Podcast episode 43: Judy Kaplan on universals

In this interview, we talk to Judy Kaplan about universals in American linguistics of the mid-20th century.








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References for Episode 43






Emmon Bach & Robert T. Harms, Universals in Linguistic Theory (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968)
Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).
Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Joseph Greenberg, “Some Universals of Grammar with Special Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements,” in Idem (ed.), Universals of Language (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1963), 73-113.
______ “The Nature and Uses of Linguistic Typologies,” IJAL 23: 68-77.
Roman Jakobson, Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze. (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1941).
Linguistic Society of America, Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation, “The Need for the Documentation of Linguistic Diversity,” June 1994. (https://old.linguisticsociety.org/sit...)
Janet Martin-Nielsen, “A Forgotten Social Science? Creating a Place for Linguistics in the Historical Dialogue,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47(2): 147-172.




Transcript by Luca Dinu






JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, [00:09] and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, [00:13] online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:20] Today, we’re talking to Judy Kaplan, who’s a historian of the human sciences and a Curatorial Fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. [00:30] One of Judy’s current projects is to investigate the notion of universals in American linguistics of the mid-20th century. [00:39] Why is it that various competing schools of American linguists in this period converged [00:44] on universals as the target of their research, despite their fundamental differences in scientific outlook? [00:50] What did they mean by “universals”, and what role did universals serve in their respective theories? [00:57] So, Judy, can you sketch the scene for us? [01:01] What was happening in American linguistics in the mid-20th century? [01:04] Who were the leading figures, and what positions did they take? [01:09]






JK: Thanks so much. [01:10] Viewed from above, we can see that the mid-20th century was a time of remarkable growth and expansion in American linguistics, [01:18] so funding went up, the first university departments were established, and the ranks generally grew. [01:25] These markers corresponded to a handful of different programs or positions. [01:30] As far as those leading figures and positions, most people concentrate on two dominant approaches to the study of language at this time: structuralism and generative grammar. [01:42] I should say that both were internally heterogeneous. [01:46] On the structuralist side, there were students of Edward Sapir in the anthropological tradition and Leonard Bloomfield on the more strictly linguistic side. [01:54] Structuralists focused on speech, a sort of self-conscious departure from 19th-century philology, on form, [02:01] on abstractions — ultimately, as the name suggests, on structure. [02:06] In terms of evidence, they were heavily invested in the study of Native American languages. [02:12] By the post-war period, the so-called neo-Bloomfieldians or distributionalists were at centre stage. [02:19] So, figures here are people like Charles Hockett, Zellig Harris, Bernard Bloch, Martin Joos, and others. [02:26] To your question, their position was basically that linguists should be looking at how linguistic forms show up in different speech environments. [02:33] They insisted on the distinction of different levels of analysis — so, phonology, morphology, syntax, these were all different levels. [02:40] And these points of emphasis pretty much bracketed meaning and the mind, which is important. [02:47] Much of the work was really mathematical in terms of its look and feel. [02:51] Emerging in a sense from this tradition, but also deeply critical of it, was Noam Chomsky and the study of transformational grammar. [02:58] This program elaborated transformational rules, and that was a term that was adapted from Harris, so you can see that there’s this kind of emergence. [03:06] So, it elaborated these transformational rules to link fundamental deep structures of language to surface manifestations, allowing linguists to turn from empiri...