [17:18] So there’s this disavowal of the shared nature of language. [17:22] There’s also this idea that language ultimately isn’t about communication at root; it’s about the expression of thought. [17:28] So these are ideas which really put the focus on the individual and background social determinants of linguistic behavior in a way [17:38] that, for example, conversation analysis, which you’ve discussed on the podcast recently, tried to address in some ways, at least. [17:47] So that sort of hyper-individualism is, I think… it buys into a standard default way of conceiving of society in our kind of world, which is society as an aggregate of individuals. [18:01] I mean, Thatcher famously said there’s no such thing as society, and it’s famous, [18:05] but in a way, linguists have been saying that for decades before it came out of Margaret Thatcher’s mouth. [18:12] And it’s interesting to think of linguists not just saying that, [18:17] but saying that in lectures to very large numbers of undergraduates and saying it with the authority [18:25] or claiming the authority of science for it in the way that Chomsky claims the authority of science. [18:30] And I think it’s interesting to ask what kind of ideological contribution our discipline is [18:37] making to the maintenance of this whole deeply exploitative, deeply ecocidal economic order, [18:45] which is catapulting us into environmental destruction and social upheaval and permanent war. [18:52] What is the contribution of linguists and of the discipline to that ideologically? [18:57] And that’s one of the questions that I want to ask—not blaming linguistics for everything by any means (that would be ludicrous), but just acknowledging that this thing we do, this [19:07] discipline that we’re in is caught up with all of these things in ways that have often been disavowed [19:13] or at least silenced under this claim of scientificity that we like to make. [19:19]

JMc: Sure. But I mean, radical individualism of the Chomskyan kind could also be an anarchist move, right? [19:25] It’s not necessarily neoliberal. [19:27]

NR: No, no, it’s not. And that is obviously the political affiliation that Chomsky has claimed for it. [19:33] And, you know, he’s said with respect to… I mean, he was a member of the [19:39] Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies. [19:41] So, you know, his political affiliations, formally speaking, absolutely aren’t in doubt, [19:46] but, you know, ideology has this nasty way of escaping from you. [19:50] And it is interesting to think about, you know, the… I mean, Chomsky has just been… [19:58] He’s had this schizophrenic split, of course, between his linguistic work and his political activism, which has been, in my view, you know, exemplary in many ways, [20:10] and he has… [20:11] He certainly cannot be accused and shouldn’t be accused of being on the wrong side. [20:15] I mean, you know, he has doggedly fought against, you know, US power, for example, doggedly fought against, [20:25] you know, the abuses of Zionism, to give another example, doggedly fought against, [20:29] you know, interference by the US in the governments of the developing world. [20:34] So, you know, his politics are not in doubt. [20:38] But what is in doubt is the ideological tenor or valency of this model that he contributed to. [20:44] And, you know, if we look at people like George Lakoff or Steven Pinker, for example, you know, they’re perhaps the two neo-Chomskyans or people with Chomskyan linguistics in their background [20:58] who’ve most explicitly contributed to political discourse and have tried to weigh into political debate in the US, [21:06] and it’s interesting to look at how they do that. [21:08] You know, Lakoff has done it in the favour of, in my view, [21:11] completely dead-end Democrat politics of the most sort of counterproductive kind. [21:21] Pinker is a neo-reactionary of a very clear stripe, yet they both have, you know, [21:29] adopted those individualistic, highly intellectualist approaches to politics, [21:34] which I think have their roots in Chomskyan ideas about the nature of the mind. [21:40]

JMc: So if I can just ask one more question, do you think these developments in linguistics of having [21:46] an abstract notion of la langue, which is examined synchronically, so separate from any notion of history, are entirely internal to the discipline, [21:55] or do you think that there are external forces [21:57] that might have helped to shape this image of language that linguists support, such as technological developments in the 20th century? [22:05]

NR: Yeah, well, that’s an interesting question, and obviously any kind of answer is speculative. [22:11] But one of the things that we can say about the context [22:14] in which, you know, important thinkers in the 20th century developed their ideas about language is [22:18] that it was a context of the progressive and sort of galloping autonomization of language from human speakers. [22:28] So you see that in the development of broadcast technology, of things like the telex, [22:34] of things like the networked computer, and then more recently of, you know, technological [22:40] innovations like, you know, automatic text generation, text translation, you know, AI. [22:48] So there is this sense in which throughout the 20th century language is being increasingly [22:53] separated from its base in live human interaction, and I don’t think we have to be, you know, [23:00] starry-eyed romantics to see that as the natural niche of language. [23:06] It is in embodied, socially situated interaction. [23:11] And ever since Gutenberg, or ever since the invention of writing, [23:13] in fact, linguistics has been in part of this dynamic of this increasing and now, as I said, [23:20] galloping autonomization, you know, the freeing of language from bondage to actual flesh-and-blood speakers, [23:27] you know, the emancipation of language from the spoken word, which has just gathered pace astonishingly. [23:35] And I do think that notions like langue and competence can be seen as part of that dynamic, this idea that language is at root an abstract system. [23:46] And I think it was, no doubt, in complicated ways, reinforced by that, at least. [23:52] And I also think that there’s another interesting angle here, maybe, which is that one of the things that we… [24:00] One of the ways we typically talk about language, we talk about ourselves as using language, [24:06] and this increasing reification of language, this way that linguists increasingly had [24:14] of hauling language out of its interactional basis in interaction between people, and of [24:21] treating it as this, you know, mathematizable formal system, this is reification writ large. [24:27] And what I mean by that is the treatment of something which is fundamentally a social process [24:33] as a thing, which can be, you know, manipulated by a sovereign subject, by a subject who is free [24:41] and rational, and able to just use this system to achieve its own goals and to achieve its own ends, [24:49] in the ideal case, and in the case that’s assumed, in a way that’s pretty much free of social determinants. [24:55] You know, we’ve got the linguistic system out there at the disposal of [25:01] the free linguistic subject, who’s like Homo economicus in the linguistic domain. [25:07] You know, they just make a rational means-end calculation. [25:10] They use whatever words best express whatever ideas they have in their head, which are aimed at achieving their particular interactional ends, [25:18] you know, getting what they want. [25:20] That, I think, has been the sort of model of language that is often not articulated as crassly as that, though sometimes it is. [25:28] But I think it underlies so much of the way we think about language, and it’s particularly not challenged by so much of, you know, scientific linguistics. [25:38] And that reification, I think, participates in this same sort of ideological complex that I’ve been talking about, in that it feeds in and reinforces, [25:47] and does reflect, this view we have of what society is under capitalism, [25:53] which is this collection of rational individuals who are unconstrained in using their intelligences to [26:01] improve their particular individual situations, in competition often with other people. [26:08] And our view of language just buys into that very uncritical, very, you know, unsociological, [26:18] very sort of Pollyannaish conception of the way society works, where society is not something [26:24] which is fundamentally riven with class conflict, but where it’s something where there are [26:29] free agents who, sure, are in competition with each other for various goods, but they’re in [26:34] competition on an individualistic basis, and everything that we need to say about them [26:39] can be understood as rational. [26:41] So, you know, that’s the other really striking thing about linguistics in the 20th century. [26:45] It’s hyper-rationalism, it’s hyper-intellectualism, [26:48] the way that emotions just got screened out, but maybe we can talk about that another day. [26:53]

JMc: Yeah, OK. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [26:56]

NR: Thanks very much for having me, James.

In this interview, we talk to Ingrid Piller about her forthcoming co-authored book Life in a New Language.

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Kachru, Braj B. 1985. ‘Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle’, in English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures, ed. Randolph Quirk and Henry George Widdowson, pp. 11–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Piller, Ingrid. 2023. ‘Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower’. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/scholarly-sisterhood-collaboration-is-our-academic-superpower/

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language [00:13] Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:18] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re joined by Ingrid Piller, who’s Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Australia. [00:29] Ingrid has many different areas of expertise within the vast field of applied linguistics, [00:35] including in intercultural communication, language learning, multilingualism, and bilingual education. [00:42] Ingrid’s also the co-founder and one of the leading contributors to the multi-author scholarly [00:48] blog Language on the Move, which has recently branched out into a podcast, [00:54] and she’s going to talk to us today about her latest book project, a collective volume [00:59] that she’s co-edited with several colleagues from Language on the Move, about the experience [01:05] of learning a new language and making a new life in that language after migrating to another [01:10] country. [01:11] This book will appear soon with Oxford University Press under the title Life in a New Language. [01:18]

So Ingrid, to get us started, could you tell us a bit about your forthcoming book? What [01:22] is it about, and what approach does it take? [01:25]

IP: OK, well, thanks, James, for having me on the show. [01:29] So Life in a New Language, first thing I should say, it’s not a co-edited book, but a co-authored book. [01:35]

JMc: OK. [01:36]

IP: And I think that’s really special about it. [01:40] So it answers the question: what does it mean to start a new life through a new language [01:48] and what kind of settlement challenges do new migrants face? [01:53] And this is a question that myself and my students and my Language on the Move colleagues, [01:59] as you’ve said, has been a key research question for us over more than 20 years. [02:07] And in the late 2010s, a couple of us were getting together and were saying, ‘Well, look, [02:15] we’ve got a number of really interesting but separate studies, and we’ve collected all [02:21] these data, we’ve interviewed and sat with and spent time with and conducted participant [02:27] observation with so many migrants from so many different contexts over so many years. [02:35] Why don’t we actually get together and reanalyse those data?’ [02:39]

And so methodologically, it’s a real innovation in that we are actually reusing data from [02:46] existing sociolinguistic ethnographies, and so it’s a data-sharing project, and there [02:54] are six projects from which we bring together data. [03:01] So there is one that I started in the early 2000s at the University of Sydney, and that [03:11] was an ethnography with highly achieving second language learners. [03:16] So at the time, I was particularly interested in people who had learned English to such [03:22] high levels that they could pass for a native speaker, and so that was the first cohort of people who went into it. [03:31] Then another PhD, data from a PhD that focused on the experiences of European migrants to [03:38] Australia, that was done by Emily Farrell and completed in 2010. [03:46] Then three other PhDs completed here at Macquarie University, one by Vera Williams Tetteh about [03:54] the language learning and settlement experiences of African migrants to Australia, [03:59] one by Shiva Motaghi Tabari about the experiences of Iranian migrants, and she was particularly focusing [04:11] on parenting and heritage language maintenance in that context. [04:16] And then data from another sociolinguistic ethnography with female migrants and how… The focus [04:23] of the PhD was on how gender influences the migration experience. [04:29] And then the sixth project that went into it was a project that was funded by a New Staff Grant here at Macquarie University to Loy Lising [04:38] about the experiences of skilled migrants from the Philippines [04:44] who arrived here under a temporary skilled work visa and went [04:49] straight into workplaces and what their experiences were. [04:53]

And so we brought all these data together that we’d collected for separate projects. [04:58] I mean, I have to say, I was involved in all of these projects. [05:01] I either was the PhD supervisor or the researcher or the sponsor or mentor of the research. [05:08] So I was involved in all of these. Even so, they were actually… I mean, in hindsight, [05:13] they were very disparate and some of the challenges in terms of data sharing, you only notice [05:19] them like in hindsight. ‘Oh, if we’d done this more consistently or that more consistently, would have been easier.’ [05:26] But anyway, so we set ourselves the challenge of actually bringing all this data together [05:32] and reanalysing them with a new set of research questions focused on language learning experiences, [05:41] interactional practices, like how do you make friends, how do you actually find someone [05:45] to talk to? Which is a not trivial problem. Experiences of finding work; that was relevant [05:53] to everyone. Regardless of how we had originally set up the research, everyone wanted to talk [05:59] about… I mean, we have so many data about finding work and not finding work at the [06:03] level you want to find work, then experiences with making family in a new context because inevitably your family changes, right? [06:13] Some people are left behind, but even like the people with who you migrate, you know, [06:19] your relationship changes, new challenges arise like parenting, bilingual parenting, [06:24] do you pass on the heritage language, do you focus on English, experiences with racism [06:31] and experiences with belonging — how do you create belonging and a sense of connection? [06:37] And so these were the research questions we asked of these data and so overall now [06:44] we then have an analysis based on data with 130 migrants from 34 different countries [06:54] on all continents, pretty much over a period of 20 years, the earliest of these arrived [07:02] in Australia in 1970 and the last to arrive was someone who arrived in 2013. [07:12]

JMc: But in every case the country that they moved to is Australia, is that correct? [07:17]

IP: Yes, that’s correct, yeah. [07:18]

JMc: And do you think language is a key feature of the migrant experience that you’ve analysed? [07:25]

IP: Yeah, so, I mean, we’re only looking at migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, so all of them had to learn English. [07:33] So that was a key feature of their experience because, you know, when you move to a new [07:41] country where even if you’ve learned the language for a long time, you now need to do things [07:48] through that language, and so that’s the dual challenge, right? [07:52] You need to still learn the language and extend your repertoire or some people arrive with [07:57] pretty much zero English, so you learn English, but at the same time it’s not like you’re [08:03] in a classroom. [08:04] You’re in real life. [08:06] You need to achieve things, you need to be able to rent a house, to find a job, to interact with customers, to, you know, go to the supermarket, [08:18] maybe go to hospital, maybe have an emergency, but even also accomplish really trivial things. [08:25]

We start with one trivial-sounding example that has really deep repercussions for the participants. [08:36] So this is the story of a young woman from Japan who arrived in Australia when she was [08:42] in her late teens, and the idea was for her to come here to, you know, improve her English, essentially. [08:49] So she had learned a bit of English back in Japan, and when we first met her, she had been [08:56] in Australia like 10 years or so, so after the study abroad experience, she had actually [09:02] settled down, and one of the… [09:04] She had this traumatic memory of the first year of her [09:10] time in Queensland that she was only able to drink apple juice and it was like this [09:16] absurd trauma, like, ‘Oh, I could only drink…’ No, sorry, not apple juice, orange juice. [09:22] So why only orange juice? [09:24] And she goes, ‘Well, I never liked orange juice, but whenever I asked for apple juice, no one ever understood me.’ [09:31] And so we kind of reconstructed that probably apple juice would have sounded something like, in a very Japanese accent, something like ‘apuru juice’. [09:41] And you know, I mean, she didn’t utter that word randomly. [09:45] She always asked it in the context of some hospitality encounter, but no one ever understood [09:51] her and so people would shout back like, ‘What?’ [09:54] And, you know, she imitated this like loud kind of people being rude or saying this rapid-fire, ‘What do you want?’ And, you know, so… [10:03] She never got… Or just, you know, ignoring her. [10:09]

So all she could ever drink for the longest of time was orange juice, but that was sort [10:13] of the example for actually being ignored, being, you know, not given opportunities [10:22] to learn the language when you are actually there in real life. [10:26] So people are not necessarily sympathetic to adult language learners. [10:31] I think that’s the other challenge because as adults, you know, we’re supposed to be competent. [10:36] You want to… You’re not focused on your language. [10:41] That’s for little kids. [10:43] You know, I mean, we set up the world for children so that they actually learn language [10:49] at the same time that they are being socialized into whatever it is that a child needs to do. [10:56] But a child really has, you know, huge responsibilities. [11:01] And so when, as an adult, you’re kind of thrown back to that language learning situation where [11:08] you’re basically in the shoes of the little child, except you have responsibilities, you [11:15] have serious things to do, and you’re supposed to be competent to know how to order a drink [11:21] in a restaurant, right? [11:22] I mean, that’s… No one gives you any… cuts you any slack there. [11:28] And so that sort of encapsulates the story, encapsulates the challenge that all our participants [11:36] experienced, really, to regain their adult competence through a medium that they were [11:45] still learning, going along, mastering. [11:49]

JMc: And do you think you could make any generalizations from these studies [11:52] to the migrant experience sort of internationally? [11:56] Because in some ways, maybe Australia and other English-speaking countries are a special [12:00] case, because English has this status today internationally as a sort of neutral default [12:07] language that is used in international encounters. [12:10] So do you think that the experience in Australia can be generalized more broadly? [12:14]

IP: Yes and no. [12:16] So no in the sense that, as you’ve pointed out correctly, English is a very different [12:23] beast than any other language, [12:25] and hardly any of our participants really arrived with zero English. [12:32] Some had learned English for years and years and years as a foreign language, and you and [12:40] your listeners are probably familiar with kind of Kachru’s circle model of English. [12:46] And we sort of used that as a guide because it was really quite helpful in the sense [12:51] that some people come from these postcolonial societies where English has some official [12:57] status and they had all encountered some English, [13:02] but in those contexts English is strongly associated with formal education. [13:08] And so we have people, particularly from African postcolonial countries, who actually had [13:15] a lot of oral proficiency in English, had a lot of experience actually communicating [13:21] multilingually, picking up new languages as they kind of went along. [13:28] And they arrive in Australia, and all of a sudden their English no longer counts. [13:36] That high oral proficiencies that they have, they’re not recognized, so all that people [13:43] seem to see in them is either that they are low literacy, because some of them had very [13:48] disrupted education, or if they did have good levels of formal education, still they were [13:56] often treated as if their English wasn’t real or as if no one could understand them. [14:01]

So we have this example, for instance, from a participant from Kenya who actually had [14:08] all her education through the medium of English. [14:12] I mean, her English was, she had a slight kind of East African accent, but essentially [14:18] it was British English. [14:19] I mean, it was more formal than the way most Australians speak English. [14:23] And she had this experience that she was applying for a job in some customer-facing role, and [14:33] then the person who interviewed her said, ‘You know, you’re fantastically qualified, [14:38] but you know what, I can’t actually give you that job because my clients won’t understand you.’ [14:46] And there really is no way this was a problem of understanding, because, I mean, if you [14:56] hadn’t seen her, then you would have understood. [15:01] So it’s this kind of McGurk effect problem that you judge the proficiency of people also [15:08] on their embodied identity and what kind of stereotypes you may have about that embodied identity. [15:18]

So going back to these multilingual experiences, the other thing that I’ve said about this [15:24] group from the postcolonial countries where English has an official status, so they were [15:30] highly multilingual, and they were really quite used to learning new languages. [15:35] There was nothing special to them, as it often is sort of in Western contexts. [15:41] However, in Australia, all of a sudden, that didn’t work anymore, because it wasn’t this [15:47] kind of multilingual repertoire that people could build on, but it was all this monolithic [15:54] monolingual English, [15:57] and so although they had a lot of English, still the kind of English that they brought [16:05] was very different from the kind of English that was needed here, [16:10] and so that created all kinds of challenges and mismatches, particularly in terms of education, [16:17] in terms of credentialing, in terms of finding jobs. [16:21]

And the other group that we had were from countries that would conventionally call countries [16:27] in the expanding circle. [16:29] So they had learned English through the school system, like as a school subject, often over many years. [16:36] They’d done tests and tests and tests. [16:38] In fact, the testing was reinforced by Australian migration regulations [16:44] that actually in order to get a Skilled Independent visa, you need to demonstrate a particular proficiency level of English. [16:53] So these people actually, they came to Australia, they felt, ‘My English has been certified [16:58] by the Australian state, you know. I’ve got a visa on the strength, amongst other things [17:05] of course, that my English is OK. [17:07] So I have certified competent English.’ That gets you like 10 points for the visa. [17:13] And then they arrived and they had this huge shock because they felt they couldn’t understand anything. [17:20] So they didn’t have the kind of oral proficiency or communicative competence. [17:24] And some of them were saying it’s because, you know, Australian accent is so different. [17:29] It’s not Oxford English or whatever kind of British or American English they’d learned. [17:34] But it was also just really, you know, being in different communicative situations. [17:41] Like for instance, one of our participants told us the story about how she arrived in Australia and needed to get a phone. [17:49] And she had very high IELTS level, goes to get a phone, and just, ‘I didn’t understand a word [18:01] of what that salesperson was saying to me.’ [18:03] Just couldn’t get a phone, right? [18:06] And that seems like a trivial thing, [18:09] but again, you know, the kind of English that people bring is very different from what you [18:15] actually need in real life, so to speak, or in this kind of real life. [18:22] So in that sense, English or the language learning and settlement challenges are also [18:27] similar to learning another language. [18:31] Whatever kind of proficiency you bring, you will have a whole lot of adaptation challenges. [18:38] But there’s no doubt about it that for most other languages, people start at zero or [18:46] are likely to start closer to zero than they are for English. [18:50]

JMc: Yeah. [18:51] Or perhaps other postcolonial languages like perhaps French. [18:55]

IP: That’s right. [18:56]

JMc: And you’ve sort of touched on this point, but do you think it’s fair to say that migration [19:01] is not just about a person or people being transplanted from one land to another, but [19:07] is a formative process that affects the identity not only of the person who’s migrated to the [19:14] new country, but of the society that they move into? [19:18] So are there any generalizations that we can make about that, [19:21] about how migration and identity and language interact with each other? [19:27]

IP: Yeah, look, absolutely. [19:29] So that’s what we try to say in the title. [19:32] You start a new life, right? [19:34] Migration, in many ways, is a break with your former life. [19:40] It’s a break with the daily habits you had. [19:43] It’s a break with the career you might have built. [19:49] It’s a break with your family and friends, your social circles, because they will be away. [19:58] I mean, even if nowadays where we have all these virtual contacts and social media, which [20:03] weren’t available for many of our people in the participants in the early migration [20:10] phase, even then, you no longer have this actual face-to-face contact, and having… [20:19] Even if you maintain daily contact with someone left behind on WhatsApp, it’s [20:23] very different from actually being in the same place with that person and being able [20:29] to do things together, to have a meal together, to just sit together. [20:34]

So in that sense, migration is a fundamental break. [20:38] And you have to re-establish yourself. [20:40] You have to re-establish your routines, understanding your neighborhood, all your financial, socioeconomic responsibilities. [20:52] You have to build a new home. You have to find new… So if you… [20:58] I mean, one other generalization I would say, I would make, is, there was a clear difference between [21:04] people who migrated as individuals and those who migrated with a partner or as part of [21:09] a couple or couple with children. [21:13] So that really makes a difference in terms of whether they had a ready-made partner available, [21:23] whether they maintained the language, and so on and so forth. [21:26] But even if you migrate as a couple, the couple relationship changes, because… [21:32] Like one thing that many of our African participants in particular said, at home, you have a lot [21:39] of support for looking after the children and keeping house, and there would always [21:45] be other family members and mothers and sisters, and that would be a lot of help, particularly for women. [21:54]

Many of the women really found themselves in more traditional gender roles post-migration [22:00] than they were pre-migration, regardless of where they were from. [22:04] Partly that had to do with, you know, that there’s just much more reproductive labor [22:10] that needs to be done after migration, because you may no longer have that help, but also… [22:19] like maids may no longer be affordable or something like that. [22:22] So there is more work to do, and it’s just the two of you or even the one of you. [22:27] So that was a problem then, because many, actually most, of our participants, if they [22:35] already had professional qualification, their professional qualification was unlikely to [22:41] be accepted or re-accredited at the same level in Australia, and women in particular ended [22:48] up either just kind of doing jobs instead of re-establishing their career or, you know, [22:57] deciding that actually this was now the time for them to become homemakers and just concentrate on their families. [23:06] And so that’s why so many women ended up in more traditional gender roles, very surprisingly. [23:14]

JMc: To get back to sort of the methodological questions about your study, could you tell [23:19] us a little bit more about the data you’ve recorded in the ethnographies that form the basis of the book? [23:25] So what form do the data take? [23:28] And you mentioned that you’ve tried to make the data open and reusable. [23:34] How does this work with qualitative data? [23:37] Because it’s not just numbers that you can run through a Python script. It’s something [23:41] that has to actually be read and interpreted. [23:43]

IP: OK, so when I say ‘open’, we’re not making the data openly accessible. [23:52] We were sharing the data amongst ourselves, if you will, so we created a joint dataset, [24:00] but we’re not going to make that openly available for all kinds of reasons, including that we [24:08] don’t have the ethics approval to do that and we have actually really no clue how we would anonymize that. [24:16] So there is no intention to make the full data set available as an open data set. [24:23] So the data sharing is sort of amongst our projects, the projects that came together in that book. [24:31] Now your other question, what kind of data do we actually have? [24:34] So that’s really sort of your whole gamut of ethnographic data from participant observation data, [24:45] recordings of naturally occurring conversations, interviews, lots and lots of individual and [24:53] group interviews, formal and informal interviews. [24:58] In some cases, we ask participants to keep diaries of particular experiences, so we have those data. [25:09] We have all kinds of artifacts that they engaged with or that they shared with us. [25:16] So yeah, that’s the corpus, essentially. [25:19]

JMc: So the sort of, the sharing within your group comes about through a shared practice of analysis [25:24] and discussion of how the various forms of data can be analysed. [25:30]

IP: That’s correct. [25:31] Plus we did actually create a specific corpus based on bringing together all these data. Yeah. [25:39]

JMc: Yeah. OK. Those are all the questions I was going to ask. [25:42] So thank you very much for answering them. [25:44]

IP: Well, can I just say the book will come out online in May, and then the actual physical [25:52] book should be out by June, so watch this space. [25:56]

In this interview, we talk to Dan Everett about the life and work of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and Everett’s application of Peirce’s ideas to create a Peircean linguistics.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts

Cole, David. 2023. “The Chinese Room Argument”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), eds. Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/chinese-room/

Everett, Daniel L. 2012. Language: The Cultural Tool. New York: Pantheon Books.

Everett, Daniel L. 2017. How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention. New York: Liveright.

Everett, Daniel L. 2023. ‘Underspecified temporal semantics in Pirahã: Compositional transparency and semiotic inference’, in Understanding Human Time, ed. Kasia M. Jaszczolt, pp. 276–318. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, [00:15] online at hiphilangsci.net. There you can find links and references to [00:19] all the literature we discuss. Today we’re joined by Dan Everett. Dan is Professor [00:25] of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley College in Massachusetts. His background is in field [00:31] linguistics and linguistic theory, and he’s of course best known for his work with the [00:37] Pirahã in the Brazilian Amazon. The conclusions he’s drawn about the structure of the Pirahã [00:43] language have significant consequences for much of mainstream linguistic theory, especially [00:49] for generative grammar in the Chomskyan tradition. These consequences have been debated extensively. [00:56]

At the moment, Dan is researching most keenly the life and work of the American philosopher [01:01] Charles Sanders Peirce. This project is not unrelated to his work on Pirahã and his previous [01:08] contributions to linguistic theory. These various threads are now coming together in Dan’s proposal [01:15] for a Peircean linguistics, and this is what he’s going to talk to us about today.

So to set the [01:22] scene for us, can you tell us, who was C.S. Peirce? What were his intellectual contributions, [01:29] and why are they important?

DE: I’m actually writing a biography of Charles Sanders Peirce for [01:35] Princeton University Press, and I’ve been interested in Peirce now for about six years [01:42] seriously, and before that I did cite him quite a bit in my How Language Began from 2017 and [01:51] also in my Language: The Cultural Tool from 2012, but I got seriously interested in Peirce [01:59] some years later. The first time I heard about Peirce, and then I’ll get to who he is, was [02:05] actually from Chomsky, who called him his favorite philosopher and talked about the [02:10] Peircean concept of abduction, which is the formalization of hypothesis formation. [02:16]

Charles Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Benjamin and Sarah Peirce in 1839. [02:26] Benjamin was for 50 years professor of mathematics at Harvard and was considered the leading [02:33] mathematician in the United States and the person who put U.S. science on a nearly equal footing [02:41] with the European science of mid-19th century, and he was a very interesting person in his own [02:47] right, founder of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement [02:53] of Science, co-founder.

Charles was raised in Harvard Yard. When he was a boy, they lived [03:02] actually in Harvard Yard, and his friends and his father’s friends were some of the leading [03:07] intellectuals of the United States, and later as Peirce grew, his own friends became leading [03:15] intellectuals and friends of people such as Thomas Huxley and others.

But Charles initially became [03:23] interested in logic and chemistry, and for most of his life… The only degree that he actually ever held [03:33] was in chemistry. He held a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from [03:41] Harvard, and he was then hired as an astronomer and as a geophysicist with what was then called [03:51] the U.S. Coastal Survey, which is now NOAA. They actually launched a ship called C.S. Peirce. [03:59] So he got mainly interested in logic, but he was also one of the greatest polymaths in history. He [04:07] was the first person in the United States to do experimental psychology. He was the inventor of [04:15] propositional and first-order logic with quantifiers, nearly simultaneously with Frege. [04:20] They didn’t know about each other’s work. Peirce is also known as the inventor of American pragmatism, [04:26] or just pragmatism. That’s a philosophical school of America that is often associated with [04:30] William James. He is the inventor of semiotics, and there’s evidence that Saussure actually [04:38] was able to consult some of Peirce’s work on semiotics before he came out with his own work [04:44] on semiotics, which was very different and designed for a very different purpose. [04:51]

So in mathematics, Peirce took his father’s place as the number one mathematician in the United [04:57] States, and there are many articles on mathematics. So he was a phenomenal polymath. He was one of the [05:03] leading Egyptologists in the world, and he was… In his notebooks I have copied, there are analyses of [05:12] Tagalog syntax, and he was very interested in languages. He published about 127 articles on [05:21] linguistics or linguistic themes, including the first-ever phonetic study of Shakespearean [05:27] pronunciation. His father had produced the first formal study of phonetics in the United States, [05:33] or one of the first.

So he was this astounding person, but when he died, [05:40] he never held an academic post except for four years at Johns Hopkins. He was one of the first [05:46] professors hired at the new University of Johns Hopkins, but Peirce was a very egocentric person. [05:54] He thought he was smarter than everybody else. He probably was. He didn’t like to take orders. [05:59] So he lost his job at Johns Hopkins. Also from the fact that he liked to drink, and he was seen [06:06] coming out of a hotel with a woman who was not his wife, and that really got the trustees of [06:11] Johns Hopkins upset. He eventually married her. But he was fired. He was eventually fired from [06:17] his job at the U.S. Coastal Service after 31 years, and this was in the day before pensions, [06:22] before retirement plans.

So he was left penniless when he was roughly 60 years old, 62 years old. [06:31] He was left penniless and survived through the contributions of William James, who led a great [06:39] effort to round up people from Alexander Graham Bell to Andrew Carnegie to contribute monthly [06:46] to Peirce. But it was very pov… It was a poverty-level contribution, but it kept him from death, I mean, [06:53] and starvation.

Peirce, according to his diaries, was usually up at 7:30 in the morning and worked [06:59] till about midnight or 1 AM every day, seven days a week, and his neighbors said that the light [07:05] was always on in his study, and poverty did not keep him from working a tremendous amount. [07:11]

His papers originally were not well organized after his death. They were picked up and sold [07:17] for a very small price to Harvard, and Harvard took them and tried to organize them, but because [07:23] of his reputation for immorality, in part, Harvard wouldn’t allow access to those papers, [07:30] and so it was very hard to do work on Peirce. And one of the chairmen of the Harvard philosophy [07:36] department who had the control over the papers was Willard Van Orman Quine, who would not let [07:41] anyone see them. So it wasn’t until the work of Max Fisch and Paul Weiss and others that the [07:52] papers began to become organized and that we began to get access to them. Max Fisch worked for [07:59] 50 years on a Peirce biography that he never started, but he took over 70,000 notes on Peirce [08:08] and did a huge amount of historical research, and I have all of those on my computer now. [08:12] I made an effort to get to where they’re located in Indiana and copy them. So Peirce, in my opinion, [08:19] offers an exciting alternative to current views of linguistics, which, in my opinion, even if one [08:29] does not ultimately decide that they want to work within a Peircean linguistics, I think they will [08:36] find his ideas extremely interesting and relevant, even if they continue to work in the same model. [08:43]

JMc: So can I just ask you there, obviously he worked in pretty much every field of intellectual [08:49] endeavor, but you say he was the inventor of modern semiotics?

DE: Yes, Peirce was the inventor [08:56] of semiotics. He certainly wasn’t the first person to talk about the semeion and signs. [09:01] That goes back… You know, there’s great work on that by Sextus Empiricus, there’s work by [09:08] John Locke, and many others worked on signs, but Peirce was the first one to develop a formal [09:14] theory of semiotics. He actually saw logic as a branch of semiotics. And the big difference [09:20] between Peircean semiotics and other semiotics, such as Saussure’s, is that whereas Saussure’s, [09:27] for example, was dyadic — there was a form-meaning composite, which is what most linguists are used to; [09:36] you have a word “dog,” its form is d-o-g in English, and it means “canine,” “domesticated canine” — [09:44] but for Peirce, there were three components to any sign. There was the sign itself (the physical [09:51] form, which he called the representamen), there was the object of the sign (which was very crucial, [09:57] so “tree” has an object, this thing in nature), and there’s also the interpretant. Every sign [10:03] has to be interpreted by another sign. We can’t think without signs; we can’t talk without signs; [10:09] every sign needs another sign. So if I paraphrase what a tree is, I would still be using other [10:17] signs to interpret that sign. So in this sense, also for Peirce, semiotics is recursive. One sign [10:24] is interpreted by another sign, which is interpreted by another sign, so it’s signs all the way down. [10:29]

So that makes Peirce’s signs very different, and he developed a very elaborate system of signs. [10:35] The three most common signs for people who aren’t specialists in semiotics are the icon, [10:41] the index, and the symbol. And like many terms, those are very good terms. I mean, [10:48] people use them in various ways, not always the way Peirce used them, and there’s debate on how [10:55] Peirce used them, but there’s also a very strong consensus on how Peirce used these signs. [11:02] And, you know, an icon is something which has a correspondence that a speaker perceives [11:10] between the sign and the object. So a photograph is not just that it’s an image of [11:18] the object, but it corresponds. So in any photograph, no matter how vague, if I choose to see it as a [11:24] photograph of myself, I can point out the correspondences. A diagram is a correspondence; [11:30] a tree diagram in syntactic analysis is an icon. An index is something which is physically, [11:38] a sign which is physically connected to its object, such as smoke and fire and footprints, [11:43] and the person who made the footprints. And a symbol is something which is conventionally [11:49] determined, by and large. I’m simplifying in all of these, but it’s a simplified conventionality. [11:57] This has a lot of interest for linguistics and for neuroscience and for the evolution of language, [12:05] and I’ve talked about some of these, and I do plan to explore these in much more detail. [12:11] So the second book that I’m working on relevant to Peirce is Peircean Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Pragmatist Thought, which you will see a similarity with [12:22] Cartesian Linguistics in the title. And in that volume, I plan to sort of, in part, [12:29] go through Cartesian linguistics and show the course how this would work, how this would be [12:33] in Peircean linguistics, and then outline some ideas. So Peirce, it’s difficult to think of [12:40] ways in which he couldn’t influence any part of linguistics, and I want to explore those. [12:46]

JMc: So your plan is basically to take Peircean semiotic theory and turn that into the basis [12:54] of linguistics? Is that the central idea of your Peircean linguistics? [12:57]

DE: No, not necessarily. Semiotics will be a major pillar of that, but more than anything else, [13:04] I mean, the semiotics is very important, but also Peircean inference is very important, because [13:10] one of the fundamental differences… I mean, when Russell and Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica, they used Peirce’s logic, not Frege’s, but they mainly talked about Frege, [13:21] which was kind of funny, but they used Peirce’s logic, which had been slightly adapted by Peano. [13:28] Peirce introduced universal and existential quantifiers, but Peano just used slightly [13:33] different symbols for those, but that’s the system that Whitehead and Russell used, [13:38] and his inference is very important, whereas Frege introduced compositionality, you know, [13:44] the idea that the meaning of a sentence is the meaning of the parts and the way they were put [13:50] together, which has been by far one of the most influential ideas in modern linguistics. [13:57] Peirce did not propose that type of approach to meaning, and he developed an inferential [14:04] approach, which he formalized in his existential graphs. So, a large part of it will be to show [14:10] how existential graphs can handle not only sentences and propositions, but discourses, [14:17] and I think that counts as a serious advantage.

It also doesn’t require… This is one thing that [14:26] got me interested, in part. It doesn’t require syntactic recursion to get semantic recursion. [14:33] In other words, it’s not Montegovian. It doesn’t follow Richard Montague’s method [14:38] or Frege’s method, and I know that will be heresy to many, and certainly it doesn’t [14:45] imply any disrespect for those works that I think it’s worth exploring an alternative, [14:52] just to see that there is an alternative. I don’t think many linguists consider an alternative to [14:56] compositionality.

So, these are things I want to bring out in the theory, and the first thing I’ve [15:02] ever published sort of in an informal way about this is a chapter in the book Understanding Human Time, where I argue that in Pirahã, also in English, you can’t really understand temporal [15:16] interpretations if you don’t look at inference. And I mean inference across the elements of the [15:23] sentence, outside the sentence in the discourse, and in the context, the cultural-ecological [15:29] context. I give a lot of examples from English in that paper, and from Pirahã, and maybe other [15:36] languages in which I argue that inference is crucial.

JMc: Just on the question of semantics and [15:43] meaning, one of the things that you’ve written about Peirce is, and this is a quote: [15:48] “[F]rom a Peircean perspective, language is a tool […] to transfer information from one mind […] to another [15:54] through the facilitation of inference via an open-ended system of symbols. Language by this [16:00] view is a subtype of communication system. All communication is the transfer of information via [16:07] signs […]” But do you think that this account is faithful to Peirce’s conception of semiotics? [16:14] Because this idea of the transfer of information is a bit narrow, isn’t it? You know, this question [16:19] of exactly what the nature of meaning might be is one of the central questions of much of [16:23] semiotic scholarship. Meaning is often taken to be something much more than just definite [16:29] and determinate information that’s transferred from one mind to another. [16:32]

DE: Well, I absolutely agree with that, but I do think it’s compatible with Peirce. I think that we have [16:39] been influenced in many ways, extremely positively so, by the notion of information that is found [16:46] in computer science that comes out of Claude Shannon’s work. And in that view of information, [16:52] information is primarily based on the form of the message, and it doesn’t really get into meaning. [16:59] It looks at what does the form provide that we didn’t have before, but it doesn’t really get [17:04] into meaning. This is why I think John Searle’s Chinese room argument, which many people hate [17:11] but I like, is still valid, because what Searle tried to show in his Chinese room experiment is [17:17] that a computer using forms only is, in fact, exchanging information with the outside world [17:26] — there’s no question about that — but it’s not a meaning-based information. The interpretant [17:33] is missing. So, in a dyadic semiotics, such as a Saussurean semiotics, the computer is [17:40] performing just fine at a semiotic level. You stick in something from Chinese to the computer [17:47] and it spits out something in English, even though it doesn’t understand it.

But Searle had not read [17:53] much Peirce, and I was sharing an office with Searle, actually, at the time, right after he [17:59] came up with the Chinese room experiment in Brazil. We were in an office together for about [18:03] four months, and as we talked about it, he certainly never mentioned Peirce. He also said [18:08] that he was surprised there wasn’t an easy answer to that. He figured the computer scientists would [18:12] have an easy answer, but they don’t. But from a Peircean perspective, the interpretant is missing. [18:19] And so this is what makes Peircean information very different from Shannon information, and that is [18:26] that meaning really is part of information, and Peirce defines the growth of information as the [18:32] growth of symbols. Increasing the connotation and the denotation together is growth of symbols, [18:39] and so Peirce talks about meaning in a sophisticated way quite extensively. [18:45] So when I talk about information, I’m talking about information that is based on interpretant [18:52] meaning, how we deal with this, how we infer, and so it’s a much richer concept, perhaps not as [19:01] useful to some people as Shannon’s, but from a linguistic perspective, I see it as a much [19:05] richer concept than information in the Shannon model of information. [19:11]

JMc: Yeah, OK, fair enough. [19:13] I think what I was just getting at is that the use of the word “transfer” [19:18] implies to me that the speaker has a meaning that is sort of coded and sent to the recipient, [19:26] who then decodes it, but my understanding of Peirce with this notion of interpretant is that [19:31] it’s a much more open-ended process. The meaning that arises could be surprising even to the [19:37] speaker. [19:38]

DE: Exactly, and this is, when we talk about transfer of information, we don’t mean [19:44] that the final result is the same information for the hearer that it was for the speaker, [19:48] so it would be good to clarify that. It would be good for me to clarify that. [19:52] Because what I mean by transfer is Peircean transfer again, so that the interpretant of [19:56] the hearer may not be the intended interpretant of the speaker, so that the hearer could… the hearer’s interpretation [20:03] could be very surprising, as you just said, for the speaker. So, I agree with that. So, [20:09] transfer only makes sense in the way that I’ve just used it. [20:13]

JMc: You and John Searle sharing an office in Brazil sounds like a great premise for a sitcom. I’d watch that. [20:21]

DE: Yeah, I have great quotes from Searle in the office. You know, I was reading Rules and Representations by Chomsky, and I was a very strong Chomskyan at the time, and there’s a [20:33] passage where he strongly criticizes Searle, and so I turned to John, and I said, “Can I read this [20:38] to you?” And he said, “Sure.” So I read it to him, and I said, “What’s your reaction?” And he got a [20:43] big grin on his face, and he said, “Well, look, Noam and I have an agreement. I never understand [20:48] anything he writes, and he never understands anything I write.” [20:52]

JMc: To compare your Peircean linguistics to Chomsky’s Cartesian linguistics, I guess one point of contrast that immediately [21:01] jumps out is that you seem to be conceiving of language as fundamentally a system of communication, [21:07] but, of course, one of Chomsky’s controversial – and even counterintuitive – claims is that language did [21:15] not evolve for communication, but has been co-opted for this purpose. So, would you say [21:20] that that’s a difference between you and Chomsky? [21:23]

DE: Yes, definitely. And there are, of course, [21:26] several things to say about that. I think some of the biggest differences between Cartesian [21:31] linguistics — and Chomsky’s interpretation of it — and Peircean linguistics — my interpretation of it — [21:36] is nativism, rationalism, nominalism. Chomsky’s a nominalist-conceptualist, whereas Peirce was [21:45] strongly opposed to nominalism and realist in his own view of realism.

But for semiotics, [21:53] for a semiotic theory, the language of thought is semiotics. The language of communication is [22:00] semiotics. You can’t draw that kind of difference, saying that language evolved for thought and was [22:09] then exploited for communication. In fact, we see semiotics in other creatures. We’re not the [22:16] only creatures to communicate semiotically. Other creatures may use symbols, but we’re the only [22:21] ones to use them as an open-ended system of production. We can make any symbol we want as [22:27] soon as we decide we need it. Most animals can’t do that. We’re animals too, but we’re the one [22:31] animal that seems to be able to do that. So, for Peirce, it’s a non-issue to say… In my interpretation [22:38] of Peirce, it’s a non-issue to say that the language of thought was the purpose of language [22:43] and that it eventually evolved into a communication system. Chomsky talks about [22:50] errors that we make when we communicate that we don’t make when we think, [22:55] but there are many possible interpretations of that. I mean, I make errors when I walk [23:03] relative to the way I think about walking. I don’t include stubbing my toe on a [23:10] stool in the kitchen. I don’t think of that when I start walking, and so that’s an error. [23:16] That’s not the nature of walking. It’s just, I made an error, and we make errors in communication [23:21] and in thought. So, I don’t see that… From a semiotic perspective, that is a difference without [23:28] a difference. [23:30]

JMc: Thank you very much for answering those questions. [23:32]

DE: Yeah, thanks very much for asking them.

In this interview, we talk to Michael Lynch about the history of conversation analysis and its connections to ethnomethodology.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts

Button, Graham, Michael Lynch and Wes Sharrock (2022) Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Constructive Analysis: On Formal Structures of Practical Action. London and New York: Routledge.

Fitzgerald, Richard (2024) “Drafting A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation,” Human Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09700-7

Garfinkel, Harold (2022) Studies of Work in the Sciences, M. Lynch, ed. London & New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003172611 (open access)

Lynch, Michael (1993) Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lynch, Michael and Oskar Lindwall, eds. (2024) Instructed and Instructive Actions: The Situated Production, Reproduction, and Subversion of Social Order. London and New York: Routledge.

Lynch, Michael and Douglas Macbeth (2016) “Introduction: The epistemics of Epistemics,” Discourse Studies 18(5): 493–499. See also the articles in the special issue.

Sacks, Harvey (1992) Lectures on Conversation, Vols. 1 & 2, Gail Jefferson, ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sacks, Harvey (1970) Aspects of Sequential Organization in Conversation.  Unpublished manuscript, U.C. Irvine.

Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson (1974) “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation”, Language 50(4), Part 1: 696–735. Available online

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language [00:14] Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. There you can find links and references to [00:20] all the literature we discuss. Today we’re joined by Michael Lynch, who’s Professor Emeritus [00:26] of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He’s going to talk to us about [00:32] conversation analysis and its links to ethnomethodology.

It’s probably fair to say that conversation [00:40] analysis, or CA, is a well-established subfield of linguistics today, which is concerned with [00:47] studying how interaction is achieved between speakers in an oral exchange. On a technical [00:54] level, conversation analysts typically proceed by making an audio or video recording of an [00:59] interaction and then transcribing it in a heavily marked up notation that conveys elements [01:06] of intonation, overlapping speech, gaze, and so on. Using these transcripts as empirical [01:12] evidence, the analysts then put forward theories about how the back-and-forth of conversation [01:18] is structured.

The seminal publication introducing conversation analysis was a 1974 article in [01:26] Language with the title, “A Simplest Systematics for the Analysis of Turn-Taking for Conversation”, [01:33] co-authored by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. These three are widely considered [01:41] the founding figures of CA. But crucially, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson had not been trained in [01:48] traditional linguistics programs. They were sociologists by academic upbringing. Moreover, [01:54] they were adherents of ethnomethodology, an approach to sociology pioneered by Harold Garfinkel. [02:02]

So the question arises as to how conversation analysis fits into linguistics and this broader [02:09] disciplinary constellation. Mike, can you illuminate this question a bit for us? [02:14] Where did conversation analysis come from, and how is it placed today? [02:19]

ML: OK, well, thank you, James, for the opportunity to speak to your podcast. To start, I’d like to [02:26] add that what you said about Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson also applies to me. I’m not trained as a [02:34] linguist, traditional or otherwise. My background is in sociology, but also like them, [02:39] I spent a lot of my career, particularly the last 25 years at Cornell, in interdisciplinary programs [02:46] of which sociology was a part. But my take on sociology through the field of ethnomethodology [02:53] is not normal sociology, as many people would tell you. I don’t want to go into that right now.

But [02:59] you asked about the background of Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson and where CA came from. I know less [03:06] about Schegloff’s and Jefferson’s background a little bit, but I know more about Sacks, [03:12] partly because I’ve been spending the last year and a half reading and rereading the two-volume [03:19] set of his lectures. A little bit about Schegloff. He wrote an MA thesis on the history of literary [03:26] criticism before pursuing a PhD in sociology at Berkeley at the same time that Sacks did. [03:32] Jefferson had an education and practical experience in dance choreography before she attended Sacks’s [03:40] lectures and switched into a PhD program with him at UC Irvine, and her father was a famous [03:48] radio psychiatrist.

Sacks had a law degree from Yale in 1958 and after that decided, [03:55] to the disappointment of his parents, not to pursue a law career. He was in the MIT, Cambridge, Harvard [04:05] area when he decided he wanted to go back to sociology and political science. He had studied [04:13] sociology as an undergraduate and he met Garfinkel and I believe also Goffman, who were on sabbatical [04:20] taking seminars from Talcott Parsons, a famous sociologist and Garfinkel’s mentor. And from there [04:29] he really hit it off with Garfinkel. Garfinkel encouraged him to go to the West Coast [04:34] and he pursued his PhD in sociology at Berkeley, where he did, for a time at least, work with [04:40] Goffman, although Goffman did not sign his PhD. And he stayed in touch with Garfinkel, was part [04:47] of groups that met, kind of forming the basis of ethnomethodology, which, to put a short gloss on [04:55] it, is the study of everyday actions as they are performed, at least preferentially in the case [05:03] of CA, using recordings of interaction naturally occurring (so-called) as a material for study. [05:12]

Sacks also was very widely read. I really recommend reading his lectures or at least some of them [05:19] because there – you can still get them online. They’re out of print, I believe. It makes clear [05:26] that he’s drawing from the history of oral languages, the cultures of ancient Greece and [05:33] Rome, the studies of Judeo and biblical culture and language. He also was apprised, to what depth [05:44] I don’t know, of ordinary language philosophy, Austin, Searle to some extent, but mainly Austin [05:51] and Wittgenstein as well. He didn’t mention it much in his writings or in his lectures, [05:58] but his sensibilities were definitely shaped by that background. And he also brings in themes [06:04] from law, which is not really obvious, but when you read the lectures and some of his unpublished [06:09] writings, you find that he has kind of a legal orientation to the organization, the rules, [06:17] the norms, procedures of ordinary conversation. There’s a bit of a legal background into what [06:23] he’s saying.

Now, you mentioned the 1974 paper on simplest systematics and turn-taking by [06:30] Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson. It’s often taken to be the beginning of conversation, [06:34] but his lectures, starting when he was a graduate student and living in Los Angeles and teaching [06:40] at UCLA, they start in 1964, so 10 years before that, and even the earlier lectures exhibit [06:49] themes about language, about many other things that show up in part in the turn-taking paper, [06:56] although compared to the ground he covers in the lectures, which of course are much more extensive, [07:03] he’s much broader, much more varied in his interests and his analyses than that paper [07:09] gives access to. So one of the things to keep in mind is that paper is treated as a foundation, [07:15] but when you go back to Sacks’s lectures, you see that there’s a lot missing from it, [07:20] and a kind of a restricted way of going about the study of conversation that it represents. [07:26]

JMc: You say that the 1974 paper is a bit restricted in terms of the ideas that Sacks had already [07:34] developed in his earlier lectures. Could you elaborate a bit and say in what ways it was [07:39] restricted, and do you think it’s because the paper appeared in Language and was being repackaged [07:45] for linguists? And if that’s the case, then what is the relationship or what was the relationship of [07:52] conversation analysis as Sacks conceived of it to other schools of linguistics at the time? [07:59]

ML: It was edited by a linguist at UCLA named William Bright [see Fitzgerald (2024)], and he did an unusual job of [08:09] doing the sole review and advice on the paper, mainly working with Schegloff, who was originally [08:17] not listed on a very early draft of the paper by Sacks and Jefferson. And then he was listed third, [08:25] and then second after his work with Bright, I guess. It was written in a different style than [08:33] some of Sacks’s earlier work, which also was very difficult to fathom, and lectures, [08:38] which are not so difficult to fathom, although very thought-provoking.

The main topic of that [08:44] paper is turn-taking issues, that is one person speaking, coming to an end, another person, [08:52] or multiple persons, then vying for next turn, and so on and so forth. And that indeed is a [09:01] major theme in Sacks’s work and in Schegloff’s work, Jefferson’s, but there’s also a broader [09:08] conception of sequential analysis that’s in the lectures and also in unpublished manuscripts [09:15] that went through several drafts that Sacks wrote and which is yet to be published, but [09:22] presents, again, a somewhat different cast of the sequential analysis than you get in [09:29] this more exclusive interest in turn-taking and turn-transition [09:35] and the beginnings of turns in the 1974 paper. So there’s also lots of other themes about [09:44] phenomena that tie together utterances, not just at the beginnings and ends, but which [09:51] show topical continuity and coherence in a very interesting way in Sacks’s lectures. [09:59]

Sacks, in occasional remarks in his lectures and in a couple of papers where he talked about [10:05] understanding and organization of talk in a way that he sharply distinguished from [10:11] the orientation of linguistics, and the simplest aspect of this distinction that he emphasized was [10:18] that linguists treat the sentence as the basic unit and structural constituents of sentences [10:24] as embedded in sentences and as individually organized, cognitively or even neurologically, [10:34] to the extent that they could do that. He looks at sentences, parts of sentences, utterances, [10:41] in connection with those of other participants in conversation. And in some cases, you can get [10:48] a very different sense of not only the form, but also the meaning. He generally treats meaning [10:54] sideways in the sense that he doesn’t talk about it directly. He talks about in connection to [11:01] practices and structures of conversation, that you get a different sense of what’s being said [11:07] than when you take a sentence in isolation. Maybe linguists have caught on to this, but [11:14] at that time, and I think predominantly now, that orientation was distinctive of what Sacks and his [11:23] company were doing. [11:25]

JMc: I mean, in the mid-20th century in America, there were also schools of linguistic [11:31] anthropology, sort of ethnography of speaking, and so on, that looked at discourse and the use [11:38] of language in a particular cultural context. Do you think that Sacks would have felt that they [11:42] were still stuck with the sort of formal conception of a sentence as the basic unit of language? [11:48]

ML: He did know and addressed work by, you know, Gumperz and Hymes, and he actually participated [11:56] in a book they co-edited, and he knew of people in sociolinguistics, and Goffman himself was his [12:08] main contact at Berkeley when he was a student, and Schegloff was a student there too. [12:12] And there were differences. It seemed like a superficial difference, but for Sacks, [12:19] it’s very important, and I think there’s much to say about the difference, that his method of [12:27] working was usually, but not always, but usually he would try to record what he called naturally [12:36] occurring, or Garfinkel called, naturally organized everyday actions. So, bugging a phone or [12:45] recording – one of his favourite examples was some recordings he made behind a one-way mirror [12:53] of a group therapy session involving these mildly delinquent kids in Los Angeles at some point in [13:01] the probably early ’60s. And he goes to these tapes again and again, hears the same sequences, [13:07] discusses them again and again, often with a somewhat different framing in his lectures, [13:14] and finds in those recorded conversations, as he put it, things you would never imagine, [13:22] right, that people would say, and organizations of talk that you just don’t remember when, [13:28] you know, you think of a conversation you might have, or when you imagine an ideal typical [13:34] conversation.

And you find in Goffman and in social psychology, and in even some of the [13:44] more linguistically inclined sociolinguists, that they either still work on things like speech acts, [13:52] which are largely the actions of one person. They see the person as the organizational basis of, [14:00] and the person’s psychology or cognition, as the organizational basis of the structure of talk, [14:07] where moving the frame to sequences, and not just pairs of utterances, but more extended [14:15] connections and ties between one’s own and others’ utterances in an ongoing stream. [14:22] It’s not a stream of consciousness. It’s a stream of talk, which we’re recording, at least [14:28] Sacks, but it could be adequate to capture, not necessarily complete, but adequate for starting [14:34] a starting point.

It gives you a very different insight. It’s not just that, you know, he’s being [14:38] empiricist, always wanting stuff recorded from the ground. He also used newspaper articles and [14:46] snippets from the Bible and all sorts of stuff. But his main resource was recorded conversation [14:52] that he could play again and again and again. And another aspect of it was he could, [14:56] with transcript, which he didn’t treat as the primary ground, the recording was the primary [15:02] ground as, you know, an adequate record of what people were doing. Assuming they spoke a language [15:09] you spoke and you had enough insight into who they were, what they were talking about and so forth, [15:14] that you could find recognizable structures that required no special skill, no special [15:24] knowledge to recognize and to try to stay with that rather than try to override it with [15:29] an overly technical understanding. That those materials he saw to be a source of insight, [15:36] not just material from which to derive inductive inferences. [15:41]

JMc: So what does structure mean to an ethnomethodologist, and specifically to Sacks? [15:49]

ML: That’s a very good question. Sacks had a love for machine metaphors. He talks about machinery [15:57] of conversation, the turn-taking machine. Occasionally in his lectures, he acknowledges [16:05] that when he’s talking about machinery, he’s talking about rules, or you could even say [16:09] maxims, or, you know, regularities, even, that occur, but he just loved to talk about machinery. [16:18] And he also loved to invest agency in the machinery, rather than in people’s intentions, [16:27] motives, cognitive organization, right? So it was kind of a gestalt shift from the speaker [16:37] to the speaking in concert with others as the, not ultimate origin necessarily, but as [16:45] an organizational basis for what people are doing, saying, orienting to, and so forth. [16:51] It’s not that he emptied the person. Gail Jefferson once made a joke about, [16:58] “Sacks was somebody who treated people in the same way that you would treat algae.” [17:04] He has a line in his lectures that is really funny where he says he’s got nothing against [17:10] anthropomorphizing humans any more than when physicists anthropomorphize their data. [17:17] He’s got nothing against it, but nothing particularly in favour of it. So there’s this [17:23] kind of strange indifference that he expresses, but it leads to a very unique insight. [17:31]

JMc: But at the end of the day, Sacks still talks in terms of rules, maxims, or structures and so on, [17:39] because isn’t it a sort of, would it be reasonable to say that one of the core ideas of [17:45] ethnomethodology is that the ethnomethodologist seeks to discover organization sort of from the [17:51] perspective of the participants in a particular situation? [17:56]

ML: Yes, and I think that Sacks held to that. And the perspective of the participants didn’t require [18:05] some sort of magical trip of mind reading. But in his case, not necessarily Garfinkel’s, [18:13] in his case, he used the overt recording materials, the surface, [18:22] as the organization that the members were paying attention to insofar as they would hear what the [18:31] other is saying and react often without hesitation in a way that showed an understanding, or in some [18:39] cases a misunderstanding, of what the other said, and that would be then dealt with downstream in [18:45] the conversation. And so he was treating the surface materials, which sounds very shallow, [18:51] but in this he had some backing by the likes of Wittgenstein. And the skepticism about having [19:01] to always delve into interpretation, reading between the lines and that kind of thing, was [19:08] not his procedure. And he had a deep basis for that in both Wittgenstein, Garfinkel, and to some [19:18] extent Goffman.

And so there is this orientation in the analysis to, “What are the parties doing?” [19:27] And it’s very important to know that the term “conversation analysis,” which Sacks didn’t use, [19:34] actually, at least not in his lectures, he talked about the analysis of conversation, [19:41] and he and many of his colleagues for a while talked about conversational analysis, A-L, [19:47] “conversation” with “al” at the end. And it got conventional to talk about CA or conversation [19:55] analysis, and everybody went along with that. But the idea was that the analysis is being done [20:02] on the ground floor by the person’s talking. It’s not something where you take data, you code it, [20:09] you do experiments to try to eliminate the lack of comparability from one occasion to another. [20:18] And for him, the problem was to address how it is that parties hearing what they hear, [20:24] knowing what they know, can continue in the way they continue in a conversation. [20:30] And how do they respond to what another says? Now, it may be they misinterpret it, or it may be [20:36] that they interpret differently than the speaker meant, and the speaker doesn’t indicate that [20:43] that’s the case. I mean, there’s a lot of things that can happen, but the orientation analytically [20:49] was to try to recover, as Garfinkel would call it, what persons were doing. So that the rules, [20:56] say the rules of turn-taking or the facts of it, as they talk about the turn-taking paper, [21:02] that one speaker speaks at a time, transitions occur without gap or overlap, as both a description [21:09] and in some sense, a basis for normative organization, that these are not strict [21:16] inviolable rules. They are procedures that also have noticeable, regular features that you could [21:24] call structures in the way conversation is organized. And Sacks tried to then delve into [21:30] that to try to answer the question, how do members do it, given that they’re flying by the seats of [21:37] their pants with very limited time constraints on understanding and response, especially in a [21:43] situation where there’s competitive talk, that there’s no timeout. And so how do they do that [21:49] is his big question, and how do they reconcile things like that speaker change recurs in [21:56] conversation, that is, you know, one speaker speaks, another does, etc., etc., [22:00] that with the idea that they can do it without gap or overlap, how do they do that? [22:05] And he had a lot to say about that. I can’t summarize it in a few words, but that was the problem. [22:12]

JMc: Just to sort of summarize the picture of how CA came into existence, do you think it’d be [22:17] fair to say that Sacks was the great theoretician and Jefferson provided the sort of technical [22:25] apparatus required through her transcription system? [22:29]

ML: Well, I think you have to also mention Schegloff, since he was the major figure in the period of time after ’75 and until he stopped [22:37] working in 2012 or ’10. Jefferson struggled to maintain a career. She never thought of herself [22:44] as a sociologist. I’m not sure what she thought of herself as. She was a conversation analyst. [22:50] And she spent the last roughly 20, 25 years of her career living in the Netherlands as an independent [22:59] scholar, occasionally employed, but mainly working on her own stuff. I was told, I haven’t seen it, [23:07] I’d love to see it actually. She transcribed the Watergate hearings [correction: Watergate tapes recorded in Nixon’s White House office], or at least a good part of [23:13] them. And I don’t know what’s happened to that transcript because she died in, I think it was [23:18] 2007. And I don’t know what’s happened to those records, but she kind of faded out of the scene [23:25] pretty early on, and Schegloff was the major character.

And Schegloff and Sacks obviously [23:32] worked closely together. I think Schegloff had a somewhat different, more structured, [23:38] more disciplined orientation than Sacks, which was probably good for maintaining CA as a [23:45] quasi-discipline, sub-discipline, whatever you want to call it. But Sacks was not just a [23:51] theoretician. He was widely read, very creative. During his lifetime, people called him a genius. [23:58] I went to Irvine, somebody told me, “This guy’s a genius.” Not that… That’s not necessarily the reason I went [24:03] there, but… And it’s sort of like, yeah, he was a genius, but I don’t believe in the concept. [24:10] He did more than just theorize. I think, again, if you read the lectures, you get a sense of [24:16] the various things he did. It wasn’t always the same from beginning to end. And there’s [24:21] different threads of his analysis that have been picked up, particularly what he called [24:26] membership category analysis, which has an attraction for some people. [24:33] So he was involved in the production of it. I think, though, he was, in his own words, [24:39] sort of the methodologist of ethnomethodology, and Schegloff worked differently, and Sacks kind of [24:46] went along with that in some of the stuff they collaborated with.

To break it down into, yeah, [24:52] there was Jefferson’s transcription system, which, yeah, she developed and deserved credit for it. [24:59] But more than that, she deserved a lot of credit for some of the analyses she did, [25:03] which are brilliant. She was really an amazing character. And Schegloff is also a very formidable [25:11] intellect. And so all three of them had their own shape in what they did, and it didn’t break [25:17] down in terms of theory and technical aspects of it. It was much more varied for all three of them. [25:24]

JMc: And what’s Garfinkel’s relationship to conversation analysis? [25:31]

ML: Yeah, inconsistent. Informally, he was very disappointed with the direction that CA had [25:38] taken, but at the same time, particularly in public statements to other sociologists, [25:45] he would really defend CA, and he would say, and I think he meant this, [25:49] that it was the crown jewel of ethnomethodology. It was the most developed, most technically [25:55] developed, most procedurally developed area of ethnomethodology. But it also diverged from [26:02] ethnomethodology. And I think people who currently come into CA, particularly from other fields other [26:09] than sociology, just don’t see much connection with Garfinkel. He’s treated as kind of a woolly [26:16] predecessor who spoke incomprehensibly and was besotted with phenomenology, etc., etc. [26:27] And certainly there are differences. Yet you can find in Sacks’s work and also Schegloff’s and some [26:34] of Jefferson’s that they were doing ethnomethodology at the same time they were [26:39] also developing CA as an independent field with its own interdisciplinary links, [26:48] not just to linguistics, but to communication studies, to psychology to some extent, [26:55] anthropology. You know, language, nobody owns language, ordinary language particularly, and [27:02] so it shows up in odd places. [27:06]

JMc: Great. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions.

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McElvenny, James. 2024. A History of Modern Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Entry in the Edinburgh University Press catalogue