One of the more confusing slanders against generativism is the belief that it has all somehow been undone by William Labov and the tradition of variationist sociolinguistics. I have bad news: Noam and Bill are friends. I saw them chopping it up once, in Philadelphia, and I have to assume they were making fun of functionalists. Bill has nice things to say about the generativist program in his classic paper on negative concord; Noam has some interesting comments about how the acquirenda probably involve multiple competing grammars in that Piaget lecture book. They both think functionalism is wildly overrated. And of course, the i-language perspective that Noam brings is an absolute essential to dialogues about language ideologies, language change, stigma and stratification, and so forth that we associate with Bill.
Its pretty funny given Labov quite literally states as much in papers, like his “what is to be learned” or the northern cities chapter of his Principles book, and things like his “enigmas of uniformity” talk from nwav a decade ago. The response is usually “yeah well labov is problematic anyway” when you show things like him begging that linguists “turn the focus away from those minor subdivisions and account for the breathtaking uniformities and discontinuities that result from the outward orientation of the language learning faculty”.
Thanks, yeah. Good examples there. Somebody should do a study to figure out who the one good linguist is.
Lucie tells me physics has ingrained that “good” presupposes “frightens everyone”, like witten. I don’t wanna model that stemlord take but our humanities alternative, where “good” presupposes “viciously dunked on”, is maybe worse.
That’s interesting. Nobody good in our field has that “bulldog” reputation really.