Lakoff, Robin Tolmach;
The Language War
University of California Press, 2001, 332 pages
ISBN 0520232070, 9780520232075
topics: | language | history | linguistics | politics
This is an uneven book, with two interpretations of its title that don't sit easily with each otheer. In the first chapter "War" is the well-known showdown between Chomsky and his rebel followers, conducted with great mud-slinging on both sides. Later in the book, it becomes a second and completely unrelated type of "war" - at the level of gender and politics. Of the two wars, the writing is passionate and cler when talking of the first war in the early 70s, where Robin Lakoff discusses the disillusionment of people like herself and her (now ex-) husband, the noted linguist George Lakoff, when Chonsky gradually turned away from semantics.
Chapter 1 ("What am I doing here") presents a compact description of the limited goals of the Chomskyan view of linguistics, and what led to disillusionment among the Lakoffs and others. This is summarized through some quotations/notes below. As the field of linguistics experienced a boom in the late 50s after Chomsky's Transformational Generative Grammar, at least three very different kinds of people entered linguistics with three very diff assumptions , and hence diametrically opp views of what we ought to be doing, what scientific study of language meant, etc. : a) Those who had been trained as social scientists, anthropologists interested in learning about languages other than the familiar IE ones as a way of understanding other cultures. b) Those trained as humanists, whose interests lay in the hermenuetic potential of TGG. We wanted a way to determine, from their superficial form, what sentences "really" meant at a deeper level, why people made the choices they made, and what those choices signified about ourselves. c) Those who entered from math / formal logic. For them language was above all a system whose properties could be formalized in equation-like rules. They were less interested in the relationships between language and culture, and language and thought, than in the relations that held between the parts of sentences. This last was the centerpiece of the Chomskyan project, as those of us who had entered it under one of the other auspices would ruefully discover. The 3 kinds of linguists made strange, increasingly uneasy bedfellows. To the formal (i.e. strictly Chonmskyan) TGGian, the linguist's task was discovering the abstract grammar of the lg, the grammar of ideal speaker-listener in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of language in actual performance" (Chomsky 1965 p.3) language variants were deemed of little importance, and context, though it affected both form and its understanding, was essentially irrelevant. Empirical data gathered from people's actual utterances was not only not necessary, it was undesirable: it might be corrupt, tainted by trivial external influences, "performative factors." Transformational theory directed its practitioners to produce the data that they then analyzed, and those analyses formed the basis for theories. The justification was that to not use such superficial data would be to go back to that dangerous yesteryear, and to move linguistics further from "science", where rational people who craved respectability wished to reside. [Robin Lakoff and some others were not happy with this formalist approach. They wanted to understand why men and women don't quite speak the same language, why advertising keeps influencing 20th c. sophisticates, and how lawyers on two sides can describe the same scenario in completely contradictory ways, leading to verdicts that make no sense (e.g. the OJ Simpson verdict). This constitute the bulk of the rest of the book. - AM