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. STOCKWELL FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUISTICS AND BACK AGAIN 233 glish literature. Probably early English: I had a kind of vague idea that all the graphic entities (the way I used the terms 'grapheme' and 'allograph') could Greek and Latin I had studied, and the fact that I was good at decoding an­ be used as a systematic basis for determining historical phonemic contrasts. cient text languages, somehow ought to make me suited for the study of early Another part was my view that scribes a thousand years ago and more could English language materials. I supposed, when my father brought up the ques­ not be relied upon phonetically to the degree that standard grammars of Old tion of how I intended to make a living, that there must be a demand out there English and Middle English insisted upon. A third part was an extreme form for people to teach these things. of the uniformitarian hypothesis: look at contemporary English dialects, de-­ Among the M.A. courses I elected was a graduate history of the language vise a system maximally compatible with them, and allow historical differ­ with Hill, only this time it was history of the language, starting with the basic ences from that system (i.e., fundamental changes in the properties of the sys­ Moore & Marckwardt text, then various papers by Karl Luick (ending with tem, such as replacement of length by diphthongization) to be reconstructed his Historische Grammatik and all the standard literature available). Hill was, only when driven to the wall by overwhelming evidence of change. Try to at that time, avowedly ignorant of syntax and just getting into Trager & find a reasonable basis for arguing in favor of absolutely minimal change. I Smith phonology. He knew Zellig S. Harris's work on discourse analysis wrote the first draft of the dissertation along these lines, but using traditional (Hartis 1951b) but did not see it as important. He was impressed, however, philological orthography for the phonetic aspects, somewhat enriched by by Harris's (1951a) efforts to establish a 'discovery procedure' for grannnars. IPA. That was during my third year, 1951. Hill had just read the Trager and The former contains both phrase structure rules and the essence of transfor­ Smith Outline of English Structure. He invited me to go up to Washington mational rules (which Hartis was teaching at Penn at that time; and of course with him one weekend to meet these two authors, both of whom were in the Chomsky was his most distinguished student). Many of the Chomskyan de­ Language Training Branch of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), Department velopments of the next thirty years are embryonic in Harris, but unhappily of State. Henry Lee Smith (called "Haxie" - I never found out why) was di­ Hill did not see it, nor did 1. I especially enjoyed the historical aspects of rector, and he had been implementing for Foreign Service Officers the lan­ Hill's teaching, and a study of the catalog quickly revealed that it was possi­ guage-teaching techniques of the Army Specialized Training Program or ble to take a whole degree, an honest-to-God degree, in nothing but this kind ASTP for short, where he had played a major role (for details, see J Milton of thing: they offered a Ph.D. in 'English Philology'. I gave up English litera­ Cowan's 1991 account). George Trager held the title 'Director of Research', ture after my M.A. and did nothing but philology (Old English, Middle En­ a title which was later to get him into trouble when the State Department be­ glish dialects, Gothic, Old High German, Old Icelandic, Old French, etc.), came budget-conscious and started a series of RJF's ('reduction in force', i.e., and this was closely paralleled by courses in Bloomfieldian structural lin­ eliminating any position they could). Because it was a 'research' position, guistics. Atcheson Laughlin Hench taught me Beowulf and Chaucer, and George's job turned Qut to be vulnerable in spite of Haxie's best efforts. sprinkled it all with anecdotes about folk etymologies and new words he had Anyway, they both received us very gracioulsy on a Saturday and Sunday in reported in numerous notes for American Speech. Hill never distinguished the Spling of 1951, and we spent hours and hours first learning about, and rigorously between philology and linguistics: in any class he was open to dis­ then arguing about, the now generally discredited system of nine vowels plus cussion of theory or of details of English language history. The only syntax three glides, the 'overall pattern', of English vowels. The magic number we discussed was 'substitution techniques' along the lines of Nida (1942) and 'nine' has been, I think, correctly repudiated: but the analysis of the checked Fries (1952). It was 1958 before I learned that 'discovery procedures' were a vs. free vowel distinctions as being essentially simple vowels vs. diphthongs chimera and that a major focus of research should be to explicate the natural­ (which goes back at least to Batchelor 1809 and was favored also by Sweet ness of acquisition and the richness of speaker intuitions. I'll return to that 1888) was insightful and to my mind still basically correct. It had very rich story below, about the Texas Conference of 1958 when I met Chomsky. historical implications which I have pursued extensively since that time. It That awful time came when you have to stop taking seminars and start also provided the basis for William Labov's variable notation for vowels in showing that you can contribute to the field. For my dissertation topic I had American English, which continues actively in use to this day (e.g., Labov given some thought to the parallels between sound systems and orthographic 1994). systems. Part of my idea was that complementary distribution among ortho- 234 ROBERT P. STOCKWELL FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUISTICS AND BACK AGAIN 235

I forgot to mention, if there was a proper place above, that at the end of were - on the 'linguist + informant' team-teaching and text-writing model the two days with Trager and Smith in Washington, I tossed a year's work on - tutors that worked closely with the students, and wrote the dialogs and ex­ my dissertation into the trash and started over, using their framework I guess ercises, in their areas. Some of them were truly outstanding language teach­ this impressed them, or flattered them, since they accepted Hill's invitation to ers. I especially remember Hugo Montero, who went on to work with Dwight serve on my doctoral committee and at the oral examination a year later they Bolinger at Harvard, Hugo Pineda, who took a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature offered me my first job, a position as instructor in Spanish at FSI. Of course, and subsequently taught at American University there in Washington, and there was a small problem: I knew very little Spanish, and they knew I knew Guillermo Segreda, who later taught at a private university. Sadly, he died very little Spanish. They were prepared to cross that bridge: they. got me a job even younger than Bowen. for the sururner at the Nashville Auto-Diesel College, which hardly sounds There were serious drawbacks to being in the State Department during the ideal as a place to learo Spanish. But there were some frfly students from var­ McCarthy era, even though we were just language teachers, and 8:00 a.m. ious parts of Central America being brought there on some sort of Interna­ commuting to Foggy Bottom was no more fun than the 5:00 p.m. return tional Aid prograro to learo to become mechanics. The instructors at Nash­ commute. Though I learned a huge amount from people like Trager and ville spoke no Spanish, and these young men spoke very little English. I Smith, I accepted almost by return of post an offer that carne out of the blue taught them English for two hours a day of regular class instruction, and the to join the English Department at UCLA, as of July I, 1956. I had not applied rest of the time I studied Spanish, practicing with them about'twelve hours a for the position and did not know I was being considered for it. I knew almost day and then going to bed with a dictionary or grammar. By the end of the nothing about Los Angeles or UCLA at the time, except that it was a branch summer I had enough Spanish in my head to be able to learn the rest 'on the of a university system that was by all accounts one of the best in the States. It job' after I got to FSI in the Fall of 1952. Came about this way: I had decided in the Fall of 1955 that continued neglect Those were four wonderful years at FSI, '52 to '56, and not just because of my English philological interests was a bad idea, so I wrote a paper, based events remote in the memory of old age take on a certain halcyon qUality. on my dissertation, which got onto one of the sessions at the annual meeting Just a list of some names who worked there at the same time will give an idea of the Modern Language Association in New York. The MLA then, as now, of the quality of the interaction - and unlike a university situation, even was an academic flesh market, though much smaller then and you had a bet­ thongh we had academic titles like 'associate professor', we were on duty on ter chance of being heard (and the LSA in those days still had ouly plenary the spot eight hours a day, five days a week, real government employees. sessions). After my paper, which was last on the program so there was casual There were, as just a sampling, Charles Ferguson doing Arabic, Nicholas conversation going on as the session disbanded, a plumpish gentleman Bodman doing Chinese, Charles Bidwell doing Serbo-Croatian, R B. Jones smoking a pipe and leaving no accentual doubt that he was Cockney, came doing Vienaroese and Burmese, Howard Sollenberger doing Chinese, George up to the table where I was gathering my materials and engaged me in a Trager doing Russian, Carleton Hodge doing Persian, Fritz Frauchiger doing rather lengthy discussion of my theories about the phonology of Old and German, Bryce van Syoc doing Indonesian, J. Donald Bowen, Ismael Silva­ Middle English. I am not even sure that he introduced himself, but I aro quite Fuenzalida, and Dorothy Rauscher working with me in Spanish (we were by sure there was no mention of a position at UCLA. It turned out, about a far the largest single language department). My closest collaborator was Don month later when I received the offer, that I had been interviewed by Will Bowen, with whom I wrote the phonological and syntactic portions of the Matthews, the senior medievalist and historicailinguist at UCLA, for a posi­ mainline Spanish textbooks used in our intensive language program there, tion teaching the English philology courses (there were three such still re­ and later both a textbook on Spanish pronunciation (Bowen & Stockwell quired of all Ph.D.s. at that time). I accepted the offer, and in August we drove 1965) and the two English-Spanish volumes of the Contrastive Linguistics with a two-year old son and a 70-year-old grandmother across the country in series sponsored by the Center for Applied Linguistics (Stockwell, Bowen & a two-door Ford that started overheating before we got out of the state of Martin 1965). A couple of years after I left the State Department Don also Virginia. If you ever had a 1954 Ford you know the problems we had; and if joined the UCLA English Department and was a major force in the ESL pro­ you didn't, you wouldn't believe me anyway. gram for the rest of his much too short life. In addition to the linguists, there 236 ROBERT P. STOCKWELL FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUISTICS AND BACK AGAIN 237

The job at UCLA was a good one, and my colleagues in the English De­ been formulated by Trager and Smith (I remember him as gleeful when I partment were wonderful to work with. They were generous in promoting pointed that out, but that may be a memory somewhat burnished by age); he me, such that I was a full professor by 1962. But in the meanwhile a number first published the observation in a snort-lived journal published in Istanbul of events had occurred which changed, radically, my own view of linguistics, of all places (Sledd 1956). It was dramatic because the Trager-Smith system and my role in the growth of the programs in linguistics at UCLA. was predicated on the nuc1eaT stress rule: the location of the next-last pitch Even before I actually left FSI, I was already focused intellectually on my was the focal point, the nuclear stress, from which the pitch could go up /11/, new work in California. Arch Hill organized and invited me to four extraor­ or go down /-1#/, or stay levell-21f, but it could not go up and then down, and dinary conferences on English linguistics at the University of Texas, Austin. still be annotated within their system. The rise-fall represented by the The first, in 1956, was entirely devoted to phonology and dialectology, pri­ 'morpheme' {231#} could not be mapped onto a string that was either mono­ marily a testing of the Trager-Smith system. It was on that occasion that I met syllabic or that began with the most prominent syllable, because the most James Sledd, who was full of counterexamples to everything Trager and prominent syllable was reserved for the /3/, not the /2/. Thus the devastation Smith had written. Sledd was, and is, intimidating, at least to me. Dwight wrought by the examples pronounced Bolinger described himself as "a kind of sorcerer's apprentice of the coun­ cer tain terexample" (Bolinger 1991:12), but Sledd was more so. And he did it with Iy more glee. He claimed that words like fire in his idiolect required a tenth sur simple vowel, since /aeh/ and /ahl were taken up by fair and far, and for him e fire was monsyllabic rag]. Trager never conceded the "Confederate vowel", The second consequence of that conference was to air some problems faT because Trager's own interpretation of the system was much more abstract the view, held strongly by Trager, Smith, and Hill, that syntactic strncture, at than most people realized then or now: he had no qualms about assigning the least constituent structure, could be discovered and mapped directly from in­ representation /fap/ and leaving the rest to low level rules of phonetic inter­ tonation contours. It has always been clearl that processes like cliticization pretation. He didn't believe that syllables could be counted in a coherent way, create problems for the mapping between syntax and phonology, but it was so Sledd's claim that fire was monosyllabic whereas Trager's representation noted that there are many other instances where phonological breaks violate was disyllabic cut no ice with him. The burning questions of that generation constituent strncture ranking (subordinate clauses of all kinds, and parenthet­ of phonological theory no longer seem important to us: I won't bother to re­ icals). Hill's 1958 book was either completed or very far along by tl,e time of count these issues in further detail. the 1957 conference; one expects he would not have written it, at least not in But the second conference, in 1957, on English intonation, was of consid­ the same way, had he anticipated all the difficulties raised during the confer­ erable consequence in two ways. For the first time it became really clear to ence concerning the enterprise of reading syntactic structUI'e off from surface me what it might mean pot only to mark an utterance with numbers that pro­ intonational information. vided a reasonable 'phonemic' representation of its pitch contour ~ the sort In 1957 of course Chomsky'S Syntactic Structures was published. Hill of thing that Kenneth Pike, Rulon Wells, Bernard Bloch, Charles Hockett, planned the third conference in what turned out to be a confrontational for­ Trager & Smith and others had been doing with a fair degree of reliability for ma~ though I do not think Hill, a gentle man, expected so much controversy. a number of years - but to abstract these number-sequences away from the He brought Chomsky to present what he called "A Transformational Ap­ .linear phonology and formulate rules for reassembling the decomposed mate­ proach to Syntax", basically an elaboration of the fragment of English gram­ rial into the correct composites. That is, if you had a segmental string and a mar that is found in Syntactic Structures. He brought Smith to represent 'pho­ suprasegmental morpheme{231#}, how did they fit together? The nature of nology-based syntax', as it came to be called, with' Hill and me as Smith's the problem was suggested by some counterexamples of Sledd's which he got back-ups and reinforcements, his cheering section.2 As I gradually came to 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#} 1 Well, at least for a lot longer than there have been generative grammarians. when in fact it was a dramatic counterexample to the whole theory that had 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 FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUISTICS AND BACK AGAIN 239 understand Chomsky, this relationship changed; it is all there in the record the only senior scholar on the UCLA campus interested in general linguistics; (Hill 1962). From my later perspective it is difficult indeed to see how any of he was willing to let the future have its voice even though he himself thought us could have believed there was any hope in phonology-based- syntax, or there was a good deal of nonsense in the Chomskyan publications. Between have been mesmerized by the intrinsic fascination of 'levels of analysis' and us we wrote up a proposal for an interdepartmental program in linguistics of­ what information should be accessed on one level VS. another. The most em­ fering first an M.A. in 1961 and two years later a PhD. In 1966 after some barrassing part, as J. see it now, was our utter failure to recognize what the unpleasant wrangling with various departments who felt threatened by our real subject matter of linguistics was. Much of my 'conversion', as it has existence, the program became a department. This is not the place for a his­ been called, took place out of the limelight in private conversations with tory of that department, but I will note with pride that by the time of our Sil­ Chomsky and can only be seen inferentially in the published record. I cor­ ver Jubilee in 1991 we had awarded 182 doctoral degrees and have never nered him at every opportunity for many hours during those four days. By the been ranked reputationally lower than second in the country. Many of the final day I thought I understood his views, and I was convinced of their cor­ graduates are of course extremely well-known scholars in the field. I was the rectness. I had placed myself in a rather dismal position socially, since I had founding chair, and occupied the chair, counting two years ofpre-departmen­ worked for Sntith for four years in the State Department and Hill had been tal status, for fourteen years. This association with the fine scholars who were my thesis adviser. I spent a lot of time outside the fonnal sessions trying to the intellectual core of that department during some substantial part of my convince both Sntith and Hill of the good sense to be found in Chomsky's tenure - Peter Ladefoged, Victoria Fromkin, Barbara Hall Partee, William views. Smith did not yield to any arguments, though he was much embar­ Bright, Sandra Annear Thompson, John Du Bois, Theo Vennemann, Stephen rassed to have defended his own views so unsuccessfully. This is reflected Anderson, Bruce Hayes, Patricia Keating, Timothy Stowell, Hilda Koopman, fairly clearly in the conference publication (Hill 1962:116) even though a lot Dominique Sportiche, Raimo Anttila, Paul Schachter, Donca Steriade, Wil­ was edited out. Hill knew there had been a complete failure to achieve any liam Welmers, Thomas Hinnebusch, Russell Schuh, Edward Keenan, George kind of convergence, and I think he felt, as I did though with more convic­ Bedell, Susan Curtiss, Nina Hyams, Joe Emonds, Talmy Giv6n, Pam Munro, tion, that a tradition had died that week and that an altogether new tradition in Ed Stabler, Anna Szabolcsi, Benji Wald - has been a privilege for which I linguistics had emerged. (The real blows had of course been struck earlier in am deeply grateful, one matched only by the early years at the FSI recounted Chomsky's 1955 dissertation, but they became very public that week.) It is a above. pity that the publication of the conference proceedings took four years: by the I retUlTI now to one of the less public events which has been queried on time they came out in 1962, Lees's review of Chomksy (Lees 1957) and several occasions. I was in Edinburgh at the invitation of Ian Catford (who Chomsky's review of Skinner (Chomsky 1959) had appeared, a couple of ran Applied Linguistics'there before he moved to Michigan) in 1959. Michael memorable linguistic institutes and several LSA meetings had taken place, Halliday was the leading theoretician of that excellent group of scholars, a and the publication was old hat. group which a few years later became a department with John Lyons as head After the 1958 conference I returned to Los Angeles and read everything (though Halliday had moved on to London by that time, to work with Ran­ on transformational-generative theory that had been published and a great dolph Quirk on the great Survey of Contemporary English). Among Halli­ deal that had not (the pre-publication paper circulation system was already day's closest associates were James Peter Thorne and R.M.W. Dixon (best very active, and if you weren't on the right mailing lists you could be seri­ known now of course for his work on aboriginal Australian languages). I ously out-of-date in a few months). By 1959 I concluded that the field was spent a lot of time with them, walking up to the top of Arthur's Seat, lunching exploding and that part of that explosion should be a full-scale linguistics and drinking at the Faculty Club, attending lectures, and so on. We argued program at UCLA. I got together with Harry Hoijer, a student of Sapir's and 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 sis, Sledd to represent pedagogical English grammars; and structuralists like Werner Winter, hand, were enthusiastic Hallidayans: 'Systems-Structure' theory, elegantly 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 taxonontic. Somehow, then, it really mattered to try to find the truth, as 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. 240 ROBERT P. STOCKWELL FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUlSTICS AND BACK AGAIN 241 though it existed just beyond the reach of the most telling arguments you overly ambitious two-year project (1966-1968) that involved many of our could construct, and next time you ntight actually get there. students and provided financial support to them for a couple of years, namely Halliday was a splendid adversary with a well-defined position. I had the the so-called "Air Force" project (the source of our research funding was the idea, brilliant I thought at the time, of getting him and Chomsky together in Air Force Advanced Systems Command) intended to produce a reasonably my room at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists taking place in full grammar of English based on some variety .of then-current theory, at the Cambridge, Mass., in 1962, with just a few friendly observers who would sit same time summarizing most of the mushrooming literature of the 1960s. No back with some beer and wine and snacks and watch two extraordinary lin­ one within the generative tradition has subsequently thought it wise to at­ guistic minds have at it for a couple of hours. We did, and they did. Happily tempt to actually write a grammar of a well-known language, both because for the success of that occasion, it was several years later before Chomsky they have realized that we don't know enough about the modules and the pa­ stopped commenting on alternative theories other than revisions and new rameters which have to be set on the basis of universal principles, and be­ ideas emerging from within his own camp. In 1962 he was still eager to show cause new facts keep being discovered about specific languages (consider, for where, in his opinion, taxonomic and functionalist perspectives failed to face example, all the new facts that emerged from the discussion in the late 1970s the fundamental issues to which the generative paradigm was and is ad­ and early 1980s of contraction before a gap). We turned over a two-volume dressed. I can't now reconstruct who all the participants were - Jimmy tome to the Air Force only a year off-schedule, and three years later pub­ Thorne was there, and Bob Dixon,- but in any case at least those two left in lished a revised and reduced version of it as Major Syntactic Structures of the end pretty much persuaded to restructure their views of linguistics along English (Holt), but by then much of the integration we had tried to achieve generativist lines, as their subsequent work demonstrates. Halliday was not in through a case-grammar approach inspired by some of Charles Fillmore's the least moved, however - and I do not mean this in a negatively judgmen­ work had already been achieved in the X-Bar theory of phrase structure that tal way: his work went straight on as though neither this confrontation nor Chomsky proposed in 1971. any other influence from the generativists had any bearing on his views, and After nine years as Chair (1964-1973) I resigned to return to full-time it is clear that there are many scholars who are grateful for his persistence and teaching and research. It is not uncommon, I find from talking with col­ consistency. I personally thought at the time that his views had been pretty leagues, for a period of extended adntinistrative responsibility to be the death much demolished, but history has proved me wrong. of research achievement. It was two years before I wrote another paper in The rest of the sixties were spent, as I indicated above, building a depart­ historical phonology, my primary field, and that paper was a summary of ment; a highlight was the first UCLA Linguistic Institute, that of 1966, di­ earlier views I had espoused, presented on my first visit to Poland (1976) at rected by Jaan Puhve!, with Chomsky as the Institute Professor teaching two the invitation of Jacek Fisiak, who had spent a year at UCLA (1963-64). to courses. The phonology course was a full presentation of The Sound Pattern participate in his first Poznan conference on English historical linguistics - of English that appeared two years later, and the syntax COurse was an elabo­ in the course of time, he became Mr. English Linguistics in Poland, a man of rated version of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, which had just appeared. We quite extraordinary achievements, and a dear friend. had scheduled these classes in the largest lecture room available, seating 320 It was three years after my first tour of duty in the chair before I wTote my people, with no other class scheduled at the same time. Every seat was al­ fIrst-ever paper on syntactic change. The initial stimulus for the latter was the ways taken, and the aisles were usually filled too. Chomsky handled these invitation of Charles Li, at the University of California, Santa Barbara cam­ large classes as easily as he would a seminar, allowing extensive questions pus, to participate in a conference on the mechanisms of syntactic change. I both friendly and antagonistic. A couple of years later in connection with tried to show in that paper that Old English not only was a verb-second lan­ Viet Nam I saw him deal with audiences of a thousand or more just as com­ guage, but how it came to be so from earlier verb-final main clause word or­ fortably. He has an extraordinary gift. But I will not go on about it: his story der (though it is not now so clear that early Germanic was at all consistently is well known to everyone. verb-final) and how some common rules of rightward movement (PP-extra­ In the course of building the department, our three syntacticians of the position and the like) created the trigger for reanalysis as a Germanic maver­ early days - Barbara Hall Partee, Paul Schachter, and I - entered into an ick, an SVO language with finite verb either second or third. If I may jump 242 ROBERT P. STOCKWELL FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUISTICS AND BACK AGAIN 243 ahead just slightly while I'm on the topic of word order change, I think that ferences organized by Dieter Kastovsky at Vienna, the several English histor­ Donka Minkova and I, a little over ten years later at the Kellner Conference ical conferences organized by Jacek Fisiak in Poland, and the biennial con­ in Vienna (Stockwell & Minkova 1991a), considerably improved on that ear­ ferences of the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. lier account by arguing for analogy downward from the V-2 matrix clause Since Minkova and I started working together we have published 18 papers, into subordi_nate clauses (producing V-3 because the first position was occu­ with more in press; and alone I have published eight more. We have one book pied by the complementizer), and then -later, after V-fmal was dead (as in seeking a publisher, and another under contract. My fondest hope at the mo­ the Peterborough Chronicle) - these V-3 clauses provided the target of anal­ ment is that my health and energy will allow me to continue at this pace for ogy in the other direction, leading to loss of V-2 in main clauses. No doubt several more years. this is oversimplified, but I cannot believe in so-called degree-zero learnabil­ ity, with the child having no access to lower clause information. REFERENCES My interest in Old English syntax and early Germanic generally remained Batchelor, Thomas. 1809. An Orthoepical Analysis of the English Tongue. high for the next ten years or so; but in 1980 I again assumed the Chair of the London: Didier & Tebbett. UCLA Department of Linguistics, an administrative task that included direct­ Bolinger, Dwight L. 1991. "First Person, Not Singular". Koerner 1991.19-46. ing the 1983 Linguistic Institute. The latter was difficult because it was so big Chomsky, Noam. 1959. Review of B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton, 1957). Language 35.26-58. (about 600 students and visiting scholars) and so diverse (major lecture series Cowan, J Milton. 1991. "American Linguistics in Peace and at War". Koer­ going, along with regular classes, on both functionalist theories and fannalist ner 1991.67-82. theories, at the height of the period when these seemed largely incompatible). Duncan-Rose, Caroline & Theo Vennemann, eds. 1988. On Language: A That one summer consumed at least two years of my productive life. Begin­ Festschriftfor Robert P. Stockwell from his friends and colleagues. London ning ntid-1985 I had to recharge my research batteries yet again, when I left & New York: Routledge. the Chair once and for all. Fries, Charles Carpenter. 1952. The Structure of English. New York: Har­ court, Brace & World. This time I turned back to where I had begun, namely English philology. Harris, Zellig S. 195Ia[1947]. Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: At about the same time I started the third highly productive collaboration of Univ. of Chicago Press. my career, with Donka Minkova, who had joined the UCLA English Depart­ ------. 1951b. "Discourse Analysis". Language 28.18-23. ment in 1983. We started at the heart of English historical phonology, the so­ Hill, Archibald A. 1958. Introduction to LingUistic Structures. New York: called Great Vowel Shift. Our first joint paper, presented in 1985, assaulted Harcourt, Brace & World. the venerable tradition that there was "a" vowel shift, a coherent series of in­ ------, ed. 1962. Third Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Anal­ ysis in English. Austin: Univ. of Texas. terlocking sound changes that began and ended within a hundred years or so. Koerner, Konrad, ed. 1991. First Person Singular II: Autobiographies of We called the classical Jespersenian vowel shift a chimera, arguing from the North American scholars in the language sciences. Amsterdam & Phila­ huge variety of quite different shifts, all English, that various non-standard­ delphia: John Benjamins. ized varieties underwent. I still think we were right, but I wouldn't make that Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol.!: Internalfac­ claim, ten years later, for much else that I have written (my share of, that is).3 tors. Oxford: Blackwell. I have never viewed the specter of retirement with joy, and the reality has Lees, Robert B. 1957. Review of Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957). Language 33.375-408. not changed my view of it. So though I am officially retired, Minkova and I Luick, Karl. 1921. Historische Grammotik der englischen Sproche. Leipzig: have continued conferencing and writing, and I teach two courses a year, all Tauchnitz. that I am allowed in my emeritus status. The writing has gone well, in no Moore, Samuel. 1951. Historical Outlines of English Sounds and Inflections. small part due to the stimulation provided by the four English historical con- 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.) 3 A complete list of my publications through 1987 appeared in DWlcan~Rose & Vennemann Sledd, James H. 1956. "Superfixes and Intonation Patterns". Litera: Studies (1988). The article on the vowel shift referred to above is listed there as 1987; the date in language and literature Vol 3. Istanbul. should be 1988. I have included below an up-dated supplement to that list. 244 ROBERT P. STOCKWELL FROM ENGLISH PHILOLOGY TO LINGUISTICS AND BACK AGAIN 245

Stockwell, Robert P. & J. Donald Bowen. 1965. The Sounds of English and ------. 1993c "On the Evidence for Bimoric Vowels in Early English", Spanish. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Historical Linguistics 1991: Papers from the 10th International Stockwell, Robert P., J. Donald Bowen & John W. Martin. 1965. The Gram­ Conference on Historical Linguistics ed by Jaap van MarIe, 315-324. matical Structures of English and Spanish. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Press. ------. 1993d. "Dwight L. Bolinger". Language 69.99-112. [Obituary] Stockwell. Robert P., Paul Schachter & Barbara Partee. 1973. Major Syn­ ------. 1994a. (With Donka Minkova). "Syllable Weight, Prosody, and tactic Structures of English. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Meter in Old English". Diachronica 11: 1.35-64. Sweet, Henry. 1888. A History of English Sounds. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ------1994b. (With Donka Minkova). Review of Cambridge History of Trager, George L. & Henry Lee Smith, Jr. 1951. An Outline of English Struc­ the Eng/ishLanguage, VoLl, ed. by Richard Hogg (Cambridge: Cambridge ture. (= Studies in Linguistics; Occasional Papers, 3.) Norman, Oklahoma: Univ. Press). Journal of Linguistics 30.515-527. Batten burg Press. ------. 1994c. (With Donka Minkova). Review of Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol II, ed. by Norman Blake (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge Univ. Press, 1993).Journal of Linguistics.30.528-547. APPENDIX ------. 1995. (With Donka Minkova). Review of Robert Fulk, A History A list of publications of Robert P. Stockwell that have appeared subsequent to the list of Old English Meter (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). in Duncan~Rose & Vennemann (1988) Language 71.359-375 Robert P. Stockwell. 1990. Review Article on Syntactic Case and Mor­ ------. 1996a. "Old English Short Diphthongs and the Theory of Glide phological Case in the History of English by Ans van Kemenade (Dor­ Emergence". English Historical Linguistics 1994 ed. by Derek Britton, 57- drecht: Foris, 1987). Lingua 20.90-100. 72. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ______. 1991a. (With Donka Minkova) "Subordination and Word Order ------. 1996b. "Some Recent Theories of Old English Metrics". English Change in the History of English". Historical English Syntax ed. by Dieter Historical Metrics ed. by Christopher McCully, 73-94. Cambridge: Cam­ Kastovsky, 367-408. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. bridge Univ. Press. ______. 1991b. (With Donka Minkova). "Poetic Influence on Prose Word ------. 1996c. (With Donka Minkova). "Against the Notion 'Metrical Order in Old English". The Evidence for Old English: Edinburgh studies in Grammar"'. Insights in Germanic Linguistics II ed. by Irmengard Rauch & English language ed. by Fran Coleman, 147-160. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Gerald Carr, 243-257. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Univ. Press. . ------. 1996d. (With Donka Minkova). "Chaucerian Phonemics: Evidence ______. 1991c. (With Donka Minkova). "The Early Modern English and Interpretation." Language History and Linguistic Modelling ed. by Ray­ mond Hickey & Stanislaw Puppel, 29-57. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Vowels, more 0' Lass". Diachronica 3.1-18. ______. 1992a. (With Donka Minkova). "On the Role of ------1997a. (With Donk. Minkova). "The Prosody of Beowulf'. A Beo­ ProsodicFeatures in Syntactic Change". Internal and External Factors in wulf Handbook. ed. by John Niles & Robert Bjork, 55-84. Lincoln: Univ. Syntactic Change ed. by Dieter Stein & Marinel Gerritsen, 417-433. Berlin: of Nebraska Press. Mouton de Gruyter. ------. 1997b. Review of David Denison, English Historical Syntax (Lon­ ______. 1992b. (With Donka Minkova). "Homorganic Clusters as Moric don & New York: Longman, 1993). Language 73:4.858-860. Busters in the History of English: The case of -ld, -nd, -mb". History of ------. 1997c. "Incompatibilities among Theories of Anglo-Saxon Metrics". Englishes: New methods and interpretations in historical linguistics ed. by The Life of Language: Papers in lingUistics in honor of William Bright ed. Matti Rissanen et al., 191-207. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. by Jane Hill, P. J. Mistry & Lyle Campbell, 473-480. Berlin: Mouton de ______. 1992c. (With Donka Minkova). "Kuhn's Laws and Verb-Second: Gruyter. On Kendall's theory of syntactic displacement in BeowulF.On Germanic ------. 1997d. (With Donka Minkova). "Old English Metrics and the Linguistics: Issues and methods ed. by Irmengard Rauch, Gerald F. Carr & Phonology of Resolution". Germanic Studies in Honor o/Anatoly Liber­ man (= NOWELE 31/32), 389-406. Odense: Odense Univ. Press. Robert L. Kyes, 315-337. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ______. 1993a. (With Karn King). Review Article on Jan TeJje Faarlund, ------. 1997.(With Donka Minkova). "On Drifts and Shifts". Studia Anglica Syntactic Change: Toward a Theory of Historical Syntax (Berlin: Mouton Posnaniensia 31.283-303. ------. In press. (With Donka Minkova). "The Origins of Long-Short Allo­ de Gruyter). Nordic Journal of Linguistics 16:1.60-68. ______. 1993b. (With Donka Minkova). "Kuhn's Laws and Old English morphy in English". Proceedings of the 9th International Congress on verse". Studies in Early Germanic Linguistics ed. by Toril Swan, 213-232. English Historical LingUistics. Ed. by Jacek Fisiak. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Rerlin: 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 ofLanguage in North America. A social history. 1994. 70. FORMIGARI, Lia: Signs, Science and Politics. Philosophies ofLanguage 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 ofpragmatics 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 ofLanguage. 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.