The Future of Linguistics

Mark Liberman finally put up the slides from his LSA talk, The Future of Linguistics.

I think they’re an interesting read, even (and perhaps especially to non-linguists. Liberman’s narrative is full of wonderful anecdotes, and explains why linguistics is in the state it’s in, and what can be done to change it.

Pop Psych is huge. Why not Pop Ling?

From the abstract:

Those who are resigned to the fate of our academic discipline should still be disturbed that contemporary intellectuals learn almost no skills for analyzing the form and content of speech and text, so that few writing instructors can even identify instances of the passive voice that they urge their students to avoid. More seriously, the teaching of reading is so widely based on false or nonsensical ideas about speech and language that a quarter of all students emerge from elementary school with difficulties serious enough to interfere with the rest of their education.

To break the grip of familiarity, it may help to view the past 150 years of intellectual history as a poker game. The academic disciplines concerned with speech and language began with a bigger stake than almost anyone else at the table and have been dealt a series of very strong hands. However, the role of linguistic research and teaching in English, foreign languages, and anthropology is dramatically smaller than it once was, and the field of linguistics itself is a marginal player, in danger of being busted out of the game entirely.

See also Semantic Compositions’ summary and comments

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