The following are my (admittedly normative) notes on how to introduce a linguistics speaker.

• The genre most similar to the introduction of speaker is the congratulatory toast. An introduction should be brief, and the lengthy written introduction should be scorned. The speaker is already making an imposition on the audiences’ time, and for the host to usurp more of this time than necessary is a further imposition on both host and audience.
• The introduction is not an opportunity for the introducer to demonstrate  erudition, but it can be an opportunity to show wit.
• The introduction should be in the introducer’s voice. For this reason, a biography paragraph provided by the speaker should not be read as part of the introduction.
• The introduction should be extemporaneous. The introducer can prepare brief notes, but they should fit on a notecard or their hand, and the notes should never be “read”.
• Polite humor, brief personal anecdotes (e.g., when the introducer first met the speaker or became aware of their work), and heart-felt superlatives or compliments (one of the nicest introductions I ever received stated that I was “in the business of keeping people honest”) are to be encouraged.
• The introduction should state the speakers’ current affiliation and title, if any, but need not list their full occupational or educational history unless it is judged relevant.
• Introducers may feel an urge to read the title of the talk when concluding their introduction, but should resist this urge. There is no real need—the audience already has seen the talk title in the program or other announcements, and they can read the slide—and the speaker normally feels the need to read it out loud regardless.
• The introduction should conclude with the speaker’s name. In one common style, which I consider elegant, the introducer is careful not to say the speaker’s full name until this conclusion, and uses epithets like “our next speaker” or “our honored guest” earlier in the introduction.

[I once again need to state that I am not responding any person or recent event. But remember the Law of the Subtweet: if you see yourself in some negative description but are not explicitly named, you can just keep that to yourself.]

There is a long debate about the effects of birth order on stable personality traits. A recent article in PNAS¹ claims the effects are near null once proper controls are in place; the commentary it’s paired with suggests the whole thing is a zombie theory. Anyways, one of the claims I remember hearing was that older siblings were more likely to exhibit subclinical “Dark Triad” (DT) traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Alas, this probably isn’t true, but it is easy to tell a story about why this might be adaptive. Time for some game theory. In a zero-sum scenario, if you’re the most mature (and biggest) of your siblings, you probably have more to gain from non-cooperative behaviors, and DT traits ought to select for said behaviors. A concrete (if contrived example): you can either hog or share the toy, and the eldest is by more likely to get away with hogging.

I wonder whether the scarcity of faculty positions—even if overstated (and it is)—might also be adaptive for dark triad traits. I know plenty of evil Boomer professors, but not many that are actually DT, and if I had to guess, these traits (particularly the narcissism) are much more common in younger (Gen X and Millennial) cohorts. Then again, this could be age-grading, since anti-social behaviors peak in adolescence and decline afterwards.

Endnotes

1. This is actually a “direct submission”, not one of those mostly-phony “Prearranged Editor” pieces. So it might be legit.

I strongly identify with the generativist program. I recognize and accept that there are other ways to study language; some of these (e.g., any reasonably careful documentary work) contribute to generativist discourse and many of those that don’t are still prosocial. I for one would love to see the humanist aspect of documentation get more recognition. (Why don’t humanities programs hire linguists engaged in documentation and translation efforts?) But I’m most interested in the scientific aspects of language and think that generativism basically encompasses the big questions in this area, and some of the questions it doesn’t encompass just aren’t very important.

I don’t think it’s really ideal to brand generativism as Chomskyanism, which is the term anti-generativists tend to use. Certainly Chomsky is the plurality contributor to the program, but I think it gives undue credit to a single individual when there are so many others worth recognizing. I suspect the reason anti-generativists prefer it is they tend to see generativism as a cult of personality and perhaps want to trade on the repute of Chomsky’s (admittedly, extremely idiosyncratic but conceptually unrelated) political commitments. In evolutionary biology, it is common to refer to the modern theory of natural as the neo-Darwinian synthesis or modern synthesis. This makes sense because in 2024 there are no “strict Darwinists”, since subsequent work has integrated his monumental contributions with Mendelian and molecular genetics. Similarly, linguistics has no “strict Chomskyans”, even though we linguists eagerly awake our Mendel and our Crick & Watson.

The thing that sticks with me about the anti-generativist contingent is how disunited and disorganized they are. Anti-generativists are mostly a sincere lot (generativists too), but their attitudes are greatly shaped by negative polarization and as such, they have strange bedfellows. On the anti-generativist internet, you’ll see Adorno-disciple social constructivists talking at cross-purposes with construction grammarians, self-identified leftist/radical sociolinguists palling around with neocon consent-manufacturing journalists, experimental psycholinguists who reserve all their respect for exactly one out-of-practice fieldworker, tensorbros who don’t read books, and a few really mad, really old Boomers who never managed to build a movement around their heresy. By all accounts these people ought to hate each other. (And maybe, deep down, they do.)

In the worst case these conservations tend to veer away from constructive critique to a kind of anti-linguistics which devalues any form of language analysis that isn’t legible either as social activism or white-coat-wearing lab science. I for one can’t take your opinion about the science of language seriously if you can’t do the “armchair linguistics” that forms the descriptive-empirical base of the field. There are anti-generativists who clear this low bar, but not many. You don’t have to be a genius to do linguistics, but you do sort of have to be a linguist.

In my opinion, generativism has never been hegemonic beyond the level of individual departments, and claims otherwise are simply scurrilous. (Even MIT is a hotbed of anti-generativist reaction, after all.) But I think it would be a shame for college students to get a liberal arts education without learning about these very interesting ideas about human nature (in addition to standard consciousness-raising about prescriptivism and language ideology, which is important too).