Failure to Communicate Why Princeton Needs a Linguistics Department Arthur Dudney 2 comments About her 300-level linguistics course, a friend of mine recently told me, “It makes me want to gouge my eyes out.” This violent, Oedipal reaction is pretty rare for courses at this university but surprisingly common in classes in the Program in Linguistics. The lack of a major in linguistics and the half-hearted substitution of an underperforming, narrowly defined program is truly a dishonor to this university. What linguistics is capable of, the understanding of how humans use language, is lost on our Program in Linguistics. I consider myself a linguist but am formally a senior in the Classics Department not receiving a certificate in Linguistics. I’m interested in the literary side of language, and our Linguistics Program can’t serve my needs because of its antipathy to that sort of analysis of language use. In the eyes of many people with whom I’ve discussed it, the Program functions as the Princeton chapter of the Noam Chomsky fan club. Nearly every class is tainted by an assumption that Generative Syntax (Chomsky’s brainchild) is akin to godliness. Students who have asked questions requiring answers outside of the Generative framework have been haughtily referred to other departments as though the very asking tainted the Program’s purity. Lest I be misunderstood: No one doubts that Chomsky is a genius. But assuming that Chomsky was and is and always will be the only genius in the field of Linguistics is foolish. Yet this is exactly what the Program does. It would be as though the History Department were only teaching Marxist history or Woody Woo systematically ignored whole continents it deemed unimportant. One can only assume that such a lacuna is tolerated because the Program is a program and not a degree-conferring department. There are legitimate fields of linguistics other than Chomskian Generative Syntax, and those ought to be represented. We all benefit from intellectual diversity; as the program stands, we all suffer. When one peruses the Harvard and Yale course catalogues and comes across "Categorical Grammar and Related Theories", "Advanced Syntax", and "From Indo-European to Old Irish" all peacefully coexisting in the same department, one cannot help but feel a little cheated. As one professor put it: “The Program in Linguistics should never have been allowed to get this way.” Recently, a friend of mine was at a Slavic department gathering, and made a very natural observation to a graduate student in the department (an assistant in his linguistics class this fall): “It’s funny,” he said, “but we only seem to have people interested in generative syntax here at Princeton.” “Yes, that’s true,” she replied, “Thank God.” There is a glaring problem with that mindset. We pride ourselves on intellectual diversity so isn’t this exactly the trap that we at the zenith of American academia aren’t supposed to fall into? Consider what opportunities are being lost by the program’s myopic approach. Instead of finding themselves in a stable academic environment, students not primarily interested in Generative syntax are essentially made to feel off-balance, and then are forced to teach themselves about whatever other linguistic theory they happen to be interested in—to their frustration and confusion. To make matters worse, classes in the Program in Linguistics are quite often poorly taught, painful, and boring. Infuriatingly, there are vast resources at Princeton for a hypothetical Linguistics Department, which are currently spread though a dozen departments and have little hope of collaborating. Princeton is the only Ivy (barring Columbia) which lacks a full-fledged department devoted to the theoretical problems of human language. Our Anthropology Department is better equipped to do field research on language than the Program in Linguistics, which is overly dependent on English and Slavic languages. Students in linguistics classes who try to bring up questions and examples in languages such as Latin or Arabic should not be looked at by the professor as if they were from another planet. A wider range of languages needs to be represented, because it’s an untenable position that all the universals of human language happen to be easily accessible in English. This academically parsimonious idea permeates Chomskian methods as they’re being applied here. Classics Professor Joshua Katz’s class, entitled “The Origins and Nature of the English Language”, is ironically the class in the Program in Linguistics to incorporate the most languages. A consistently high-rated class (with good reason), CLA 208 serves as an introduction to the linguistic history of English, to Indo-European studies, and to historical and comparative linguistics as a whole. Despite drawing some of the highest ratings and reviews in the University, this class is scarcely recognized or acknowledged by other professors in the program even though it counts toward a Linguistics certificate. If one has the good fortune to be at Princeton, then one feels a lot of trepidation in denouncing an entire academic program. However, it is warranted in this case and perhaps in some others. The first step in fixing this obvious weakness in our otherwise strong academic front is for the Program to expand its focus and for the scholars at Princeton who do the “wrong kind of Linguistics” to be shown some respect. This could be accomplished by the careful infusion of new faculty and the consolidation of the resources into a degree-conferring department. We need a department that can bring together experts in linguistics and all its sub-disciplines (sociolinguistics, Indo-European philology, neurolinguistics etc.) and also serve the needs of interested undergraduates, of which there are many. I shouldn’t have to take sociolinguistics in the Spanish department from a visiting professor nor historical linguistics in French. In a time when the administrators want to see more undergraduates in smaller majors, perhaps a new major with a true intellectual range should be brought forth from the void. Presumably, the administration would pay more attention to the quality of an actual department than it has to the quality of the program. But something has to change: A university program should not repel people in this way. There should be less eye-gouging and more focus on language. Arthur Dudney is a senior in the Classics department. He is writing his thesis on sociolinguistic issues in the ancient world.

jfriedma: Your article touches on a lot of good points, but there are a few assertions that you make which simply are not true. For instance, you claim that only generative grammar is taught but take the example of LIN 360: one of the primary course books was written by a linguist with a fiercely descriptive, typological method to the study of language – pretty much the antithesis of Chomsky’s generative grammar approach. Also, I do believe that most of the linguistics courses incorporate a wide variety of languages (rather than just ENG/CLA 208). In my courses thus far, we have looked at languages from the Pacific Rim, Africa, as well as the languages of the indigenous peoples of this country (to name a few). I would love to see a strong linguistics department akin to those of universities such as MIT and the other Ivies, but I think your article points out certain flaws which are either distorted or may not actually exist. Anonymous: Having read the above article and comment, I think there are a few things that ought to be pointed out. First of all, I sat through the entirety of LIN 360, the course which the author of the comment above uses to refute the claim that the Princeton Program in Linguistics is Chomsky-centric. I am wondering how the author of said comment failed to notice that Comrie's book (which indeed is critical of Chomskian methods) was on the reading list solely for the purpose of being nitpicked, criticized, and ultimately rejected by the course professor. Indeed, the purpose of Comrie was to demonstrate the superiority of Chomskian methods, and to degrade others (in this case typology specifically) as unworthy of time and consideration. That does not seem to me to be the shining example of intellectual openness the author of the above comment would have it be. Second, it must also be mentioned that "incorporating a language" into a class should not mean that one or two sample sentences that language were at some point or another placed on the board. Endless example sentences in languages the instructor doesn?t know are essentially meaningless, since not much insight can, practically speaking, be offered into the larger grammar and structure. The continuous use of random sentences out of any sort of context is thus not particularly useful, and no, it does not count as actually incorporating the language into the course. However, I share the sentiment of both authors when I say that I would love to see the strengthening of the current Program in Linguistics into a full department. READ POST A COMMENT (html welcome) Name or nickname: Or comment via email.

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