Podcast episode 49: Fritz Newmeyer

In this interview, Fritz Newmeyer discusses linguistics, history of linguistics, and politics.

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References for Episode 49

Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1986 [1980]. Linguistic Theory in America, 2nd edition. Orlando: Academic Press.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2022. American Linguistics in Transition: From Post-Bloomfieldian Structuralism to Generative Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Transcript by Luca Dinu

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:13] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:18] Today we’re continuing our series of conversations with living legends in linguistics, this time with a living legend in the history of linguistics, Fritz Newmeyer. [00:29] And I should add, actually, that Fritz has in fact made contributions to several areas of linguistics, [00:35] but given the focus of this podcast, his work in the history of linguistics is perhaps the most interesting for our audience. [00:43] So Fritz has written a number of important books on the history of American linguistics in the 20th century, the first of which is his 1980 Linguistic Theory in America, which has gone on to become the standard history of the generative school, [00:58] and the most recent of which is the 2022 American Linguistics in Transition, which examines the transition from American structuralism to generative grammar. [01:10] So to get us started, maybe we should go back to the very beginning and ask you how you got into linguistics. [01:17]

FN: Well, it’s a somewhat interesting story. [01:21] My undergraduate degree was in geology, believe it or not. [01:25] Don’t ask me why. [01:27] By my third year, I was totally uninterested in geology. [01:32] I applied to law school, didn’t really want to be a lawyer at that particular time in my life. [01:38] But my undergraduate roommate was Larry Horn, who is one of the main contributors to linguistic pragmatics. [01:47] He was a French linguistics major at the time and told me [01:51] — I had probably never even heard of linguistics; I may have seen the word somewhere — [01:56] and told me the last semester of my last year, “Why don’t you take this course?” [02:02] And the rest is history, my history, [02:07] and then Larry and I have continued to be great friends for the last, I don’t know, 60-something years, [laughs] because we’re talking about 1964, 1965. [02:18]

JMc: OK. But you clearly took to linguistics, right? [02:21] Like, clearly, the subject then clearly fascinated you. [02:25]

FN: Yes, absolutely, and I, at that point, decided I was going on to do graduate work in linguistics. [02:33] I didn’t even decide this until the very end of my last year as an undergraduate. [02:39] The only place I could go at the time was the University of Rochester, where I was an undergraduate with Larry, [02:46] but the next year, I applied to Illinois to study with Robert B. Lees, who was Chomsky’s first student. [02:57] I didn’t figure I had the marks to get into MIT, so I didn’t even try, but Lees was happy to take me in. [03:05] The department had just opened, and everybody was from MIT, all of my professors. [03:12] They were all from the first class of graduates at MIT. [03:15]

JMc: OK, so it was a sort of MIT outpost. [03:18]

FN: Yeah, the first MIT outpost. [03:21] There were many, many more…

JMc: OK. [03:23]

FN: …as time went on, but that was the first. [03:25]

JMc: MIT Manifest Destiny, maybe. [laughs] [03:27]

FN: That could very well be. [03:30]

JMc: So how did you go then from linguistics proper, if we can put it like that, to the history of linguistics? [03:38]

FN: Well, I was an ordinary linguist for at least 10 years, a syntactician mainly, [03:45] and while I think my work was competent, it certainly didn’t set people’s hearts a-thumping. [03:52] It was just basically competent. [03:55] But Robert B… This was the 1960s, and the battle between generativists and the old structuralists was still raging. [04:05] I mean, it was petering out, but Lees required that all the graduate students at Illinois read all of the main structuralist papers, mainly American, but also Jakobson, and Trubetzkoy, and Hjelmslev, and so on. [04:22] Now, most of my classmates hated that. [04:25] It was just so boring. [04:27] “We don’t do this any…” [04:28] But I loved it. [04:29] Not that I was in love with their theory, but to see what people had been doing really just 10 years ago, or 20, or 30, [04:38] and why we are taught at Illinois that this work was crap. [04:46] But at the same time, I mean, I certainly felt… [04:51] I saw all the problems with the post-Bloomfieldian work, but at the same time, it fascinated me, [04:56] and I never stopped being interested in how we got to where we are in linguistics, something that… [05:05] I mean, it’s a personal thing, I suppose, but always fascinated me and didn’t fascinate that many of my classmates and colleagues. [05:14]

JMc: So, I mean, you were writing, as you were just sort of indicating yourself, [05:18] you were writing contemporary history when you started doing the history of linguistics. [05:22]

FN: Yes. [05:23]

JMc: This is something that we’ve spoken about a little bit on the podcast already, the sort of difficulty of doing contemporary history, because you don’t have any historical distance, like, you’re there while it’s happening. [05:33] So how do you see that? [05:35] Do you see it as a problem, or… [05:38]

FN: Well, I mean, it’s both a problem and a benefit. [05:44] I’ve… [05:46] Linguistic Theory in America was both most praised and most condemned for exactly that reason, that I was writing about the present or the very near present as history. [05:56] Now, I think the benefit was that I knew all these people, even… [06:04] I mean, I even knew the old structuralists fairly well. [06:09] I mean, they were on their last legs, but I got to meet them at LSA meetings and so on. [06:14] So, I mean, I had insights. [06:17] I knew what these people were thinking and why they were doing it, and I was able to convey that, which conveyed a sense of interest and excitement. [06:28] At the same time, I was condemned for putting my own personal views, my own personal exp- [06:38] I mean, if I wrote something very negative about George Lakoff, who was very, very much alive at the time, George Lakoff would blow up. [06:47] He said, “You know, you can’t… Where does he get off writing about me? [06:52] I wasn’t thinking that. [06:53] That’s not why I did that.” [06:55] So while the reviews were mostly positive except here and there… [07:00] Historiographia Linguistica was not a positive review. [07:04] Stephen Murray, I don’t know if you ever met him, but he was kind of a close colleague of Konrad Koerner’s. [07:11]

JMc: OK. [07:12]

FN: But by and large, people were fascinated by it. [07:15] I mean, certainly it changed my life for the better, even though for the first time in 10 years [07:20] — which is… I mean, I had been out there for over 10 years — [07:25] people wanted to read what I wrote, and that was a very, very new experience for me, [07:30] because I was in a crowded field of syntacticians trying to write the definitive paper on English nominalizations or something like that, which nobody paid much attention to. [07:42] And then I wrote, it was just the right time for that book to come out, because generative grammar… [07:48] Well, 1980 was the first edition, and so people… [07:53] Generative grammar actually did have a history then, 1957 to 1980, gave me enough time to reflect on what was happening and what’s going on now. [08:05] So from a personal point of view, [08:07] even though I accept the criticism that my work was inevitably biased because, [08:14] being a practitioner in the field, I had my own ideas about the way syntax in particular should go, [08:23] nevertheless, I mean, people found it interesting, even if it was interest in the sense of, we have to condemn this personal biased view from just somebody who came out of… [08:36] Well, I’m not going to say out of nowhere, but was not one of the very leading figures of the field. [08:42] “Where does he come off?” [08:44]

JMc: Yeah. OK. [08:45] But what was your method then, writing this sort of contemporary history? [08:48] I mean, obviously, you cited people’s publications, as all historians do, [08:54] but I guess it wasn’t necessarily archival-based, like historians who are working with the past, [09:02] but they want to get some sort of contemporary perspective on the past, [09:06] will go into the archives and look at the primary documents from then, [09:10] but the primary document, or the producers of the primary documents, were living and breathing people that you associated with on a daily basis. [09:17]

FN: Exactly, and the archives were in my head. [09:20]

JMc: Yeah. [09:21]

FN: Going back… [09:22] I mean, I wasn’t in linguistics in 1957 by any means — I was 13 years old — but I had read every important paper. [09:31] I knew all the important people — some very well, some not so well, but I had met them all. [09:37] So yes, I mean, in terms of what a historiographer is supposed to do, I didn’t do it. [09:43] I think in American Linguistics in Transition, my more recent book, I did. [09:47] I mean, it’s full of archival material and interviews and things like that. [09:52] But I didn’t… [09:54] I mean, I wasn’t… At the time, I wasn’t saying this is my view of how to write history. [09:59] It just seemed like a really fun thing to do, [10:03] and I got a lot of encouragement, partly from Geoff Pullum, but also Joe Emonds, Barbara Partee, and Steve Anderson, [10:11] and Steve Anderson has worked in the history of linguistics. [10:14] They all read it very, very carefully. [10:17] I had dozens of pages of helpful criticism. [10:24] So I found from the beginning that there were people who wanted me to do this, [10:33] so whether I was violating every rule of historiography, I’m not sure, but I’m glad I did it. [10:41]

JMc: Well, I’m not sure histories are pr- you know, history’s like linguistics. [10:44] It’s not necessarily a prescriptive discipline, [10:46] like you do historiography using whatever means are available to you, [10:50] but I guess there is a guild of professional historians that like to complain that everyone thinks they can do history, but no one knows how to. [laughs] [10:58]

FN: I mean, well, you’re right. [11:00] I mean, when it came to Linguistic Theory in America, people were saying, “This is chronicling. This is not history.” [11:06]

JMc: Yeah. [11:06]

FN: And that’s fine. [11:09] I never said I am historian of linguistics. [11:11] I never went to any of the conferences. [11:13] Konrad Koerner was certainly not interested in the more recent stuff that I was writ- [11:19] I mean, he later published things that I wrote on the structuralists and so on. [11:22]

JMc: Yeah. [11:23]

FN: But the few people at the time who did history of linguistics, like Koerner or Dell Hymes… [11:32] In general… [11:36] Keith Percival, he was interested and very helpful, and he gave me some insights on the structuralists. [11:43]

JMc: OK, Percival, who wrote a scathing review of Koerner’s first book. [11:47]

FN: Yes.

JMc: Yeah. [11:48]

FN: Yes. I think one thing that made Keith such a good historiographer of linguistics is that he actually did linguistics. [11:57] I mean, he wrote a grammar of Toba Batak, I believe it was, a language of Indonesia, [12:05] and before he turned to the history of linguistics, his degree is from Yale, and he studied with the leading figures of the time, [12:13] whereas Koerner did have a degree in linguistics from Simon Fraser in Vancouver, [12:19] but they had a guy named Bursill-Hall there who taught… [12:23] You could study with him history of linguistics without studying linguistics, [12:29] and I think that’s how Koerner got his… [12:33] Koerner did, I mean, amazing things for the field of history of linguistics [12:38] — I mean, starting journals, conferences, discussions — [12:42] so my appraisal of him is definitely not all negative. [12:48]

JMc: Yeah.

FN: Not that you asked. [12:49]

JMc: Yeah. [FN laughs] [12:50] So, well, I mean, so do you think you need to be a linguist to write history of linguistics? [12:56]

FN: I think you need to know a lot about linguistics, at least. [13:01] I mean, I’ve read a fair amount in the history of science, history of physics, history of chemistry, and so on, and biology. [13:09] By and large, these people know the field inside and out. [13:13] There are a lot of people who write in the history of linguistics who don’t know linguistics inside out. [13:21] They’re possibly, let’s say, instructors in the history of French, [13:26] and they discover a medieval French grammarian who nobody’s written about before, [13:34] but they don’t know current linguistics. [13:39] Is that a problem? [13:40] I’m not sure. [13:42] I would think in order to have a well-rounded view of work that’s done in the past, you need to know what’s going on in the present, and vice versa. [13:52]

JMc: Yeah. [13:53] I guess, I mean, also the problem is what you would call linguistics. [13:57] We have an academic discipline now called linguistics, but there wasn’t necessarily anything directly comparable in the medieval period. [14:05]

FN: No.

JMc: So… Yeah. [14:06] So, I mean, maybe the problem is projecting our academic discipline of linguistics backwards in the medieval period. [14:14]

FN: No, it didn’t exist as an academic discipline, but then neither did physics. [14:18]

JMc: Yeah, sure. [14:19]

FN: It was natural philosophy. [14:22] But I take your point that people didn’t call themselves… [14:27] I mean, you could change the name from philologist to linguist or whatever, [14:32] but yeah, I mean, the principles of linguistics are much more recent. [14:38] The person they’re writing about certainly wouldn’t be expected to know the difference between langue and parole and so on, [14:45] but I think that it’s important that the person writing about the medieval French linguist have an understanding of how these investigations have changed over time and just not held in a vacuum, just not be in a vacuum. [15:02] It’s like, I mean, this is not just a criticism of history of linguistics. [15:07] I have a phonetician friend, Pat Keating, who, like many phoneticians, goes to the Acoustical Society meetings every year because there’s always something of interest, [15:18] and she says every year, year after year, some acoustic… somebody in the Acoustic Society discovers the phoneme. [15:29] “Here’s the interesting thing, you know, there’s all these sounds, but some of them can be grouped together,” and they’ve read no linguistics. [15:39] And you could say the same about sociology. [15:42] I once asked Bill Labov why so little linguistics is done in sociology departments, and he said, “They don’t want to take five minutes to learn the basic principles of linguistics.” [15:56] And there are people who write, who are in the field of history of linguistics, broadly conceived, who I don’t think know anything about modern linguistics, [16:10] and I think that is not good. [16:14]

JMc: Yeah, OK. [16:16] So what do you think the point of doing history of linguistics is, then? [16:20] What does history of linguistics have to contribute? [16:23]

FN: Well, I think the stock answer is to avoid the mistakes of the past. [16:28] I’m not sure that ever works. [16:30] But I think you can get a sense of history and direction by looking at the field, and I’m interpreting this through my own eyes. [16:38] It seems to me that every major step forward in linguistics has been achieved by saying, “We don’t have to talk about this stuff, this other stuff.” [16:51] So what was a great breakthrough in the 19th century in historical linguistics? [16:57] That you can study language change without knowing or caring much about the culture and society of the people who are speaking the language. [17:06] Regularity of sound change was kind of the culmination of that. [17:10] Then came the structuralist revolution, and people discovered that you can write a lot about the structure of language without taking that much account of how language is used. [17:23] Now, here it’s more debatable, but I think everybody agrees that, I mean, almost everybody, that we can write a grammar of a language without writing about the folktales in that language or how people relate in a hierarchy. [17:41] Structure is independent of that. [17:43] And then with the Chomskyan revolution, again, there was a further restriction that we can say a lot about the structure of language without talking about meaning, at least to get the basic aspects of structure, which at least the European structuralists did not believe. [18:03] They may have practised differently, but they certainly didn’t act like they believed that. [18:08] So, I mean, I think you can get a perspective of that, saying, “I’m not going to look at this, I’m not going to look at that,” is not necessarily a bad thing, [18:18] and that’s what, of course, generative grammarians have mostly been criticized for. [18:22] In fact, it could be a very good thing, as history has shown us. [18:25]

JMc: OK. So you think there is progress in linguistics? [18:29]

FN: Well… [chuckles] I think there’s been general progress over the last couple centuries. [18:37] If you’re going to ask me, has there been progress in the last 20 years, I would say I’m not sure. [18:45] I’d have to think about that. [18:46]

JMc: OK. [18:48]

FN: I think that, in fact, theoretical linguistics, not just generative grammar, but functional linguistics too, has been treading water for a couple decades. [19:01]

JMc: OK. [19:01]

FN: Maybe I just say this because I’m an old guy, and I used to think that things were better in the, you know, like all old guys, things were better in the past. [19:11] But there, for a long time, in generative grammar, at least mainstream, there was Chomsky as an anchor, and this was in many ways a very bad thing, so there were… [19:24] I have colleagues, many colleagues who would spend their entire careers rewriting their dissertation after Chomsky published a new paper. [19:32] I mean, that’s terrible. [19:34] No person should dominate a field like that, and that’s bad. [19:38] And of course, Chomsky’s not producing anymore, and a lot of the generative grammarians, I think, never learned to think independently, and they don’t have this anchor of Chomsky [laughs] directing. [19:54] But I see the same thing in functional linguistics. [19:57] I mean, I think there was this, you know, studies of grammaticalization and hierarchies and so on. [20:05] We were talking about Michael Silverstein yesterday. [20:07] I mean, I think some of the work that he did was really good. [20:10] He wouldn’t have called himself a functionalist, but still, functionalists took advantage of that. [20:15] And I don’t see, in either formal linguistics or functional linguistics, a great… [20:23] I don’t have a feeling that great progress has been made recently. [20:28] But again, this just could be an old guy saying, you know, “The good old days, you know, they’re gone.” [20:33]

JMc: Yeah. OK. [20:36] Well, let’s move on to some broader contextual questions. [20:40] You’ve also been involved a lot in political activism. [20:43]

FN: Right. [20:44]

JMc: So can you tell us about that, and does your political activism have any connection with your historiographic sensibilities? [20:54]

FN: I have to say that this is the question that Chomsky was asked the most: [21:03] “What’s the connection between your political activities and your linguistics?” [21:07] and he would always give this, “Well, there’s no connection except that a thinking, knowledgeable, aware person would be like me.” [21:18] And… [21:20] Well, when I was a student, students were radical, even in the United States, or maybe even especially in the United States. [21:27] There was a period of intense student activism just exactly when I was a graduate student in particular, the late ’60s, and I was swept up in that. [21:38] The question is, why did I continue for another 10, 15 years as… Well, I was… as a Marxist. [21:46] I mean, Chomsky… [21:47] I mean, Chomsky was not a Marxist, but I think that he was a kind of inspiration to many linguists at the time to be politically active. [21:58] I mean, it’s hard to fall under the spell of a particular person for some of their activities [22:05] and not at least for a time to look into, “Well, if he says this about nominalizations, then maybe I should read what he says about Vietnam,” [22:18] and so I think that that had a lot to do with it being in just the general milieu, especially in American linguistics in the 1960s and ’70s. [22:32] It was… In general, practitioners of linguistics were much more to the left, and I was part of that. [22:41] I joined the Trotskyist group, which most didn’t, [22:46] but now when I look back upon my life, I mean, it seemed like I was involved in that for a long time, but it was really just late ’60s to mid-late ’70s, which is a very short period. [23:00] I’m not a flaming revolutionary anymore, but I don’t know, I’m still left of centre and I’ve never seen any reason not to be, [23:11] and that’s probably part of the reason that we moved from the United States to Canada and became Canadian immigrants, [23:21] where the centre of political discourse is so far to the left of the United States that the Democratic Party has positions that are pretty much the same as the Conservative Party in Canada, [23:35] except the Conservative Party in Canada is to the left of the American Democratic Party in some ways. [23:42]

JMc: But I guess, I mean, at this very moment, we are possibly going through a revolutionary period, especially in the American context, but a revolution from the right. [23:51]

FN: Yes, exactly, and that’s very, very scary. [23:55]

JMc: Sure. [laughs] [23:57]

FN: Yeah. It hasn’t affected every Western country equally. [24:06] Canada, for example, has… The Liberals have won the last four elections. [24:13] Now, I don’t vote for the Liberals, I vote for the NDP, which on paper, like the British Labour Party, is socialist, [24:22] but it’s probably socialist to about the same degree that the British Labour Party is socialist. [24:28] But the NDP does have power in two provinces. [24:31] It’s not… [24:32] I mean, anything like that would be unthinkable in the United States, [24:37] that a party with a program like the NDP could get elected municipally, even. [24:44]

JMc: Yeah. OK. [24:46] So, to come back to the question, you don’t think that your interest in politics had any bearing… [24:54]

FN: Well, I mean I-

JMc: [unclear] [24:57]

FN: Yes and no. [24:58] I mean, I had a general interest in history, and probably my interest in history fanned the flames of my interest in politics, as well as linguistics, [25:13] and so, again, I would read tracts by Trotsky from, you know, 1925 and so on, which even my fellow leftists didn’t do, because they thought it was basically boring. [25:28] What’s important is what we’re doing now. [25:30] So there’s a historical side to both that I found very important, but certainly not everybody does. [25:40]

JMc: Yeah. OK. [25:42] You’ve also been involved in academic politics, for want of a better term. [25:45]

FN: Yeah. [25:46]

JMc: So you’ve been heavily involved in the Linguistic Society of America. [25:50] You were at one point Mr. President [laughs], and you still hold an office. [25:56]

FN: I’m Secretary-Treasurer, which I did 35 years ago, and now I’m doing it again. [26:01]

JMc: OK. [26:01]

FN: Fortunately, I only have a year and a half left, because it’s a lot of work and not a lot of satisfaction. [26:12]

JMc: Yeah. OK. [26:12]

FN: And certainly not a lot of honour, as being president might be. [26:15]

JMc: Yeah. So what was it like being the president of the LSA, [26:20] and considering that you’ve spent so much time investigating the sort of, you know, internal machinations and political struggles of different schools of linguists, [26:32] were you able to apply your historical knowledge in that role? [26:36]

FN: This happens all of the time. [26:38] In fact, at every meeting of the executive committee, or the officers, or in conversation with our executive director, they come up with an idea, and I can say, “Well, we tried that in 1983, and it didn’t work.” [26:53] I decided a long time ago that my professional time that wasn’t spent teaching or research would be devoted to the field of linguistics, and not to, say, university administration. [27:08] I mean, the idea of becoming a dean at my university was just repellent to me. [27:14] So a lot of people occupy their spare time as an academic, if you want to call it that, climbing the ladder at their university to dean, or maybe even higher than dean, [27:31] but that never appealed to me. [27:34] I don’t like meetings. [27:37] And the LSA was just, you know, just waiting for somebody to come along who knew a lot about the LSA and its history, had written on it, was not so sectarian that they would be unacceptable to a lot of the membership, and I really get off on it. [28:00] The idea that I’m a descendant, certainly not intellectually comparable, but a descendant of Boas and Sapir and Bloomfield doing what they did, I mean, it really fills me with awe that I’m kind of following in their footsteps in a certain way, [28:23] and I certainly wouldn’t feel this way if I weren’t totally involved in the history of linguistics. [28:28] So yeah, absolutely, my involvement in the LSA comes, to a large extent, from my knowledge of the history of the LSA. [28:41]

JMc: Yeah. [28:42]

FN: And the LSA is falling on hard financial times. [28:47] We’re losing members. [28:49] The meetings aren’t as well attended as they used to be, but they’re things mostly beyond our control. [28:57] So for example, until five, ten years ago, probably a third of the people, a quarter of the people who came to an LSA meeting were there to either interview somebody for a job or to be interviewed. [29:10] Not anymore. That’s all online. [29:12] People can get Language, any journal, online. [29:16] They don’t have to subscribe to Language, which means being a member of the LSA. [29:23] And we’re not the only society that’s having this problem, but it’s a little depressing. [29:28]

JMc: Yeah. OK. [29:30] But I mean, do you think it’s a sign or a symptom of the broader pressures that academia as an institution is under? [unclear] [29:39]

FN: Yeah, well now if we’re going to talk about the last year, absolutely. [29:43] The LSA is lucky that we have had federal grants in the past, big ones, but we have none now. [29:50] Not that they’ve been… We just haven’t applied for any. [29:54] Those societies, the big ones like the MLA or the historians and so on, they’re basically being told by the Trump administration that you’d better not pass any more resolutions in favour of, against discrimination against minorities or gender-based discrimination and so on, or we’re going to cut off all your money. [30:19] Fortunately, we’re not in that position, although individual linguists are. [30:24] Individual linguists have federal grants. [30:29] Theoretical linguists aren’t so much affected, but sociolinguists certainly are, [30:34] and there’s always been a huge grant support for sociolinguistics in the United States, and that’s all threatened right now. [30:44]

JMc: Yeah. Well, on that sunny note, maybe I should thank you for answering those questions. [30:51]

FN: Well, thank you for inviting me to be in this elite group. [30:56]