Letters to Language

Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed.

A fitting tribute

August 4, 2003
To the Editor:

I would just like to offer a small addendum to Jay Keyser’s moving obituary of Ken Hale (Language 79.411–23 (2003)). Jay mentioned the close association that Ken had with the development of our department and the promotion of linguistics here at the University of Arizona, but he didn’t mention that we awarded Ken an honorary doctorate in 1997 for his extraordinary contributions to the study of Native American languages. In addition, I noticed that two of Ken’s publications were omitted from the bibliography (the second one was posthumous):

2000c. Comments on papers. Papers in honor of Ken Hale, ed. by Andrew Carnie, Eloise Jelinek, and Mary Ann Willie, 197–207. MIT Working Papers in Endangered and Less Familiar Languages 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

2003. On the significance of Eloise Jelinek’s pronominal argument hypothesis. Formal approaches to function in grammar: In honor of Eloise Jelinek, ed. by Andrew Carnie, Heidi Harley, and Mary Ann Willie, 11–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

My thanks go to Jay for writing such a beautiful tribute to Ken. As his student, I will always be indebted to Ken for his wisdom, experience, theoretical prowess, and kindness and will miss him greatly.

Sincerely, Andrew Carnie
[carnie@u.arizona.edu]

An appeal regarding endangered languages

December 4, 2003
To the Editor:

I would like to make an appeal for increased attention paid to endangered languages and related issues in the pages of Language. Since the groundbreaking and oft-cited issue of 1992 (68.1), there has been relatively little in Language on the topic, even as the area of endangered languages has caught the attention of linguists and anthropologists as never before. Realistically, general descriptions of a grammar or phonology of a language would probably be better placed in regional journals or separate books. However, various types of papers would, I think, naturally fit into Language.

The first type is one that discusses particular language data from little-known languages. Sometimes such a discussion will directly intersect with a formal linguistic theory. The LSA’s Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation (CELP) organized a Symposium of six such papers at the 2004 Annual Meeting. (By the way, I am not making an appeal for these particular ones to be accepted—just papers of a similar sort!) Any theory of course needs to be tested against a broad range of languages, and though there has been more of an effort to do this in recent decades than in the past, we as linguists still have not reached anywhere near the ideal state here.

But beyond this, formalized theories model only what they know about, and one of the exciting aspects of working on little-known languages is the way they constantly turn up new phenomena that formal theories haven’t shown an interest in to date. So another type of article for Language is one illustrating and clearly describing, from one or more little-known languages, an entirely new or barely-known linguistic phenomenon. One should be able to write something like this without feeling obligated to intone that ‘this is problematic for theory X because it challenges Condition M of the G parameter’; part of the collective knowledge of linguists, and something any linguistic theory needs to account for, is a widely-disseminated and cumulative stock-taking of interesting linguistic phenomena. Papers having to do mainly with language phenomena and not mainly with theory should not be uncommon.

Yet another type of paper is one dealing with broad issues related to language endangerment, extinction, and preservation. Are there factors that can reliably measure the degree of endangerment of a language? What about sociolinguistic surveys of broad language families, with hard data on language use...