FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUISTICS AND BACK AGAIN ROBERT P. STOCKWELL University of California, Los Angeles 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 from the publisher. 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 perfor­ mance. 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 com­ petitive the scene is in the world of professional musical performance. Except for the top echelon, there's always someone out there, usually many some­ ones, a lot better than you are, and there's no place to hide from the competi­ tion. 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 mis­ laid" (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 instm­ ment, 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 qual­ ~w- P. ~tet-l!AAil ify 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. © 1998 by Don Lewis, Hollywood, Calif. 230 ROBERT P. STOCKWELL FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUISTICS AND BACK AGAIN 231 The first time I ever saw that language could be analyzed in an interesting of recommendation, of course from Arch Hill. Both the dean and Hill knew I way was at the University of Virginia, where I found myself at the end of the was underqualified but they were willing to take a chance. When I told the w'ar. It was in a composition course. The instructor put three unidentified people at AORC that I was resigning my position as a clerk-typist to accept paragraphs in front of us and wanted to know which one was best, and why. an offer of an instructorship at Oklahoma City University, no one believed All three described a scene. One was from the Saturday Evening Post, the me. As I left the office in downtown Oklahoma City for the last time they second from some other popular journal, and the third was the first paragraph still thought I would be back when I got over my delusions of grandeur. of Joyce's Ulysses. Only one person in the class of about 30 - not me­ Now that I had a real job where I could save money for graduate school selected the Joyce paragraph. AI the end of the hour we had all seen why it (my salary was $2600 a year in 1946), I could get on with plans that had been was, very clearly, far superior to the other two. At that point I had become a made earlier that year, without a date attached to them, namely marriage to Classics major because the only undergraduate support I could find, after the Lucy Louisa Floyd, whom I had met in the Rare Book Room at Virginia Navy V -12 took me through the first two years, was something called the during my last year as an undergraduate. My parents converged with me on Gessner Harrison Scholarship in Greek (there were no other applicants at that Charlottesville and the wedding took place in the University Chapel. We re­ time). I was so intrigued by the challenge of learning to write well that I turned to OeD and she was appointed to an instructorship in English also, doubled my major, adding English, and in the course of meeting requirements when another new junior member of the faculty failed to show up for his for that major I wandered quite innocently into the History of English, taught classes in the second week. Why he withdrew after one week (disappeared, by Archibald Anderson Hill. I learned later that the course was notorious in leaving a set of themes ungraded) you can infer from the following: We were the Department, generally known as the 'mystery' of the English language. each required to teach six sections of freshman English, eighteen contact There were two other students in the class, neither of whom had a clue to hours per week, fifty students per class. After we returned to Charlottesville what was going on. They both dropped after the second or third week. Hill for graduate school two years later, I taught Freshman English only once used Bloomfield's Language as his textbook, which while not exactly a his­ more in my whole career, one course my first year at UCLA in 1956. But in tory of English was a wonderful first book for me to study. He also suggested those two years at OeD, with 300 students in each of four semesters, with a I read Sapir's Language, which I did. I don't recall that we ever talked much theme a week, I calculate that I read and marked 18,000 essays. Lucy did about the history of English, but it was an extraordinary one-on-one course in another 18,000. The students were mostly returning veterans, many of them Bloomfieldian structural linguistics. Since I was also the only student in adults who might never have sought a college education but for the G. 1. Bill. Greek, I got much of my undergraduate education in individual tutorial They were impatient with instruction that did not have a fairly clear goal and courses. where progress could not be measured. Every paper had to be criticized in a Still, I didn't suddenly tum to linguistics. After my B.A. in Greek and way that was useful. English I had to go to work and figure out how to make a living. Nothing I Lucy and I had three children, but only one, the second one, bam in 1954, had learned up to that time seemed to prepare me for anything useful. I snrvived to maturity. He is a Berkeley graduate, a successful commercial real moved in with my folks in Oklahoma City (in the house where I had been estate broker in Los Angeles. During his teen years, he and I flew radio-con­ born in 1925), and took ajob using the only skill I had that was marketable. I trolled model aircraft, especially Formula I racing aircraft, and we travelled became a typist for the Army Organized Reserve Corps, typing up l.D. cards allover the country to participate in competitions. for the files of returning veterans. I applied to the local high schools for a job My first publications, of a sort, date from those years in Oklahoma: I re­ as an English teacher, but I was considered incompetent because I had never viewed books, mostly novels, for the Daily Oklahoman. As a second job, had an "education" course, one where they teach you how to teach. The local scraping every cent together to save up for returping to university, I played City University was a different matter, however. They were swamped by vet­ flute (2nd chair) in the Oklahoma City Symphony when Victor Allessandro erans returning to college under the G. 1. Bill. The dean, who was an irascible was its conductor. When we returned to Charlottesville in 1948, I resigned but very able administrator who ran the place essentially by himself, inter­ from the musician's union and I have never again performed professionally. I viewed me for a position as instructor in English. He had received one letter had decided on an academic career, but I still thought my field would be En- 232 ROBERT P.