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Thursday, June 19, 2008
Literature and Linguistics
Language Log has had two posts that may be of interest. On Tuesday Mark Liberman complained that “English departments are among the last places on campus where you’re likely to find any indication of interest in any form of linguistic analysis whatever.” That post as so far generated 42 replies, including one by me in which I gave a little history lesson.
Liberman’s complaint had been stimulated by a comment to yet an earlier post, this one about a gross misunderstanding about grammar. This one has generated 48 comments. If you scroll down you’ll come to a comment by Arnold Zwicky that does a succinct job of explaining the significance of Chomsky’s views about language.
Comments
Bill, I’d say that comment does a succinct job of explaining a (deflationary) view of Chomsky’s views about language, a view which apparently is shared by several members of the Language Log blog. I don’t know that it expresses the unified wisdom of linguists.
As you are well aware, and apparently, Mark Liberman is not, there are entire journals (and recent books) devoted to the linguistic analysis of literature.
To be honest, Jonathan, I don’t know that there is any “unified wisdom of linguists” on Chomsky or just where his views fit in to the overall scene. He never won everyone over, and the hold-outs were not just old curmudgeons who couldn’t get with the program. The varieties of Chomskyian linguistics may be the single largest school in the US, but there are certainly robust alternatives. I don’t think his ideas ever penetrated Europe as deeply as they did America, but they are certainly strong there.
What I like about Zwicky’s comment is that it sets out a minimal core of ideas for which Chomsky is responsible. I suspect just about any linguist would grant Chomsky those accomplishments even if they don’t by any or most of Chomsky’s specific proposals about (mostly) syntax.
I read through that whole first thread and was surprised to see no reference to systemic functional grammar. In Australia, there are a number of English departments that include streams on functional grammar (not surprisingly, since Halliday and his early followers, e.g Kress, are Australian).
But I was particularly surprised to see no reference to SFG given what you said, Bill, about being interested in “meaning”. Or, rather, it was the implication that linguistics focuses on syntax at the expense of meaning that surprised me, since SFG is very much an analysis of both. There are a number of books on literary stylistics, moreover, that use SFG (e.g. Michael Toolan (1996) Language in Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics, London: Arnold.).
I admit to having next to no knowledge of linguistics outside a reasonable grasp of Saussure (albeit as theorist rather than analyst), an inherent suspicion of Chomsky’s work based purely on its emphasis on innateness, and an understanding of the basics of SFG (with a more developed understanding of critical discourse analysis and social semiotics). So I guess my question is, are linguists (and/or English academics) outside Australia generally as ignorant of SFG as I am of every other tradition of linguistics?
Not to pick on Rob, but during the structuralist era Saussure and Jakobsen had enormous influence in some areas of literary studies, and as I understand, “Theory” (both American and continental) maintained some interest in their work. But “as theorists rather than analysts”, and generally without much knowledge of the history and themes of linguistics, or of other linguists besides Saussure.
This was true of anthropology, too, where Levi-Strauss could be talked at at length by people who hadn’t read much anthropology.
I believe that this can be extended, e.g. to Hegel, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and others. Complex ideas with wide implications were taken into Theory in canned forms, and processed thereafter in terms of the canned version. After he got smart Althusser confessed that he hadn’t read Marx very carefully and never had understand him well.
Foucault, for another example, is much more interesting than the canned grad school Foucault. On the other hand, Lacan, Derrida, and probably Zizek, though they started off with a lot of potential, ended up (like Althusser) among the canners.
Rob, I think that Halliday is generally well-known and I’d be surprised in at least some of the Language Loggers weren’t familiar with his work, even if it didn’t come up in that particular discussion. FWIW, Fish critiques one of his papers in one of the early essays in Is There a Text in This Class?
John, I think that the use of Saussure, Jakobsen, and Levi-Strauss in literary studies reflects a similar canning process. What comes through from all of them is binary opposition. Additionally, Saussure gives us the opposition between langue and parole; Jakobson gives us 6 functions of speech, and one or two others things; and Levi-Strauss, when Theory got ahold of him he was reduced to his silly assertion that his theory of myth was just another one of the myths he theorized.
And then you have Haj Ross. He got a Ph. D. under Chomsky in the 60s, but he also went over to Harvard and studied poetics with Jakobson. Google his name and you should find a small handful of detailed studies of poems here and there in the intertubes.
I’m in the process of putting a book together on my approach to literature and am struggling with justifying my commitment to the cognitive sciences. The problem is that, to put it crudely, language and thought are to literature what masonry and colored glass are to gothic cathedrals. What does a thorough knowledge of the mechanical properties of masonry tell you about the design of those cathedrals? Well, it tells you why they have flying buttresses. But it doesn’t tell you why they have the high vaulted ceilings that necessitated those buttresses.
What I really want from the cognitive sciences is a certain “spirit.” Explaining just what that is, that’s tough.