Fleetwood Nation

 

One of the finest passages in musical history, includes lyrics as follows:

 

            Dom dom, dom do dom, ooby do,

            Dom dom, dom do dom, ooby do,

                        (da capo  al fine del mondo)

 

The lead singer -- a guy named Gary, it turns out -- begins in a style that, in refined circles, is denominated "a capella" (from the Latin; literally, "in chapel style"), but which, in the doo-wop era, was known simply as "singing".  How it all came about:  This guy Gary (we learn from Wikipedia, which knows all) was waiting with this other bobby-soxer at a bus-stop, see, and they got to singing, and it was pretty neat, and so the girl, she had this friend, and so the three of them sang at school, and all the kids liked it, so they "formed a group" -- a process as simple then  as forming a collection out of a, b, and c, in set theory.  The group was called "Two Girls and a Guy", which really said it all.  Originally they were purely a-capella; later they added a rhythm section, consisting entirely of Gary's car-keys.

 

Then later, when they started to get famous, some manager changed their name to "The Fleetwoods", which is still a pretty neat name.  (Notice I do not say, "a cool name"; that would be beatnik.)  But they never forgot their roots -- in fact, the "Fleetwoods" were not so dubbed after the Cadillac of that description, but after their own telephone exchange (as in "Fleet-wood Four Five Seven Oh Nine").

 

The masterpiece referenced above was -- well, obviously, you had to be there, there and then.  The then and the there was American suburbia in 1959.   Back then I was even younger and even more completely clueless than in 1961, anno "Please Help Me I'm Falling" (**).  The Fleetwoods TOOK THE AIRWAVES BY STORM (to use a phrase  echoic of the late conflict, by then safely forgotten)  with a hit song called "Come Softly to Me".  Originally, at the sock hop in their high school gym, the song had been called, with better brevity, "Come Softly", but (again, Wikipedia) that same publicity-savvy manager made them change it, on the grounds that the original was... too... something called....  "risqué". (??!! Wh-wh-*what* ???????)  Anyway, it's a neat song, and if you listen to it, and tell your friends, they'll think it's really neat too.

 

*

 

You might gather from the above  that I am slighting this song;  if so, you gather amiss.  It was actually a major stepping-stone in my (thitherto minimal) musical education.

 

The poverty of our musical upbringing, on our little cul-de-sac  there in the suburbs, was astonishing.  If it were somehow translated into imagery, you would see a huddle of stricken children, wearing nothing but Keds, ribs showing, bellies distended, with the International Red Cross shaking their heads in the background, giving up the case as hopeless.  Later on, some kids had to take piano lessons, but I never did, and any music I was exposed to  came out of a little plastic slab, of the size, and essentially the function, of a cigarette pack. 

 

The song actually confused me, and I didn't like it at first.  But since it was NUMBER ONE, everyone wound up hearing it several dozen times a day.   It was almost my first introduction to multi-part singing -- songs like "The Little White Duck", till then the principle fare, tended to monody -- and my very first introduction to stretto -- the voices easing in and easing out, delicately overlapping like waves breaking softly upon waves.  And like, what was it up to?  It wasn't funny, like "Purple People Eater" or "The Chipmunk Song"; it didn't tell a story, like "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" or "Kisses Sweeter than Wine"; it didn't bounce up and down, like "At the Hop"; and it didn't have a simple "Hickory Dickory Dock" sort of tune, like "Rock Around the Clock".  And it certainly wasn't guy fare, like "Hound Dog". It was, you might say, kind of -- girly.

 

*

 

So once again I made the pilgrimage to Youtube.  And once again, learned something new and richly evocative, even though, again, I had remembered that song perfectly, note for note, for all those years.

 

Firstly, it turns out that Top 40 on a dirtcheap AM transistor radio (or, in the previous couple of years, off a little plastic crystal set that my dad put together from a kit, and that only got one channel) does not provide the full depth of musicality that one may derive  from either live performance  or some assemblage of digitized woofers and tweeters.  This little thin sound trickled out; and if the song had a good beat, you could hear the beat part, and sometimes make out some of the words.  The highest praise for a song was, "It has a good beat and you can dance to it"; only I couldn't dance to it, being shy and only nine years old.  As for "Come Softly", it wasn't clear how even teenagers could dance to it.  It wasn't jitterbug, but neither was it the sort of simple Slow Dance such as -- much, much later, when I was all of twelve -- we would dance to at Canteen, at the junior high, in gingerly contact with an individual of the opposite and complementary (and wholly unimaginable) gender,  simply rocking slowly from foot to foot until the music was over.  It was -- not syncopated exactly, more like... you couldn't put your finger on it.  It seems to have been scored for naiads.

 

Hearing it now, though only on the speakers of my PC, I realize that the kid Gary had a voice for which the cherubs sighed,  chins propped on hands as they listened, eyes shut, over the clouds.  The song opens a capella, and you can hear why:  What accompaniment could possibly improve upon his voice?

 

Secondly,  learning the concrete matter-of-fact details  brings you up short.  Simply to learn that the trio is from an actual place (in the event, the state of Washington) is like a wake-up splash of water.  I don't know where I imagined singers came from, back then -- "from Hollywood" or "from Broadway", maybe.  But these three are from Olympia, not Olympus.  And they have just regular names, like other kids -- "Gary", not something made up, like "Elvis" or "Dion".  In fact their lead singer, whom I would have pictured, had I tried (though I did not, not being a girl), as a cross between Lord Byron and Apollo, turns out to look like somebody's kid brother (and his sidekicks might almost be his mother).  He has what I now recognize as a “bedroom voice”; but his babyface says rather, Tuck me in.  He looks like he just stepped out of a soda shop.

 

*

 

It suddenly occurs to me that soda shops no longer exist.  The younger among you can probably scarcely conceive what such a thing would even be -- the product-line seems strangely impoverished; as who should say, a "water shop", or a "bicarbonate of soda store". Yet for a teen in the years before the Great War, and then after the Great War, and then during the Big One that they had to give a number to, and then right on in through the 'forties and 'fifties, these constituted the principle cultural and anthropological institutions of the land.

 

No, I'm not being nostalgic. It was a time before either Google or Wikipedia, so that life was worth living only in a narrowly restricted and relative sense.  Still, its pop songs are even better than I'd remembered.

 

========

(**) Note: For “Please Help Me I’m Falling”, see:

 

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/duet-at-distance.html

 

Suzanne! Suzanne!

We loved each other

   tenderly,

and our fondness encreased

  with age.

-- Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield  (1766)

feu Johnny, feu la France

Rock ‘n’ Roll was overwhelmingly pioneered by Americans.  Later, a wave of Brits joined in, not merely equaling their Colonial brethren, but redefining the genre, and deepening it.   France, for all its many merits, never significantly contributed to the swell of this international current.

~

In August of 1966, having just turned 17, I left home to live for several months in France.  Thanks to the good offices of Academic Year Abroad, it was a cultural immersion, living with a French family, attending the theatre twice a week, classes at the Sorbonne, and so forth.  And since I had neither TV nor shortwave radio, a cultural abstraction, from all that was going on across the Atlantic.

Among pop songs I particularly enjoyed that year was “Je l’appelle canelle” -- not R & R, but more like a chanson de cabaret, where indeed the French pioneered.   Or a purely franco-française sotie “Gaston Gaston, y’a téléphon qui son, y a jamais person  qui y répond”, impossible to translate and difficult to categorize, save perhaps as a précis of the nasalization of French vowels. (Still funny and endearing, after all these years.  Closest genre-match: the Australian pop hit "Tie Me Kangaroo Down".)
Then one straight-up rock song by Michel Polnareff, “La Poupée qui fait Non”, in conception simple, and not quite like anything an American had done, and permanently listenable owing to the purity of his presentation.  (Appreciaton here.)  Nothing by Johnny Hallyday  particularly caught my ear.

Besides “La Poupée”, the real stand-out for me that year was “Dis-moi, fille sauvage”.  I bought the single, and at the end of the year, excitedly brought it home to show my brother, a taste of what-all had been going on in the City of Lights.  He listened, somewhat puzzled, and at the end, said simply:  “That’s Ruby Tuesday.”

Indeed, it was a pale Gallic knock-off of that Rolling Stones classic, which, sequestered in the Hexagon, I had not yet heard.

~

The indisputably most popular French star of R&R, Johnny Halliday, died this week, and his passing dominates their headlines.  He lived long, continued to perform, and aged well, as rock stars go.  Several of his Continental his were simply workmanlike knock-offs of American or UK work.  In the U.S., his death rated barely a mention; and when so, the focus has been on the fact of it being a huge story in France, rather than upon any actual songs an American is likely to remember, or even to have heard.

The crowds on the Champs Elysées today  were immense, the emotion genuine.  Mourning the departing, perhaps, not only of one French star, but of the age (do any recall it?) of French national greatness.

Adventures in Juvenile Lexicography

Katherine Nelson, in Keith Nelson, ed., Children’s Language (1978), p. 66,  offered the following glimpse into the orismological instincts of budding lexicographers.  Asked a “What is it?” question about the word tiger (“a large, fierce, flesh-eating animal (Panthera tigris)…” to you and me), the tots responded:

(1) “at the zoo”
(2) “animal”

(3) “it’s like a lion:

(4) “lives in the jungle and runs a lot”

(5) “animal with stripes and it eats a lot of things”

(6) “to run”

(7) “someone growls”

(8) “hair on its head”

I then polled our son (aet. su. 4 years,  3 months), who offered this:

   “It’s something that is big, and it eats people, and it runs around in the jungle.”

His assessment of her other examples:

apple: “it’s juicy; it’s big; it’s round”

car:  “Something that’s big, and not so tall -- it’s this tall [shows with his arms];  it can kill someone that stays in front of it, if it’s moving.”

coat: “It’s something that keeps you warm, is big and sort of smooth, and has little furry stuff”  [Note:  Our family was at that time facing an Edmonton winter]

bed:  “It has legs, or doesn’t, and it has a pillow, and it stands up on its posts”.
[Note: That first idea in the definiens, at once oddly precise and maddeningly vague, probably meant:  “Prototypically a bed has legs (the ones you see in books), but ours doesn’t” -- the family, indeed, then in exile and furniture-poor, slept on a mattress on the floor.]

Striking  is this repeated note of ‘big’, present in every definition except the last:  extending even to the humble apple -- even a baby is bigger than an apple, let alone a robust four-year-old.   But in light of the lad’s subsequent specialization in differential geometry, an explanatory hypothesis presents itself.  What may well have struck him was the apple’s unabashed convexity -- round, not like a thin dime, but round all around:  having everywhere positive and (roughly) constant Riemannian curvature, as he would no doubt rephrase the definition upon more mature reflection.  Such an apperception of an apple was indeed the Eureka moment of the founder of differential geometry, Carl Friedrich Gauss, as depicted in the movie “Die Vermessung der Welt”.

A Day of Memorial

With fortuitous appropriateness, I’ve been spending part of today taking in an audiobook of the 1959 novel A Separate Peace, a high-school staple, which I read one summer at -- again appropriately -- a New England prep school (Mount Hermon, in this case).   I was about the same age (fifteen vs. sixteen) as the protagonists of that book.   And again, looming large in the background  a war was going on (Vietnam vs. WWII):  and like those young men, I was temporarily sheltered.

Since that summer I never re-read the book, nor thought about it much, though it is an ingredient in any young reader’s formative character.

The book’s main action takes place in 1942-43;  but it opens with its narrator, now twice his age of the time of the fateful events, revisiting his old campus in New Hampshire.    He returns with a sense of melancholy and dread.

Thus too I, now fully four times the age I was when I read it, return, not to the physical grounds of the tale, but to my own teen mind as it once received and grew inside it;  and with this, a sudden pang of unexpected dread as well.

The phrase of the title, “a separate peace”, would have been self-explanatory to anyone living through the second World War, and remembering the first;  it the context of the novel, it had a second resonance, in individual psychology.   The latter is now still readily available;  but young readers today, unschooled in diplomatic history, might miss the original significance.

The end of World War Two marked a sharp break in our nation’s history.  With it began a period of practical ahistory -- forgetting the recent conflict (my parents never spoke of it, never reminisced) -- while young families grew, and focused on making the world as pleasant as possible for their children.   Then the Vietnam conflict spread ever more darkly over us, affecting everyone, but draft-age young men especially.  These two factors somehow spawned what is to me still largely an enigma, even though I was a physical participant in all of the times’ events:  how a generation that had been (for the most part) very well treated indeed by their society, and by their parents in particular, came to contemptuously reject their birthright.

The crown-bound brows of the Bard of Hibbing (expanded)

Well I recall, in 1965, listening to the new album “Highway 61 Revisited” in my parents’ basement;  thinking:  This is the real deal.   Unlike much of the pop music my generation has enjoyed, this will last (thought I);  people would still be listening to it,  fifty years from now.

Then the decades went by, his career veered into less interesting avenues, and his voice lost much of its timbre and zing; I no longer followed his activities.

Yet lo -- Who would have predicted that, half a century from 1965, not only would people still be listening,  but the old codger would still be touring.  A lot.  Amazing.

And now the Nobel Prize.   Kind of out of left field, but one of the committee members made the valid point:  that, going back as far as Homer, poetry has been meant to be performed, even sung.  And this, in many different cultures.

The rustic troubadour, in a lyrical mood

So:  A tip of the stetson to you, old man.

~  [The genre now shifts  from memoir  to sotie] ~

It is not for us to add any groat’s-worth of comment to his abundantly documented biography.   Yet we do take comfort in having been, apparently, the only HRNS [highly-respected news site] to document Ibn-Guthrie’s  brilliant but little-known 1965 concert in Oslo:

“Desolation Row” --Norwegian version

[Footnote] I just checked the link for this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxWYEw4prQ

Remarkably, it is still available -- most songs by the Prairie Skald  have been deleted or disabled on YouTube by the Copyright Police.   The Norwegian lyrics of this one  apparently protected it -- de minimis non curat Attila.   If this trend continues, by 2076, all Internet content will be in the Norwegian language.

~

Meanwhile, the snarky, fairly brainy site Boulevard Voltaire, is underwhelmed:

Nobel de littérature : aujourd’hui Bob Dylan, demain un « twittérateur »

http://www.bvoltaire.fr/mariedelarue/nobel-de-litterature-aujourdhui-bob-dylan-demain-un-twitterateur,288740

They offer a political décryptage for the Committee’s choice, which I leave to your perusal.  That the choice might be politically motivated is not out of the question:  certainly this year’s choice for the (always highly politicized) Peace Prize makes no sense at all aside from such a perspective.  (And it’s not the obvious one -- nothing to do with the FARC really.  But my keyboard is running out of pixels, so you’ll have to figure it out for yourselves.)

~

Back to the blind bard of the Achaeans.

Whatever might have been their origin in oral performance, some folks have felt that such hit ditties as “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” read pretty well on paper too.  Whereas Zimmerman’s lyrics, so displayed, are thin stuff.  He himself took them seriously as poetry; the lyrics were printed in full on the backs of his albums of circa 1965. 

I recall in the late ‘sixties, when (excellent) bootleg albums  were appearing (like the Basement Tapes), a book of poems came out, Tarantula.    Still very much a fan, I almost bought a copy, but, glancing at it first, was obliged to toss it aside.  (Lennon’s In his own Write was actually amusing by comparison.  Heck, I even enjoyed Ono’s Grapefruit -- now there’s a collecter’s item.)

It is no knock on his song-lyrics as lyrics  to say that they fail to impress on the printed page.   One of the finest lines of all time, from the world of popular music, goes:

Bom ba-bom bom,  ba-dang ba-dang dang,

ba-ding ba-dong ding   BLUE MOON.

No seriously, it’s great;  but you have to hear it, not read it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eMkH0s3Vpc

Okay, that said:  We could still defend the Committee’s decision on the grounds that it recognizes the oeuvre, not sub specie printed poetry, like that of the modern eye-poets, but as a Gesamtkunstwerk, the music no more abstractable from than lyrics  than flesh from bones, or “The Godfather” from its soundtrack.

In any event, the Nobel committee was not the first to consider pop lyrics an integral part of the poetic canon, next to T.S. Eliot  and all the rest.  For, the anthology of American poetry published in 2000 by the prestigious Library of America, includes ditties from Tin Pan Alley (Ira Gerschwin, Lorenz Hart) and Delta Blues (Blind Lemon Jefferson  et alia).   And indeed, as I near the end of reading through both volumes, it may be affirmed that those offerings, while hardly standouts, are at least entertaining and worth reading  -- an evaluation that I would deny to (alas) a great deal that made it into these volumes, and that from  celebrated pens.

[Update 26 March 2017]  A judicious and enjoyable survey of the state of affairs, by David Orr, may be savored here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/books/review/after-dylans-nobel-what-makes-a-poet-a-poet.html

 

Consilience in Linguistics (neu bearbeitet)

[This note is a spin-off from our initial essay, Consilience, along with its sidekick Consilient Connections (distinguishing vertical from horizontal consilience);  and is sibling to such other special mini-studies as Consilience in Psychology, Consilience in Mathematics [currently closed for reconstruction], and the purely satirical Consilience and Cognitive Science.]

The whole notion of “Consilience [with]in …” a specific field  is skew to the Wilsonian/vertical-reductionist conception of the grand principle.  Instead we are noticing similarities in various regions of a field, which may have no analogues outside that field, nor follow synthetically as consequences of other principles outside that field.  Accordingly, the various discipline-specific mini-essays may have little in common, let alone contribute to a grand TOE of the sciences.  They are more in the spirit of the various volumes of the “Bobbsey Twins”.   I do plan to stop, though, somewhere short of “Consilience in Stamp-Collecting” and “So!  You Want 2 B a  Consilientist ”.

~

First:  Where does linguistics stand in the disciplinary matrix of the sciences?  Its status has often been fragile:

Finck and Wundt tried to rob linguistics of its autonomy  by incorporating it into psychology … Croce and Vossler tried to incorporate it into aesthetics.

-- Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras:  Europe in 1900 (1967, Eng. transl. 1978), p. 443

Later, much of the thrust of linguistics, over the past nigh-on one hundred years, especially in America, has been an assertion of its disciplinary autonomy -- not a branch of sociology, or history, or language studies -- even with respect to its ancestor philology, and further with regard to various components of linguistics itself, which one hoped  neatly to delineate.

Cf.

… the need felt by many  to keep linguistics an autonomous discipline, to prevent it from slopping over  into psychology, sociology, neurophysiology, etc.

-- Roger Lass, On explaining language change (1980), p. 121

This depreciatory rhetoric of “slopping over” is diametrically at variance with Wilson’s utopian holistic vision for Unified Science.

Indeed, over the past  close-on to a century, or at any rate  over a good fifty years during the heyday of the growing prestige of the field, other disciplines have looked to linguistics more than it to them.  As:

The appeal of linguistics methodologically  to anthropology  is in part because of its achievement of units at once concrete and universal.

-- D. Hymes & J. Fought, American Structuralism (1975), p. 153.

In terms of the sociology of science, this influence is reminiscent of the Physics Mesmerism earlier spawned by the pizazz of the field that invented The Bomb.

That, in fact, may explain a lot.   For the study of syntactic and semantics structures plainly finds nothing of ready use for it from current physics (“The Propositional Island Condition:  a String-Theoretic Approach”), whereas the neighboring scholarly fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc., have been -- not to put it too unkindly -- not especially successful of late.  They do not, so to speak, have The Bomb;  so linguistics has been free to go its own way.

~

The linguistic scene in Europe during the nineteenth century, and up to about Weimar, had a decidedly less isolated or self-sufficient feel, with the same Grimm brothers who wrote straight sound-law Germanistik and who launched the massive Wörterbuch, likewise collecting their equally-celebrated work of folklore,  Kinder- und Hausmärchen.   Saussure, with his penchant for dichotomies and abstractions, culminating in his purely cerebral reconstruction of the Indo-European laryngeals  not visible in the extant texts (a ghostly forerunner of the key notion of “empty categories” in the Chomskyan school), were atypical (notice that he published precious little in his own lifetime, his main influence being posthumous, his penchants  more to the liking of a later time).   There were, to be sure, occasional Declarations of Linguistic Independence similar to those which later characterized American structuralism and its progeny --

Linguistics must be regarded as an independent science, not to be confused with either physiology or psychology.

--  Baudouin de Courtenay (1871)

but more characteristic were the plumbing of ancient literatures, the quasi-folkloristic dialectological spelunkings in the hills and hamlets of the hinterland, and so concrete, sleeves-rolled-up a tendency as that of Wörter und Sachen.   As a Romance philologist once put it, emphasizing the Unentbehrlichkeit of the sister-disciplines for linguistics,

Man komme also nicht mit dem beliebten « ne supra crepidam »;  das gilt wirklich nur für Schuster.

-- Hugo Schuchardt, (1892), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 105

These humanistic traditions were carried on at Berkeley by my Doktorvater Yakov Malkiel, a White Russian refugee and time-capsule of Mitteleuropäische Kultur, whose journal Romance Philology (and it really was as deeply his, as The Rambler was Doctor Johnson’s) featured both linguistic and literary articles side by side.   It was this tradition I relished, and which informed my dissertation (later published as The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages).   It is a Kulturgut deeply to be savored, in centuries to come, long after the squabbles of Amerian Vietnam-era linguistics shall have faded into the mists of history.

~

The fiercest assertion of linguistic independence -- what we might dub the thesis of the Idiosyncrasy of Human Language (it obeys principles peculiar to itself, not generally shared among other features of animate beings) -- has come from the Chomsky camp (that bastion of the intellectually fierce and rhetorically ferocious)

The proper perspective of linguistic independence is given a trenchant formulation by Chomsky:

How can a system such as human language arise in the mind/brain, or for that matter in the organic world, in which one seems not to find anything like the basic properties of human language?  That problem has sometimes been posed as a crisit for the cognitive sciences.   The concerns are appropriate, but their locus is misplaced:  they are primarily a problem for biology  and the brain sciencies, which, as currently understood, do not provide any basis for what appear to be fairly well-established conclusions about language.

-- Noam Chomsky,  The Minimalist Program (1995), p. 2

[Sidenote:  This stance exactly parallels our own with respect to the (possibly not entirely unrelated) question of Free Will, in our diatribes against the eliminative materialists, who, failing to discover Free Will in a test-tube, declare that it must therefore not exist.  Morality they seem to have discerned cringing at the bottom of  an Erlenmeyer flask, and identify it with oxytocin, or oxycontin, or some damn thing.   Our retort:  Free Will (and with it,  possible prolegomena to morality) stands unspattered;  good luck with whatever it is you’re doing, and ever saying anything useful about these.]

Similar American declarations of disciplinary independence go back a ways:

The history of structural linguistics in the United States  can be readily interpreted in terms of three successive (and overlapping) movements:

(1) the movement for autonomous study of language, i.e., for a profession of linguistics;

(2)  the movement for autonomous study of linguistic structure;

(3) the movement for autonomous study of grammar (syntactic structure)

Chomsky’s classification of linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology, like Hockett’s classification of linguistics as a branch of cultural anthropology, does not imply any less of autonomy.

-- D. Hymes & J. Fought, American Structuralism (1975), p. 227-8

Back when I began at university,  linguistics as a discipline  was still largely at stage (1).  At Harvard College, they didn’t allow you to major in Linguistics simpliciter -- that was apparently perceived as being too narrow, like majoring in sausages or non-Abelian groups.  It had to be a combined major, say, Linguistics and Math.  (That is not necessarily a bad thing:  such disciplinary spread virtually forces you to think ‘consiliently’.)  I actually did briefly consider doing that, owing to the personal magnetism of two visiting luminaries:  George Lakoff and Noam Chomsky.  And while this-all takes us right off the topic of Consilience,  and back to the sociology of the wacky Sixties, perhaps the anecdotes may be worth retailing for their own sake.

It was my sophomore year (in many ways, my sophomoric year).  The campus was in turmoil, partially and fitfully shut-down.  The center had not held,  and we were whirling.

            Into this maelstrom  stepped  Noam Chomsky, meeting with Harvard undergraduates,  not to lecture, but to hear us out.   Already he was better known as a political commentator than as a linguist (I had eagerly read his foresightful American Power and the New Mandarins);  a small but respectful student audience  gathered at his feet -- or rather, he at ours:  for the students had occupied the available sofas and chairs,  and he himself sat down on the floor with the rest of the overflow.  He spoke softly, when he spoke at all;  listening, thinking, listening …

What he said that day, I don’t remember (how often are our memories  wordless, alas!)  but his sense or essence of open-mindedness, yet centeredness (most of us  were neither)  powerfully remains.    I left the meeting  feeling  that we student activists were truly juvenile, even if  largely right on the central issue of the Vietnam War;  and have him to thank that, thenceforward, I may have been  marginally less of an imbecile  than would otherwise have been the case.

Where Chomsky was all calm -- Jovian -- Lakoff was all energy -- Mercurial -- and tended to create a fevered atmosphere wherever he bustled -- not unlike that at campus protests and SDS meetings.  It was attractive, in a way, to an undergraduate whose veins flowed full with the sap of the Zeitgeist. 

However, I had, before my freshman year, renounced my original intention of majoring and English with a view to becoming a writer, penitentially donning the sackclothlike labcoat of a chemistry major,  in part because I knew myself to be subject to the Siren-calls of pride and cliqueishness  that went with the literary life.  And in Lakoff and his entourage (for there is no other word for the cloud of virtual particles that surrounded him), that factor was much in evidence.  So I drew back.  (Years later, at Berkeley, our paths would once again anastomose.)

What really settled it, though, was the practical reality of what it would mean to take courses from the permanent Harvard faculty (Lakoff was just passing through, and Chomsky taught over at M.I.T.)  I lasted just two meetings of the introductory course taught by droning Professor Undertaker (as I thought of him;  the real surname lies not too distant in phonological space).

Senior year, I applied to graduate school in math at Stanford and Berkeley.   When both accepted, I asked Lynn Loomis which he would recommend.   He was very practical:  no finicky attempts at comparing this professor with that, just:  Berkeley is bigger.  That proved wise advice, for exactly the same meta-reason for which I turned down Yale (whose English department had been making beckoning advances) and chose Harvard because, well, what the hell.  Once again, I wound up pursuing a course of studies entirely different from that in which I had applied.  After dropping out of math from impecunity, I stumbled upon a much more inviting introductory lecture-series by Charles Fillmore of Berkeley linguistics, and there was a thriving department ready to take me on;  whereas Stanford, at that time, didn’t even have a full-fledged Linguistics Department, just a Program within English.   So it looked as though, providentially, I had landed in the right place.

Yet how often have I dwelt in retrospect, how different my intellectual life (and with it, life tout court) might have been, had I instead found myself across the bay at Stanford.  For, despite its shoestring beginnings, by the time I received the doctorate (1981), Stanford had burgeoned into the M.I.T. of the West, whereas the Berkely department -- like the surrounding town -- was falling victim to centrifugal forces, partly political, and partly personality-driven, but more particularly, in the case of Linguistics, because the Rota Fortunae had made another half-turn, resurrecting MIT-style linguistics to a second run of pre-eminence, and sending the fortunes of Berkeley-style Generative Semantics down, down, down…   Fuit Ilium!

~ ~ ~

Below, a miscellany of consilient influences.

~

The syntactic cycle (cyclic ordering of rules in syntax) has been called “analogous” to the phonological cycle (e.g. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (1968), p. 39).   This, however, is  from a disciplinary standpoint  quite a domestic affair, and need not be ‘consilient’ with anything outside linguistics.   And indeed, as Chomsky remarks later in the same pamphlet (p. 66), “One cannot expect structuralist phonology, in itself, to provide a useful model for investigation of other cultural and social systems.

A word of caution.  By saying that a theory of sense ‘breaks down’ the complex ability of linguistic productivity,  I do not mean to suggest that the explanation must be reductive, but only that the theory of sense must articulate [unpack, make plain] the structure of complex ability.  If the ability is best explained by reducing it to other abilities, the theory of sense says what these are … If the ability is best explained holistically, … then it explains how the ability functions holistically …

-- Norbert Hornstein, Logic as Grammar (1984), p. 127

~

The whole thrust of modularity is that, while tout might more or less se tenir , within  a given module, the modules themselves are connected, in some cases, only the way the wheels and the engine and the windshield of a car are connected, in subserving a larger whole.

Ctr. a sort of ideological purity:

By strongly syntactic, I mean  not only that the theory is developed using syntactic notions,  but also that the principles invoked, and the distinctions advocated, have no natural semantic analogues.

… In fact, a stronger point can be made:  the natural distinctions and generalizations that a natural semantic theory of interpretation would [consiliently] make available  lead us to expect configurations of data that are simply not attested.

-- Norbert Hornstein, Logic as Grammar (1984), p. 102, 4

And,  more polemically, emphatically rejecting any extradisciplinary aid:

An extreme position was taken by Kurylowicz:  “One must explain linguistic facts by other linguistic facts, not by heterogeneous facts. … Explanation by means of social facts is a methodological derailment.” (1948).  For Kurylowicz, even the influence of other languages was irrelevant:  “the substratum theory has no importance for the linguist”.

-- U. Weinreich et al.  in W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel, Directions for Historical Linguistics (1968), p. 177

All of this -- taken as  a program rather than a description -- is strictly unexceptionable, apart from the final “the” in front of the word “linguist”.  With that restrictive article, the passus passes over into the overweening;  as who should say,  “The wearyingly multifarious  and mostly insensate behaviors  of non-penguin species  is of no concern to The Zoologist.”

Contrast, indeed, in the very same volume, the opinion of one of its editors (Y. Malkiel, p. 28): 

In languages where “progressive” and “conservative”, “aristocratic” and “rustic” variants are suggested by differences in form, no truly satisfactory interpretation is conceivable  without an equal share of attention  granted to the social matrix.”

Along with many other stances that could be cited. (“Pike’s tagmemics  expressly linked to an analysis of cultural behavior as a whole”).

~

In post-Chomskyan linguistics, hardcore practitioners have usually been at pains to distinguish concepts and processes peculiar to the human language faculty, from those obtaining elsewhere, be it in bee-langue, or the “language of flowers” or “the Brain’s Inner Language” (this, from an article in this morning’s New York Times), or neuranatomy or chemistry or physics or -- horrendo referens -- Psychology with its “general learning strategies.”  By contrast, generativists revel in any apparent structural or procedural harmony within their discipline -- striving, for example, to see how much material can be gleichgeschaltet under the sway of the Empty Category Principle -- the awe-inspiring ECP (the Great and Powerful).

~

Rules relating S-Structure to LF are of the same kind that operate in the Syntax:  Move alpha.

-- Norbert Hornstein, Logic as Grammar (1984)

Outsiders are unlikely to gasp at this last, nor to marvel about the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Move-alpha.  (“alpha” here stands for:  anything at all.  A slightly more general formulation  would be Stephenson’s Rule:  Do Stuff.)

~

It is desireable for the overall theory to be articulated into strata, and for certain general notions or procedures to recur at different strata, at least masking their differences in basic material, and perhaps providing a genuine generalization.    Thus:  segmentation;  compositionality; and projection.  E.g. (Hornstein):  The Projection Principle:  the Theta Criterion applies at D-structure, ((S-structure)), and LF  (these being the antiseptic rechristening of the old deep structure, surface structure, and logical form, which proved too exciting for the peasantry and had to be withdrawn from general circulation).

~

The technical tools for dealing with “rule-governed creativity” [basically, a synchronic system of limitless productivity] as distinct from “rule-changing creativity” [diachronic evolution] have only become readily available during the past few decades, in the course of work in logic and foundations of mathematics.

-- Noam Chomsky, “Current Issues in Linguistic Theory”, repr. in Jerry Fodor & Jerrold Katz, eds., The Structure of Language (1964), p. 59

~

There are books and papers that speculate about the evolution of human language while studiously ignoring all of linguistic research

-- Paul Bloom, reviewing LINGUA EX MACHINA:

Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky With the Human Brain.

By William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton.

~

Appendix: Historical references to collaboration or lack of it, between linguistics and neighboring fields:

Summing up the wide-ranging work of the philologist and etymologist Hugo Schuchardt (floruit 1864 - 1927, magnum jubilaeum), Leo Spitzer writes:

Schuchardt hat nicht nur über fast alle allgemeinen Probleme der Sprachwissenschaft  nachgedacht, sondern alle irgendwie zur Linguistik peripherisch gelegenen Gebiete des Lebens  abgesucht, von der Sprachwissenschaft als Zentrum aus  seinen Beitrag der Lösung der drängenden Lebensprobleme  gegeben.

-- Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p.

Schuchardt himself, however, in places posits the wisdom of keeping linguistics sauber getrennt:

Hamitische Sprachen sind solche die von Hamiten gesprochen werden, oder Hamiten sind die  welche hamitische Sprachen reden.  Jenes ist die anthropologische Erklärung, dieses die linguistische … Mißverständnissen kann nur dadurch vorgebeugt werden, daß Linguistisches und Anthropologisches strengstens auseinandergehalten werde.

-- review (1912) of  C. Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten; repr. Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 334

~

Referring to the theoretical-semantic efforts of the pre-eminent 19^th-century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt:

Wundt’s failure seems to have discouraged others from taking up the matter in earnest, for during the last 30 years, no one has made public any system of semasiology worthy of serious consideration.  Semantic work from 1900 to 1930  has been characterized by an astonishing and highly regrettable lack of contact and collaboration between psychologists and philologists.

-- Gustav Stern, Meaning and Change of Meaning (1931)

~

Contra sociological-anthropological structuralisme:

… eager souls who think they can easily borrow  and fruitfully adapt  a formal model  from simpler and perhaps more fortunate fields such as linguistics  or even phonetics.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 122

(Here he means rather phonology;  it is phonology, and not phonetics, that is structuralist.)

~

Where does linguistics fit in -- among the humanties, or the sciences?

Um die Sprachwissenschaft   haben sich bekanntlich  die Natur- und die Geistes- (order Geschichts-)wissenschaften gerissen,  wie in der mittelalterlichen Legende  die Teufel und die Engle  um die Seele des Menschen.  Jetzt pflegt man sie  ihrem Inhalt nach  zu den Geisteswissenschaften,  ihrer Methode nach  zu den Naturwissenschaften zu zählen;  mit fast dem gleichen Rechte  könnte man das Umgekehrte tun.

Ich halte an der Einheit der Wissenschaft  fest,  und vermag  beispiesweise  zwischen Biologie  und Sprachwissenschaft  keine tiefere Kluft wahrzunehmen  als zwischen Chemie und Biologie.

-- Hugo Schuchardt, (1892), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 105

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