Re: Learning a language

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 06/15/04 

Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 11:22:44 GMT

Eugene Holman wrote:
>
> In article <40CE2C04.142F@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> > Eugene Holman wrote:
> >
> > > No, I am not making sarcastic remarks. Slave societies are typically
> > > extremely hierarchical, and hierarchical social organization is typically
> > > reflected in and reinforced by different norms of usage. Read some of the
> > > early work in pre-Labovian sociolinguistics (or sociology of language, if
> > > you will) by J. J. Gumperz, such as his important 1958 article "Dialect
> > > Differences and Social Stratification in a North Indian Village".
> >
> > Or, read some of the recent work in (post)Labovian sociolinguistics in
> > order to be aware of the work that's been done in the 40 _most recent_
> > years. Mr. Holman's in a time warp.
>
> Hardly. I teach (using R. Wardhaugh: *An Introduction to
> Sociolinguistics*, 4th edition (2002) and John Holm: *An Introduction to
> Pidgins and Creoles (2000) as the course textbooks), do research, and
> publish in sociolinguistics, most recently on language policy in the
> Baltic countries of the former Soviet Union "Acculturation and
> Communicative Mobility among Former Soviet Nationalities,". Annual Review
> of Applied Linguistics 17 (1997), and the evolution of English as a
> language of scientific discourse in Finland
> (www.degruyter.com/journals/multilin/2003/pdf/22_309.pdf), both
> co-authored with Harald Haarmann. I'm still working through Labov's
> massive *Principles of linguistic Change*, vol. 2, so while not being too
> much into post-Labovian sociolinguistics, I am quite familiar with his
> thinking, including his current ideas about and revisions of that
> thinking, over a career spanning more than forty years.
>
> Knowing your subject means knowing the publications that were seminal
> during its formative years. Familiarity with Einar Haugen's *The Norwegian
> Language in America; a Study in Bilingual Behavior* (1953), Uriel
> Weinreich *Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems* (1953), as well as
> Gumperz's above-mentioned important and often-referred to article from
> 1958, is hardly indicative of being in a time warp.

Continuing to apply only Haugen and Weinreich to language contact
situations _is_ indicative of a time warp. (Using Holm's Red book
instead of Holm's Green books is also not a good sign. We've already
seen how out of touch you are with contemporary
pidginistics/creolistics.)

When I went from Cornell to Chicago, I became exposed to what had been
going on in linguistics _after_ post-Bloomfieldianism, but, particularly
at LACUS meetings and to some extent at the ILA and in *Word*, I still
find senior scholars who have spent their entire career attacking
Chomsky 1957 and Chomsky 1965. That's what we were taught at Cornell in
those days (that generation was on the verge of retirement when I was
there), but it had already been superseded. 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net