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Daniel Harbour (QMUL)
Les décombres de Babel
Opening his investigation de la Grammatologie, Jacques Derrida (1964:44–45) enjoins that we “[c]onsidérons d’abord simplement, du point de vue qui nous intéresse, que la scientificité de cette science [viz. linguistics – DH] lui est souvent reconnue en raison de son fondement phonologique. La phonologie, dit-on si souvent aujourd’hui, communique sa scientificité à la linguistique qui sert elle-même de modèle épistémologique à toutes les sciences humaines.” If only Jacques were right, we’d surely have a general theory of linguistic features by now.
Taking my cue from his observation that “La science linguistique détermine le langage … dans la simplicité irréductible de son essence, comme l’unité de phonè, glossa et logos”, I subject 21 recent works—diversely chosen to concern Words, Phrases, and Sentences across a range of empirical domains (e.g., Bondarenko ‘On distinguishing dative arguments from PPs’, Caudal ‘Culmination/telicity and event delineation in Australian languages’, Gersamia ‘The morphophonemics of verbal prefixes in Migrelian’, Marantz ‘Rethinking the syntactic role of word formation’, McGinnis ‘Configurationally defined Voice and v’, Wood and Sigurðsson ‘Low and higher applicatives: Icelandic adjectival datives’)—to a classical (1953) Oliver–Courier treatment. Though this rendition naturally leads to a coarse-grained representation of their essentials, when the pieces are put together, the results go, I contend, to the heart of what being a linguist is about.
