Romance Linguistics in the Brave New World

ROMANCE LINGUISTICS IN THE BRAVE NEW WORLD John M. Lipski The Pennsylvania State University Is historical Romance linguistics dying (or already deceased) in North America? Mv answer -in concert with the contributions to the previous thematic issue of La coránica- is both ves and no. In the sense of comparative multi-Romance scholarship and teaching, this subdiscipline has long been a broad desert with few oases. .Vlready in the early 1970s when I eagerly and innocently searched for graduate programs in "genuine" Romance linguistics -conceived as a comparative Romanistik- the fingers of one hand were more than enough to count the available options. Most of these programs, including the one I entered (Alberta) have since elisajijieared, and those few of us who obtained degrees in Romance linguistics found employment through teaching in and about a single Romance language; in my case, Spanish. In more than thirty- years ofuniversity teaching I have taught a course in comparative Romance historical linguistics (the course that once turned a voiing engineering major into an asjiiring linguist) exactly once; more than a quarter centun ago. Many- factors have contributed to the removal of the historical Romance linguistics button on the great academicjuke box. Some are institutional: the breakuji of large modern language departments into ever smaller constituents (Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian, and so on) has made it increasingly difficult to offer comjiarative courses spanning more than one department. Competition for student credit hours and required core courses as well as the inherent insularity and centrifugal forces of multi-dcjiartnient language offerings discourage pan-Romance pursuits. The information explosion has also cut into the amount of foundational scholarship that can be included in our linguistics courses. La corónica 34.1 (Fall, 2005): 208-19 Historical Romance Linguistics: The Death of a Discipline?209 and has pushed the classicworks ofRomance philology offdie browsable library shelves and into compact or off-site storage. Thirty years ago any graduate course in Romance linguistics carried die tacit assumption that students would have already read -or would collaterally read- die standard works ofBourciez, Elcock, Lausberg, Meyer-Liibke and Posner, as well as language-specific monographs (Pope, Rohlfs, Migliorini, Menéndez-Pidal, Ewert, Entwistle), Malkiel's always illuminating torrent ofarticles, and foundational works in general and historical linguistics (Bloomfield, Saussure, Martinet, Trubetzkoy). Today one can scarcely approach the "state of the art" in contemporary research while still paying tribute to die founders ofRomance linguistics, and most course syllabi as well as recent publications rarely cite audiors published before the 1970s or even later. All of this has, I fear, caused the implicit confusion between works belonging to the history of our Romance disciplines (increasingly regarded as "old and in the way") and the history ofthe Romance languages themselves, which have been forced to give way to die "real world" of synchronic, contemporary topics. Adhominem skirmishing in linguistics -running parallel to the street protests of the Viet Nam era- also contributed to the perception diat historical linguistics is an albatross around the neck of "progressive" research. The scorched-eardi rhetoric of die first generation of MITinspired formal linguists in the 1960s laid waste to any research paradigm diat was not "generative" and did not offer "explanatory adequacy", disparaging all "structuralist" approaches and by extension all of historical linguistics and philology. This unfortunate us-versusthem polarization signals no underlying incompatibility of formal generativist and philological/structuralistviewpoints, but it engendered a visceral animosity that persists to this day. My own experience is illustrative: as an unrepentant formalist (with a B.A. in theoretical mathematics) who fell in love with historical linguistics, I took half my graduate coursework with Romance philologists (including Eugene Dorfman, a disciple of Martinet) trained in European structuralism and the odier halfwidi general linguists hot on die -dien boldly newgenerative trail. Each group of jirofessors considered me to be an apostate, I was almost failed on my comprehensive exams, and I went dirough three iterations of a dissertation committee before finding a modus vivendi that would permit me to comjilete my degree. In retrospect diis hybrid training provided an excellent foundation and I am saddened by the memories of these cultural wars, whose legacy of intolerance still resurfaces...