Keeping Our Tools Sharp and Knowing Where to Use Them

Well-trained linguists have a diverse tool bag that is filled with such analytic procedures as phonology, morphology, syntax, discourse, semantics, pragmatics, language change, variation, and language learning. But it is the nature of the academic enterprise for scholars to develop specialties in one of these tools and to spend their careers in that focus area. Despite the good that can be said about such a process, I argue here that linguistics will not best fulfill its usefulness to humanity and assure its continuity as a discipline until its practitioners expand their horizons and keep their tools sharp and unless the field becomes more responsive to the needs of fields other than itself.

The tools in the linguists' bags, when employed appropriately, can be used to address specific issues of education, law, medical communication, translation, therapy, politics, media, religion, literature, mediation, and international relations, to name just a few. These fields do not have linguistic tools, and their participants often labor vainly on issues for which linguists can offer expertise and assistance.

One problem, as noted above, is in recognizing and using these tools where they are most needed. The other problem, suggested by the possibility that this will cause linguists to become mere generalists, is in keeping the tools sharp.

How can we keep the tools sharp? One way is to be in contact with others who use them. Older linguists can remember when the intersection of theoretical and applied issues in linguistics was commonly discussed at meetings of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). Members in good standing were involved in matters of theory, but also in literacy, language education, translation, literary analysis, stylistics, and other related fields. Old-timers can also recall when dialectology was a prominent topic of the National Council of Teachers of English, and when sociolinguistic and discourse issues were prominent at meetings of the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL). The necessary intersection of theorists who worked alongside of other scholars who use these tools in different activities was common. They listened to each other and shared ideas. They learned from difference, not similarity. The direction of progress is not merely from theory to application. Issues discovered in applied linguistics also lead to theoretical advances. The process is iterative, not linear.

But like biological cells, academic fields, once created, tend to split from one cell into many. Initial unity divides into new specializations, creating insulation from the original unitary cell. The past 30 years has seen linguists drawn into many specialized cells. There is much good that can be said about this, for specialization can also create progress. But this appears to be a time when newcomers to our field are telling us that they want their linguistic training not just to be a satisfying theoretical experience, but also to relate to real problems of real people. We now seem to be entering a vitalized rethinking about our goals, including the demand that linguistics help with the pressing issues all around us. In short, the divided cells of linguistics seem to be ripe for unifying once again, for doing what some call relational linguistics.

Changes unintentionally create new problems. For example, academics need to have places to publish their findings, but they often find that specialized journals cannot be receptive to this emerging way of doing relational linguistics. It is now difficult, for example, for those who analyze the relationship of linguistics and law or medical communication to place their findings in any journal but those that are already specialized for that purpose. The problem with such practice, of course, is that in communicating only to like-minded specialists and not to the broad spectrum of linguists, the audience is narrowed and the message is preached only to the choir.

In a time of rapidly expanding knowledge it is...