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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
We all know that linguist has lately become a magic word. Men who used to be merely English or Spanish professors find that when they are called by this term they are welcomed almost as equals by ecologists and astrophysicists; and scientifically trained administrators on public platforms, anxious to show the breadth of their interests but not feeling quite up to coming out in favor of poetry, are happy to be able to bow in the direction of departments that once seemed hopeless. For the first time within living memory there is even a good deal of money and patronage available for language students—as long as they are labeled linguists.
1 H. A. Gleason, An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, rev. ed. (New York, 1961), p. 12.
2 Ibid., p. 440.
3 “The only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations. Features which we think ought to be universal may be absent from the very next language that becomes accessible.” Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York, 1933), p. 20.
4 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Générale (Paris, 1916), p. 40. The book was not actually written by Saussure, but compiled, from notes on his lectures, by two of his students, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. It has been translated into English by Wade Baskin as Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1959).
5 Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague, 1957), p. 107.
6 I sent Chomsky a draft of this paper, got a rather extensive criticism in reply, and have made some modifications as a result, thought not as many as he suggested.
