autobiographies by north american scholars in the language

This is an offprint from:

E.F.K. Koerner (ed.) First Person Singular III.

Autobiographies by North American scholars in the language sciences. John Benjamins Publishing Company

AmsterdamlPhiladelphia 1998

(Published as Vol. 88 ofthe series STUDIES IN THE mSTORY OF THE LANGUAGE SCIENCES,

ISSN 0304-0720)

ISBN 90 272 4576 2 (Hb; Eur.) / I 556196326 (Hb; US) © Copyright 1998 - John Benjamins B.V.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means, without written pennission

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FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUISTICS AND BACK AGAIN

ROBERT P. STOCKWELL University of California, Los Angeles

~w- P. ~tet-l!AAil

© 1998 by Don Lewis, Hollywood, Calif.

FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUISTICS AND BACIK AGAIN

ROBERT P. STOCKWELL University o/California, Los Angeles

If you spent your formative years in Charleston, West Virginia, in the late 1930s and early 1940s thinking you wanted to be a professional musician of some sort, you didn't have much of a chance. There was a symphony, not a very good one but the only one, and I played first flute in it throughout my junior high and high school years. That's because the only better flutist lived 50 miles away. in Hurttington, and that was a long ways to go in those days with no super-highways along the river, for an orchestra rehearsal Of performance. If I had had good sense, or good advice, I wonld have taken up 'cello then rather than waiting until I was 45 to finally learn what is special about string chamber music, but way too late for me to get good at it. As a teenager I was a fair flutist, but never good enough to have made a decent living. For us in the academic world where jobs were plentiful at least during most of my career (Ph.D. 1952; retirement 1994), it's hard to grasp fully just how competitive the scene is in the world of professional musical performance. Except for the top echelon, there's always someone out there, usually many someones, a lot better than you are, and there's no place to hide from the competition. In his own effort to report' 1st person singn1ar', Dwight Bolinger wrote that he "was born to write music, and somewhere along the line [ ... ] got mislaid" (1991:35). I had the same feeling aboutpeiforming music, and looking back I think I was mislaid when my father insisted on putting a wind instmment, not a string, in my hands because that way I could play in the band and get into football games free (though I didn't care for the sport and never stayed after half-time). Anyway, before I could pursue what would have been a deeply disillusioning experience trying to become a professional musician, I carne of age for military service (1943) and the next two years were spent in what were called 'V-12' programs getting enough college education to qualify for trairting as a flier in- the Naval Air Corps. I never made it to flying school. The war ended before I got out of the college program into which I had been sent after enlistment.

230 ROBERT P. STOCKWELL

The first time I ever saw that language could be analyzed in an interesting way was at the University of Virginia, where I found myself at the end of the w'ar. It was in a composition course. The instructor put three unidentified paragraphs in front of us and wanted to know which one was best, and why. All three described a scene. One was from the Saturday Evening Post, the second from some other popular journal, and the third was the first paragraph of Joyce's Ulysses. Only one person in the class of about 30 - not meselected the Joyce paragraph. AI the end of the hour we had all seen why it was, very clearly, far superior to the other two. At that point I had become a Classics major because the only undergraduate support I could find, after the Navy V -12 took me through the first two years, was something called the Gessner Harrison Scholarship in Greek (there were no other applicants at that time). I was so intrigued by the challenge of learning to write well that I doubled my major, adding English, and in the course of meeting requirements for that major I wandered quite innocently into the History of English, taught by Archibald Anderson Hill. I learned later that the course was notorious in the Department, generally known as the 'mystery' of the English language. There were two other students in the class, neither of whom had a clue to what was going on. They both dropped after the second or third week. Hill used Bloomfield's Language as his textbook, which while not exactly a history of English was a wonderful first book for me to study. He also suggested I read Sapir's Language, which I did. I don't recall that we ever talked much about the history of English, but it was an extraordinary one-on-one course in Bloomfieldian structural linguistics. Since I was also the only student in Greek, I got much of my undergraduate education in individual tutorial courses.

Still, I didn't suddenly tum to linguistics. After my B.A. in Greek and English I had to go to work and figure out how to make a living. Nothing I had learned up to that time seemed to prepare me for anything useful. I moved in with my folks in Oklahoma City (in the house where I had been born in 1925), and took ajob using the only skill I had that was marketable. I became a typist for the Army Organized Reserve Corps, typing up l.D. cards for the files of returning veterans. I applied to the local high schools for a job as an English teacher, but I was considered incompetent because I had never had an "education" course, one where they teach you how to teach. The local City University was a different matter, however. They were swamped by veterans returning to college under the G. 1. Bill. The dean, who was an irascible but very able administrator who ran the place essentially by himself, interviewed me for a position as instructor in English. He had received one letter

FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUISTICS AND BACK AGAIN 231

of recommendation, of course from Arch Hill. Both the dean and Hill knew I was underqualified but they were willing to take a chance. When I told the people at AORC that I was resigning my position as a clerk-typist to accept an offer of an instructorship at Oklahoma City University, no one believed me. As I left the office in downtown Oklahoma City for the last time they still thought I would be back when I got over my delusions of grandeur.

Now that I had a real job where I could save money for graduate school (my salary was $2600 a year in 1946), I could get on with plans that had been made earlier that year, without a date attached to them, namely marriage to Lucy Louisa Floyd, whom I had met in the Rare Book Room at Virginia during my last year as an undergraduate. My parents converged with me on Charlottesville and the wedding took place in the University Chapel. We returned to OeD and she was appointed to an instructorship in English also, when another new junior member of the faculty failed to show up for his classes in the second week. Why he withdrew after one week (disappeared, leaving a set of themes ungraded) you can infer from the following: We were each required to teach six sections of freshman English, eighteen contact hours per week, fifty students per class. After we returned to Charlottesville for graduate school two years later, I taught Freshman English only once more in my whole career, one course my first year at UCLA in 1956. But in those two years at OeD, with 300 students in each of four semesters, with a theme a week, I calculate that I read and marked 18,000 essays. Lucy did another 18,000. The students were mostly returning veterans, many of them adults who might never have sought a college education but for the G. 1. Bill. They were impatient with instruction that did not have a fairly clear goal and where progress could not be measured. Every paper had to be criticized in a way that was useful.

Lucy and I had three children, but only one, the second one, bam in 1954, snrvived to maturity. He is a Berkeley graduate, a successful commercial real estate broker in Los Angeles. During his teen years, he and I flew radio-controlled model aircraft, especially Formula I racing aircraft, and we travelled allover the country to participate in competitions.

My first publications, of a sort, date from those years in Oklahoma: I reviewed books, mostly novels, for the Daily Oklahoman. As a second job, scraping every cent together to save up for returping to university, I played flute (2nd chair) in the Oklahoma City Symphony when Victor Allessandro was its conductor. When we returned to Charlottesville in 1948, I resigned from the musician's union and I have never again performed professionally. I had decided on an academic career, but I still thought my field would be En-


glish literature. Probably early English: I had a kind of vague idea that all the Greek and Latin I had studied, and the fact that I was good at decoding ancient text languages, somehow ought to make me suited for the study of early English language materials. I supposed, when my father brought up the question of how I intended to make a living, that there must be a demand out there for people to teach these things.

Among the M.A. courses I elected was a graduate history of the language with Hill, only this time it was history of the language, starting with the basic Moore & Marckwardt text, then various papers by Karl Luick (ending with his Historische Grammatik and all the standard literature available). Hill was, at that time, avowedly ignorant of syntax and just getting into Trager & Smith phonology. He knew Zellig S. Harris's work on discourse analysis (Hartis 1951b) but did not see it as important. He was impressed, however, by Harris's (1951a) efforts to establish a 'discovery procedure' for grannnars. The former contains both phrase structure rules and the essence of transformational rules (which Hartis was teaching at Penn at that time; and of course Chomsky was his most distinguished student). Many of the Chomskyan developments of the next thirty years are embryonic in Harris, but unhappily Hill did not see it, nor did 1. I especially enjoyed the historical aspects of Hill's teaching, and a study of the catalog quickly revealed that it was possible to take a whole degree, an honest-to-God degree, in nothing but this kind of thing: they offered a Ph.D. in 'English Philology'. I gave up English literature after my M.A. and did nothing but philology (Old English, Middle English dialects, Gothic, Old High German, Old Icelandic, Old French, etc.), and this was closely paralleled by courses in Bloomfieldian structural linguistics. Atcheson Laughlin Hench taught me Beowulf and Chaucer, and sprinkled it all with anecdotes about folk etymologies and new words he had reported in numerous notes for American Speech. Hill never distinguished rigorously between philology and linguistics: in any class he was open to discussion of theory or of details of English language history. The only syntax we discussed was 'substitution techniques' along the lines of Nida (1942) and Fries (1952). It was 1958 before I learned that 'discovery procedures' were a chimera and that a major focus of research should be to explicate the naturalness of acquisition and the richness of speaker intuitions. I'll return to that story below, about the Texas Conference of 1958 when I met Chomsky.

That awful time came when you have to stop taking seminars and start showing that you can contribute to the field. For my dissertation topic I had given some thought to the parallels between sound systems and orthographic systems. Part of my idea was that complementary distribution among ortho-


graphic entities (the way I used the terms 'grapheme' and 'allograph') could be used as a systematic basis for determining historical phonemic contrasts. Another part was my view that scribes a thousand years ago and more could not be relied upon phonetically to the degree that standard grammars of Old English and Middle English insisted upon. A third part was an extreme form of the uniformitarian hypothesis: look at contemporary English dialects, de-vise a system maximally compatible with them, and allow historical differences from that system (i.e., fundamental changes in the properties of the system, such as replacement of length by diphthongization) to be reconstructed only when driven to the wall by overwhelming evidence of change. Try to find a reasonable basis for arguing in favor of absolutely minimal change. I wrote the first draft of the dissertation along these lines, but using traditional philological orthography for the phonetic aspects, somewhat enriched by IPA. That was during my third year, 1951. Hill had just read the Trager and Smith Outline of English Structure. He invited me to go up to Washington with him one weekend to meet these two authors, both of whom were in the Language Training Branch of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), Department of State. Henry Lee Smith (called "Haxie" - I never found out why) was director, and he had been implementing for Foreign Service Officers the language-teaching techniques of the Army Specialized Training Program or ASTP for short, where he had played a major role (for details, see J Milton Cowan's 1991 account). George Trager held the title 'Director of Research', a title which was later to get him into trouble when the State Department became budget-conscious and started a series of RJF's ('reduction in force', i.e., eliminating any position they could). Because it was a 'research' position, George's job turned Qut to be vulnerable in spite of Haxie's best efforts. Anyway, they both received us very gracioulsy on a Saturday and Sunday in the Spling of 1951, and we spent hours and hours first learning about, and then arguing about, the now generally discredited system of nine vowels plus three glides, the 'overall pattern', of English vowels. The magic number 'nine' has been, I think, correctly repudiated: but the analysis of the checked vs. free vowel distinctions as being essentially simple vowels vs. diphthongs (which goes back at least to Batchelor 1809 and was favored also by Sweet 1888) was insightful and to my mind still basically correct. It had very rich historical implications which I have pursued extensively since that time. It also provided the basis for William Labov's variable notation for vowels in American English, which continues actively in use to this day (e.g., Labov 1994).


I forgot to mention, if there was a proper place above, that at the end of the two days with Trager and Smith in Washington, I tossed a year's work on my dissertation into the trash and started over, using their framework I guess this impressed them, or flattered them, since they accepted Hill's invitation to serve on my doctoral committee and at the oral examination a year later they offered me my first job, a position as instructor in Spanish at FSI. Of course, there was a small problem: I knew very little Spanish, and they knew I knew very little Spanish. They were prepared to cross that bridge: they. got me a job for the sururner at the Nashville Auto-Diesel College, which hardly sounds ideal as a place to learo Spanish. But there were some frfly students from various parts of Central America being brought there on some sort of International Aid prograro to learo to become mechanics. The instructors at Nashville spoke no Spanish, and these young men spoke very little English. I taught them English for two hours a day of regular class instruction, and the rest of the time I studied Spanish, practicing with them about'twelve hours a day and then going to bed with a dictionary or grammar. By the end of the summer I had enough Spanish in my head to be able to learn the rest 'on the job' after I got to FSI in the Fall of 1952.

Those were four wonderful years at FSI, '52 to '56, and not just because events remote in the memory of old age take on a certain halcyon qUality. Just a list of some names who worked there at the same time will give an idea of the quality of the interaction - and unlike a university situation, even thongh we had academic titles like 'associate professor', we were on duty on the spot eight hours a day, five days a week, real government employees. There were, as just a sampling, Charles Ferguson doing Arabic, Nicholas Bodman doing Chinese, Charles Bidwell doing Serbo-Croatian, R B. Jones doing Vienaroese and Burmese, Howard Sollenberger doing Chinese, George Trager doing Russian, Carleton Hodge doing Persian, Fritz Frauchiger doing German, Bryce van Syoc doing Indonesian, J. Donald Bowen, Ismael SilvaFuenzalida, and Dorothy Rauscher working with me in Spanish (we were by far the largest single language department). My closest collaborator was Don Bowen, with whom I wrote the phonological and syntactic portions of the mainline Spanish textbooks used in our intensive language program there, and later both a textbook on Spanish pronunciation (Bowen & Stockwell 1965) and the two English-Spanish volumes of the Contrastive Linguistics series sponsored by the Center for Applied Linguistics (Stockwell, Bowen & Martin 1965). A couple of years after I left the State Department Don also joined the UCLA English Department and was a major force in the ESL program for the rest of his much too short life. In addition to the linguists, there


were - on the 'linguist + informant' team-teaching and text-writing model - tutors that worked closely with the students, and wrote the dialogs and exercises, in their areas. Some of them were truly outstanding language teachers. I especially remember Hugo Montero, who went on to work with Dwight Bolinger at Harvard, Hugo Pineda, who took a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature and subsequently taught at American University there in Washington, and Guillermo Segreda, who later taught at a private university. Sadly, he died even younger than Bowen.

There were serious drawbacks to being in the State Department during the McCarthy era, even though we were just language teachers, and 8:00 a.m. commuting to Foggy Bottom was no more fun than the 5:00 p.m. return commute. Though I learned a huge amount from people like Trager and Smith, I accepted almost by return of post an offer that carne out of the blue to join the English Department at UCLA, as of July I, 1956. I had not applied for the position and did not know I was being considered for it. I knew almost nothing about Los Angeles or UCLA at the time, except that it was a branch of a university system that was by all accounts one of the best in the States. It Came about this way: I had decided in the Fall of 1955 that continued neglect of my English philological interests was a bad idea, so I wrote a paper, based on my dissertation, which got onto one of the sessions at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in New York. The MLA then, as now, was an academic flesh market, though much smaller then and you had a better chance of being heard (and the LSA in those days still had ouly plenary sessions). After my paper, which was last on the program so there was casual conversation going on as the session disbanded, a plumpish gentleman smoking a pipe and leaving no accentual doubt that he was Cockney, came up to the table where I was gathering my materials and engaged me in a rather lengthy discussion of my theories about the phonology of Old and Middle English. I am not even sure that he introduced himself, but I aro quite sure there was no mention of a position at UCLA. It turned out, about a month later when I received the offer, that I had been interviewed by Will Matthews, the senior medievalist and historicailinguist at UCLA, for a position teaching the English philology courses (there were three such still required of all Ph.D.s. at that time). I accepted the offer, and in August we drove with a two-year old son and a 70-year-old grandmother across the country in a two-door Ford that started overheating before we got out of the state of Virginia. If you ever had a 1954 Ford you know the problems we had; and if you didn't, you wouldn't believe me anyway.


The job at UCLA was a good one, and my colleagues in the English Department were wonderful to work with. They were generous in promoting me, such that I was a full professor by 1962. But in the meanwhile a number of events had occurred which changed, radically, my own view of linguistics, and my role in the growth of the programs in linguistics at UCLA.

Even before I actually left FSI, I was already focused intellectually on my new work in California. Arch Hill organized and invited me to four extraordinary conferences on English linguistics at the University of Texas, Austin. The first, in 1956, was entirely devoted to phonology and dialectology, primarily a testing of the Trager-Smith system. It was on that occasion that I met James Sledd, who was full of counterexamples to everything Trager and Smith had written. Sledd was, and is, intimidating, at least to me. Dwight Bolinger described himself as "a kind of sorcerer's apprentice of the counterexample" (Bolinger 1991:12), but Sledd was more so. And he did it with more glee. He claimed that words like fire in his idiolect required a tenth simple vowel, since /aeh/ and /ahl were taken up by fair and far, and for him fire was monsyllabic rag]. Trager never conceded the "Confederate vowel", because Trager's own interpretation of the system was much more abstract than most people realized then or now: he had no qualms about assigning the representation /fap/ and leaving the rest to low level rules of phonetic interpretation. He didn't believe that syllables could be counted in a coherent way, so Sledd's claim that fire was monosyllabic whereas Trager's representation was disyllabic cut no ice with him. The burning questions of that generation of phonological theory no longer seem important to us: I won't bother to recount these issues in further detail.

But the second conference, in 1957, on English intonation, was of considerable consequence in two ways. For the first time it became really clear to me what it might mean pot only to mark an utterance with numbers that provided a reasonable 'phonemic' representation of its pitch contour ~ the sort of thing that Kenneth Pike, Rulon Wells, Bernard Bloch, Charles Hockett, Trager & Smith and others had been doing with a fair degree of reliability for a number of years - but to abstract these number-sequences away from the .linear phonology and formulate rules for reassembling the decomposed material into the correct composites. That is, if you had a segmental string and a suprasegmental morpheme{231#}, how did they fit together? The nature of the problem was suggested by some counterexamples of Sledd's which he got from one of the British writers on intonation, though Sledd did not himself see the problem: he thought the example was just another instance of {231#} when in fact it was a dramatic counterexample to the whole theory that had


been formulated by Trager and Smith (I remember him as gleeful when I pointed that out, but that may be a memory somewhat burnished by age); he first published the observation in a snort-lived journal published in Istanbul of all places (Sledd 1956). It was dramatic because the Trager-Smith system was predicated on the nuc1eaT stress rule: the location of the next-last pitch was the focal point, the nuclear stress, from which the pitch could go up /11/, or go down /-1#/, or stay levell-21f, but it could not go up and then down, and still be annotated within their system. The rise-fall represented by the 'morpheme' {231#} could not be mapped onto a string that was either monosyllabic or that began with the most prominent syllable, because the most prominent syllable was reserved for the /3/, not the /2/. Thus the devastation wrought by the examples pronounced

cer tain Iy

sur e

The second consequence of that conference was to air some problems faT the view, held strongly by Trager, Smith, and Hill, that syntactic strncture, at least constituent structure, could be discovered and mapped directly from intonation contours. It has always been clearl that processes like cliticization create problems for the mapping between syntax and phonology, but it was noted that there are many other instances where phonological breaks violate constituent strncture ranking (subordinate clauses of all kinds, and parentheticals). Hill's 1958 book was either completed or very far along by tl,e time of the 1957 conference; one expects he would not have written it, at least not in the same way, had he anticipated all the difficulties raised during the conference concerning the enterprise of reading syntactic structUI'e off from surface intonational information.

In 1957 of course Chomsky'S Syntactic Structures was published. Hill planned the third conference in what turned out to be a confrontational forma~ though I do not think Hill, a gentle man, expected so much controversy. He brought Chomsky to present what he called "A Transformational Approach to Syntax", basically an elaboration of the fragment of English grammar that is found in Syntactic Structures. He brought Smith to represent 'phonology-based syntax', as it came to be called, with' Hill and me as Smith's back-ups and reinforcements, his cheering section.2 As I gradually came to

1 Well, at least for a lot longer than there have been generative grammarians. 2 There were other participants, because Hill was a very fair-minded person: he had Ralph Long and Anna Granville Hatcher there to represent traditional Latin-based syntactic analy-

238 ROBERTP. STOCKWELL

understand Chomsky, this relationship changed; it is all there in the record (Hill 1962). From my later perspective it is difficult indeed to see how any of us could have believed there was any hope in phonology-based- syntax, or have been mesmerized by the intrinsic fascination of 'levels of analysis' and what information should be accessed on one level VS. another. The most embarrassing part, as J. see it now, was our utter failure to recognize what the real subject matter of linguistics was. Much of my 'conversion', as it has been called, took place out of the limelight in private conversations with Chomsky and can only be seen inferentially in the published record. I cornered him at every opportunity for many hours during those four days. By the final day I thought I understood his views, and I was convinced of their correctness. I had placed myself in a rather dismal position socially, since I had worked for Sntith for four years in the State Department and Hill had been my thesis adviser. I spent a lot of time outside the fonnal sessions trying to convince both Sntith and Hill of the good sense to be found in Chomsky's views. Smith did not yield to any arguments, though he was much embarrassed to have defended his own views so unsuccessfully. This is reflected fairly clearly in the conference publication (Hill 1962:116) even though a lot was edited out. Hill knew there had been a complete failure to achieve any kind of convergence, and I think he felt, as I did though with more conviction, that a tradition had died that week and that an altogether new tradition in linguistics had emerged. (The real blows had of course been struck earlier in Chomsky's 1955 dissertation, but they became very public that week.) It is a pity that the publication of the conference proceedings took four years: by the time they came out in 1962, Lees's review of Chomksy (Lees 1957) and Chomsky's review of Skinner (Chomsky 1959) had appeared, a couple of memorable linguistic institutes and several LSA meetings had taken place, and the publication was old hat.

After the 1958 conference I returned to Los Angeles and read everything on transformational-generative theory that had been published and a great deal that had not (the pre-publication paper circulation system was already very active, and if you weren't on the right mailing lists you could be seriously out-of-date in a few months). By 1959 I concluded that the field was exploding and that part of that explosion should be a full-scale linguistics program at UCLA. I got together with Harry Hoijer, a student of Sapir's and

sis, Sledd to represent pedagogical English grammars; and structuralists like Werner Winter, Winfred Lehmann, and a number of his Texas colleagues participated actively. However, I think it is quite fair to view the main substance as confrontational between SmithjHill, on the one hand, and Chomsky on the other. I'm not sure Hatcher understood any of the issues; and Sledd, as usual, was just skeptical about everything, even if eloquently so.


the only senior scholar on the UCLA campus interested in general linguistics; he was willing to let the future have its voice even though he himself thought there was a good deal of nonsense in the Chomskyan publications. Between us we wrote up a proposal for an interdepartmental program in linguistics offering first an M.A. in 1961 and two years later a PhD. In 1966 after some unpleasant wrangling with various departments who felt threatened by our existence, the program became a department. This is not the place for a history of that department, but I will note with pride that by the time of our Silver Jubilee in 1991 we had awarded 182 doctoral degrees and have never been ranked reputationally lower than second in the country. Many of the graduates are of course extremely well-known scholars in the field. I was the founding chair, and occupied the chair, counting two years ofpre-departmental status, for fourteen years. This association with the fine scholars who were the intellectual core of that department during some substantial part of my tenure - Peter Ladefoged, Victoria Fromkin, Barbara Hall Partee, William Bright, Sandra Annear Thompson, John Du Bois, Theo Vennemann, Stephen Anderson, Bruce Hayes, Patricia Keating, Timothy Stowell, Hilda Koopman, Dominique Sportiche, Raimo Anttila, Paul Schachter, Donca Steriade, William Welmers, Thomas Hinnebusch, Russell Schuh, Edward Keenan, George Bedell, Susan Curtiss, Nina Hyams, Joe Emonds, Talmy Giv6n, Pam Munro, Ed Stabler, Anna Szabolcsi, Benji Wald - has been a privilege for which I am deeply grateful, one matched only by the early years at the FSI recounted above.

I retUlTI now to one of the less public events which has been queried on several occasions. I was in Edinburgh at the invitation of Ian Catford (who ran Applied Linguistics'there before he moved to Michigan) in 1959. Michael Halliday was the leading theoretician of that excellent group of scholars, a group which a few years later became a department with John Lyons as head (though Halliday had moved on to London by that time, to work with Randolph Quirk on the great Survey of Contemporary English). Among Halliday's closest associates were James Peter Thorne and R.M.W. Dixon (best known now of course for his work on aboriginal Australian languages). I spent a lot of time with them, walking up to the top of Arthur's Seat, lunching and drinking at the Faculty Club, attending lectures, and so on. We argued vigorously and almost continuously: I had just been initiated to Chomsky's work, after all, and I was nothing if not an enthusiast. They, on the other hand, were enthusiastic Hallidayans: 'Systems-Structure' theory, elegantly taxonontic. Somehow, then, it really mattered to try to find the truth, as


though it existed just beyond the reach of the most telling arguments you could construct, and next time you ntight actually get there.

Halliday was a splendid adversary with a well-defined position. I had the idea, brilliant I thought at the time, of getting him and Chomsky together in my room at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists taking place in Cambridge, Mass., in 1962, with just a few friendly observers who would sit back with some beer and wine and snacks and watch two extraordinary linguistic minds have at it for a couple of hours. We did, and they did. Happily for the success of that occasion, it was several years later before Chomsky stopped commenting on alternative theories other than revisions and new ideas emerging from within his own camp. In 1962 he was still eager to show where, in his opinion, taxonomic and functionalist perspectives failed to face the fundamental issues to which the generative paradigm was and is addressed. I can't now reconstruct who all the participants were - Jimmy Thorne was there, and Bob Dixon,- but in any case at least those two left in the end pretty much persuaded to restructure their views of linguistics along generativist lines, as their subsequent work demonstrates. Halliday was not in the least moved, however - and I do not mean this in a negatively judgmental way: his work went straight on as though neither this confrontation nor any other influence from the generativists had any bearing on his views, and it is clear that there are many scholars who are grateful for his persistence and consistency. I personally thought at the time that his views had been pretty much demolished, but history has proved me wrong.

The rest of the sixties were spent, as I indicated above, building a department; a highlight was the first UCLA Linguistic Institute, that of 1966, directed by Jaan Puhve!, with Chomsky as the Institute Professor teaching two courses. The phonology course was a full presentation of The Sound Pattern of English that appeared two years later, and the syntax COurse was an elaborated version of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, which had just appeared. We had scheduled these classes in the largest lecture room available, seating 320 people, with no other class scheduled at the same time. Every seat was always taken, and the aisles were usually filled too. Chomsky handled these large classes as easily as he would a seminar, allowing extensive questions both friendly and antagonistic. A couple of years later in connection with Viet Nam I saw him deal with audiences of a thousand or more just as comfortably. He has an extraordinary gift. But I will not go on about it: his story is well known to everyone.

In the course of building the department, our three syntacticians of the early days - Barbara Hall Partee, Paul Schachter, and I - entered into an

FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUlSTICS AND BACK AGAIN 241

overly ambitious two-year project (1966-1968) that involved many of our students and provided financial support to them for a couple of years, namely the so-called "Air Force" project (the source of our research funding was the Air Force Advanced Systems Command) intended to produce a reasonably full grammar of English based on some variety .of then-current theory, at the same time summarizing most of the mushrooming literature of the 1960s. No one within the generative tradition has subsequently thought it wise to attempt to actually write a grammar of a well-known language, both because they have realized that we don't know enough about the modules and the parameters which have to be set on the basis of universal principles, and because new facts keep being discovered about specific languages (consider, for example, all the new facts that emerged from the discussion in the late 1970s and early 1980s of contraction before a gap). We turned over a two-volume tome to the Air Force only a year off-schedule, and three years later published a revised and reduced version of it as Major Syntactic Structures of English (Holt), but by then much of the integration we had tried to achieve through a case-grammar approach inspired by some of Charles Fillmore's work had already been achieved in the X-Bar theory of phrase structure that Chomsky proposed in 1971.

After nine years as Chair (1964-1973) I resigned to return to full-time teaching and research. It is not uncommon, I find from talking with colleagues, for a period of extended adntinistrative responsibility to be the death of research achievement. It was two years before I wrote another paper in historical phonology, my primary field, and that paper was a summary of earlier views I had espoused, presented on my first visit to Poland (1976) at the invitation of Jacek Fisiak, who had spent a year at UCLA (1963-64). to participate in his first Poznan conference on English historical linguistics -in the course of time, he became Mr. English Linguistics in Poland, a man of quite extraordinary achievements, and a dear friend.

It was three years after my first tour of duty in the chair before I wTote my fIrst-ever paper on syntactic change. The initial stimulus for the latter was the invitation of Charles Li, at the University of California, Santa Barbara campus, to participate in a conference on the mechanisms of syntactic change. I tried to show in that paper that Old English not only was a verb-second language, but how it came to be so from earlier verb-final main clause word order (though it is not now so clear that early Germanic was at all consistently verb-final) and how some common rules of rightward movement (PP-extraposition and the like) created the trigger for reanalysis as a Germanic maverick, an SVO language with finite verb either second or third. If I may jump


ahead just slightly while I'm on the topic of word order change, I think that Donka Minkova and I, a little over ten years later at the Kellner Conference in Vienna (Stockwell & Minkova 1991a), considerably improved on that earlier account by arguing for analogy downward from the V-2 matrix clause into subordi_nate clauses (producing V-3 because the first position was occupied by the complementizer), and then -later, after V-fmal was dead (as in the Peterborough Chronicle) - these V-3 clauses provided the target of analogy in the other direction, leading to loss of V-2 in main clauses. No doubt this is oversimplified, but I cannot believe in so-called degree-zero learnability, with the child having no access to lower clause information.

My interest in Old English syntax and early Germanic generally remained high for the next ten years or so; but in 1980 I again assumed the Chair of the UCLA Department of Linguistics, an administrative task that included directing the 1983 Linguistic Institute. The latter was difficult because it was so big (about 600 students and visiting scholars) and so diverse (major lecture series going, along with regular classes, on both functionalist theories and fannalist theories, at the height of the period when these seemed largely incompatible). That one summer consumed at least two years of my productive life. Beginning ntid-1985 I had to recharge my research batteries yet again, when I left the Chair once and for all.

This time I turned back to where I had begun, namely English philology. At about the same time I started the third highly productive collaboration of my career, with Donka Minkova, who had joined the UCLA English Department in 1983. We started at the heart of English historical phonology, the socalled Great Vowel Shift. Our first joint paper, presented in 1985, assaulted the venerable tradition that there was "a" vowel shift, a coherent series of interlocking sound changes that began and ended within a hundred years or so. We called the classical Jespersenian vowel shift a chimera, arguing from the huge variety of quite different shifts, all English, that various non-standardized varieties underwent. I still think we were right, but I wouldn't make that claim, ten years later, for much else that I have written (my share of, that is).3

I have never viewed the specter of retirement with joy, and the reality has not changed my view of it. So though I am officially retired, Minkova and I have continued conferencing and writing, and I teach two courses a year, all that I am allowed in my emeritus status. The writing has gone well, in no small part due to the stimulation provided by the four English historical con-

3 A complete list of my publications through 1987 appeared in DWlcan~Rose & Vennemann (1988). The article on the vowel shift referred to above is listed there as 1987; the date should be 1988. I have included below an up-dated supplement to that list.


ferences organized by Dieter Kastovsky at Vienna, the several English historical conferences organized by Jacek Fisiak in Poland, and the biennial conferences of the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Since Minkova and I started working together we have published 18 papers, with more in press; and alone I have published eight more. We have one book seeking a publisher, and another under contract. My fondest hope at the moment is that my health and energy will allow me to continue at this pace for several more years.

REFERENCES

Batchelor, Thomas. 1809. An Orthoepical Analysis of the English Tongue. London: Didier & Tebbett.

Bolinger, Dwight L. 1991. "First Person, Not Singular". Koerner 1991.19-46. Chomsky, Noam. 1959. Review of B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New

York: Appleton, 1957). Language 35.26-58. Cowan, J Milton. 1991. "American Linguistics in Peace and at War". Koer

ner 1991.67-82. Duncan-Rose, Caroline & Theo Vennemann, eds. 1988. On Language: A

Festschriftfor Robert P. Stockwell from his friends and colleagues. London & New York: Routledge.

Fries, Charles Carpenter. 1952. The Structure of English. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Harris, Zellig S. 195Ia[1947]. Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

----------. 1951b. "Discourse Analysis". Language 28.18-23. Hill, Archibald A. 1958. Introduction to LingUistic Structures. New York:

Harcourt, Brace & World. ----------, ed. 1962. Third Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Anal

ysis in English. Austin: Univ. of Texas. Koerner, Konrad, ed. 1991. First Person Singular II: Autobiographies of

North American scholars in the language sciences. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol.!: Internalfactors. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lees, Robert B. 1957. Review of Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957). Language 33.375-408.

Luick, Karl. 1921. Historische Grammotik der englischen Sproche. Leipzig: Tauchnitz.

Moore, Samuel. 1951. Historical Outlines of English Sounds and Inflections. Rev. ed. by Albert H. Marckwardt. Ann Arbor: George Wahr,

Nida, Eugene A. 1960[1942]. A Synopsis of English Syntax. The Hague: Mouton. (2nd ed., 1966.)

Sledd, James H. 1956. "Superfixes and Intonation Patterns". Litera: Studies in language and literature Vol 3. Istanbul.


Stockwell, Robert P. & J. Donald Bowen. 1965. The Sounds of English and Spanish. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stockwell, Robert P., J. Donald Bowen & John W. Martin. 1965. The Grammatical Structures of English and Spanish. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Stockwell. Robert P., Paul Schachter & Barbara Partee. 1973. Major Syntactic Structures of English. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Sweet, Henry. 1888. A History of English Sounds. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Trager, George L. & Henry Lee Smith, Jr. 1951. An Outline of English Struc

ture. (= Studies in Linguistics; Occasional Papers, 3.) Norman, Oklahoma: Batten burg Press.

APPENDIX A list of publications of Robert P. Stockwell that have appeared subsequent to the list

in Duncan~Rose & Vennemann (1988)

Robert P. Stockwell. 1990. Review Article on Syntactic Case and Morphological Case in the History of English by Ans van Kemenade (Dordrecht: Foris, 1987). Lingua 20.90-100.

___________ . 1991a. (With Donka Minkova) "Subordination and Word Order Change in the History of English". Historical English Syntax ed. by Dieter Kastovsky, 367-408. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

___________ . 1991b. (With Donka Minkova). "Poetic Influence on Prose Word Order in Old English". The Evidence for Old English: Edinburgh studies in English language ed. by Fran Coleman, 147-160. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press. .

_____________ . 1991c. (With Donka Minkova). "The Early Modern English Vowels, more 0' Lass". Diachronica 3.1-18.

_____________ . 1992a. (With Donka Minkova). "On the Role of ProsodicFeatures in Syntactic Change". Internal and External Factors in Syntactic Change ed. by Dieter Stein & Marinel Gerritsen, 417-433. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

_____________ . 1992b. (With Donka Minkova). "Homorganic Clusters as Moric Busters in the History of English: The case of -ld, -nd, -mb". History of Englishes: New methods and interpretations in historical linguistics ed. by Matti Rissanen et al., 191-207. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

_____________ . 1992c. (With Donka Minkova). "Kuhn's Laws and Verb-Second: On Kendall's theory of syntactic displacement in BeowulF.On Germanic Linguistics: Issues and methods ed. by Irmengard Rauch, Gerald F. Carr & Robert L. Kyes, 315-337. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

_____________ . 1993a. (With Karn King). Review Article on Jan TeJje Faarlund, Syntactic Change: Toward a Theory of Historical Syntax (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter). Nordic Journal of Linguistics 16:1.60-68.

____________ . 1993b. (With Donka Minkova). "Kuhn's Laws and Old English verse". Studies in Early Germanic Linguistics ed. by Toril Swan, 213-232. Rerlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


------------. 1993c "On the Evidence for Bimoric Vowels in Early English", Historical Linguistics 1991: Papers from the 10th International Conference on Historical Linguistics ed by Jaap van MarIe, 315-324. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

------------. 1993d. "Dwight L. Bolinger". Language 69.99-112. [Obituary] ------------. 1994a. (With Donka Minkova). "Syllable Weight, Prosody, and

Meter in Old English". Diachronica 11: 1.35-64. ------------ 1994b. (With Donka Minkova). Review of Cambridge History of

the Eng/ishLanguage, VoLl, ed. by Richard Hogg (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press). Journal of Linguistics 30.515-527.

------------. 1994c. (With Donka Minkova). Review of Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol II, ed. by Norman Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).Journal of Linguistics.30.528-547.

-----------. 1995. (With Donka Minkova). Review of Robert Fulk, A History of Old English Meter (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). Language 71.359-375

----------. 1996a. "Old English Short Diphthongs and the Theory of Glide Emergence". English Historical Linguistics 1994 ed. by Derek Britton, 57-72. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

----------. 1996b. "Some Recent Theories of Old English Metrics". English Historical Metrics ed. by Christopher McCully, 73-94. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

----------. 1996c. (With Donka Minkova). "Against the Notion 'Metrical Grammar"'. Insights in Germanic Linguistics II ed. by Irmengard Rauch & Gerald Carr, 243-257. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

---------. 1996d. (With Donka Minkova). "Chaucerian Phonemics: Evidence and Interpretation." Language History and Linguistic Modelling ed. by Raymond Hickey & Stanislaw Puppel, 29-57. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

--------- 1997a. (With Donk. Minkova). "The Prosody of Beowulf'. A Beowulf Handbook. ed. by John Niles & Robert Bjork, 55-84. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press.

----------. 1997b. Review of David Denison, English Historical Syntax (London & New York: Longman, 1993). Language 73:4.858-860.

----------. 1997c. "Incompatibilities among Theories of Anglo-Saxon Metrics". The Life of Language: Papers in lingUistics in honor of William Bright ed. by Jane Hill, P. J. Mistry & Lyle Campbell, 473-480. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

----------. 1997d. (With Donka Minkova). "Old English Metrics and the Phonology of Resolution". Germanic Studies in Honor o/Anatoly Liberman (= NOWELE 31/32), 389-406. Odense: Odense Univ. Press.

---------. 1997.(With Donka Minkova). "On Drifts and Shifts". Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 31.283-303.

----------. In press. (With Donka Minkova). "The Origins of Long-Short Allomorphy in English". Proceedings of the 9th International Congress on English Historical LingUistics. Ed. by Jacek Fisiak. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

In the STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE SCIENCES (SiHoLS) series (Series Editor: E.F.K. Koerner) the following volumes have been published thus far:

67. SUBBIONDO, Joseph L. (ed.): John Wilkins and 17th-Century British Linguistics.

1992. 68. AHLQVIST, Anders (ed.): Diversions of Galway. Papers on the history of linguistics

from [CHoLS V. 1992. 69. MURRAY, Stephen 0.: Theory Groups alldthe Study of Language in North America.

A social history. 1994. 70. FORMIGARI, Lia: Signs, Science and Politics. Philosophies of Language in Europe

1700-1830.1993. 71. LAW, Vivien (ed.): History of Linguistic Thought in 'the Early Middle Ages. 1993. 72. WILLIAMS, Joanna Radwanska: A Paradigm Lost. The linguistic theory of Mikolaj

Kruszewski. 1993. 73. GOLDZIHER, Ignaz: On the History of Grammar among the Arabs. Edited and

translated by Kinga Devenyi and Tamas Ivanyi. 1994. 74. FORMIGARI, Lia and Daniele GAMBARARA (eds): Historical Roots of Linguistic

Theories. 1995. 75. VERSTEEGH, Kees: The Explanation of Linguistic Causes. Az-Zaggiigl's theory of

grammar. Introduction, translation, commmentary. 1995. 76. NIEDEREHE, Hans-Josef: Bibliografia cronol6gica de lingufstica, La gr~tica y fa

lexicografia del espanol desde los comienzos hasta el ano 1600 (BICRES). 1994. 77. SALMON, Vivian: Language and Society in Early Modern England. 1996. 78. JANKOWSKY, Kurt R. (cd.): History of Linguistics 1993. Papers from the Sixth

International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS VI), Washington DC, 9-14 August 1993.1995.

79. KOERNER, Konrad: Professing Linguistic Historiography. 1995. 80. NERLICH, Brigitte and David D. CLARKE: Language, Action and Context. The

early history of pragmatics in Europe and America 1780-1930. 1996. 81. LEE, Penny. The WhorfTheory Complex: a critical reconstruction. 1996. 82. BEKKUM, Wout van. Jan HOUBEN. Ineke SLUITER and Kees VERSTEEGH: The

Emergence of Semantics in Four Linguistic Traditions. Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic. 1997

83. WOLLOCK, Jeffrey: The NoblestAnimate Motion. Speech, physiology and medicine in pre~Cartesian linguistic thought. 1997.

84. VERBURG, Pieter A.: Language and its Functions. Translated by Paul Salmon, in consultation with Anthony J. Klijnsmit. 1998.

85. TAYLOR, Daniel J.: De Lingua Latina X. A new critical text and English translation with prolegomena and commentary. 1996.

86. DARNELL, Regna: And Along Came Boas. Continuity and revolution in Americanist anthropology. 1998.

87. STEIN, Dieter and Rosanna SORNICOLA (eds): The Virtues of Language. History in language, linguistics and texts. Papers in memory oJThomas Frank. 1998.

88. KOERNER, Konrad (ed.): First Person Singular Ill. Autobiographies by North American scholars in the language sciences. 1998.

A full1ist of titles published in this series is available from the publisher.

autobiographies by north american scholars in the language

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