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Keep on Talkin’
Scheduled for possible elimination during the restructuring era, the linguistics department has bounced back with a new chairman, new faculty members, and new insights about the nature of language.
October 1998
by Bruce Fellman
In late September of 1991, Laurence Horn, who was then chairman of Yale’s linguistics department, received a chilling letter from Frank M. Turner, a history professor who at the time was Yale’s provost. “The Restructuring Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” Turner wrote, “has been undertaking an overview of the departments and programs of that faculty in light of the significant reduction in size that must be made in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as a whole.” The letter went on to say that linguistics was one of the targeted departments.
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“Our goal is to explain the nature of language.”
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Turner had his reasons. At the time, the University was running an $8.8-million annual deficit, and to balance the books, President Benno C. Schmidt Jr. had proposed a 5- to-10-percent budget cut. Trimming roughly 50 faculty positions would help meet that goal, but instead of calling for an across-the-board reduction, Schmidt’s restructuring committee advocated the elimination of selected programs. The linguistics department—which once had put Yale at the center of the discipline’s universe—was prominent among them. (The others were operations research and statistics; drastic cuts were also proposed for sociology and engineering.) Under the proposed plan, the department’s remaining senior professors would be reassigned to other academic areas; its junior faculty members and graduate students could go elsewhere.
But a different faculty committee rejected the entire restructuring scheme, Schmidt resigned his post, and under his successor, Richard Levin, the University’s budget planners settled for incremental cuts across a wide spectrum of departments. “What came out of restructuring was, for us, the best of all possible worlds,” says Stephen Anderson, who joined the linguistics department as chairman in 1994 after a distinguished career at Johns Hopkins. “We were given the opportunity to reconstitute linguistics here from scratch and build a new department.”
Among its current activities are research projects in areas as diverse as the way the human mouth forms sounds, how children in the Faroe Islands acquire language, and how some adults lose the ability to recall specific words. In addition, there is ongoing work on the limitations of individual language systems, the development and evolution of ancient languages, and how words are put together and processed. The department even makes itself available to lawyers struggling over whether it’s proper to use terms such as “fresh” or “butter” in advertising for products that are, strictly speaking, neither.
But Anderson notes that while these research concerns are solidly in the linguistics mainstream, they represent “a significant change in the character of the department.” The discipline, Anderson explains, is not simply about learning French, Chinese, Choctaw, or any family of tongues. “Our goal is to explain the nature of language—to determine what you know when you know a language,” he says. “Language is a window into the mind.”
In its current form, linguistics is a kind of cognitive science. Its practitioners are concerned with such sub-areas as syntax, morphology, phonology, and structure. But when the scientific study of language was born (at Yale in the 1860s, with the work of William Dwight Whitney, a professor of Sanskrit), the field was vastly different. According to Laurence Horn, the so-called Yale approach to linguistics that developed from Whitney’s work emphasized “the roots of particular languages, the family connections to mother tongues, the descent of daughter languages, and the analysis of how languages have influenced each other.”
Linguistics was clearly part of the humanities tradition, and throughout the early and middle part of this century, Yale defined and dominated the field with the historical and descriptivist approaches pioneered by such legendary scholars as Edward Sapir, Mary Haas, Bernard Bloch, and Leonard Bloomfield. Much of this scholarship was based in the departments of the individual languages. Bloch, for example, studied Japanese, while Bloomfield was a professor of German. Other linguists were prominent in philosophy and anthropology. The University can also claim a long history of analyzing American Indian languages.
By the 1960s, however, the language departments were turning their attention to literature, and so Yale decided to bring linguistics researchers, who were in danger of becoming intellectual orphans, under one roof. A department was formed in 1963, just as a revolution in the discipline was being led by Noam Chomsky, a brilliant young professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rather than concern himself with the history and evolution of language, however, Chomsky had a very different agenda. How, he wondered, did children learn a language in the first place? Even though they weren’t tutored in any formal sense, they all became “native” speakers. This observation led Chomsky to propose that humans have a species-specific and inborn facility for language; identifying and documenting it thenceforth became the primary goal for many linguistics investigators.
But not at Yale. “While there was a major paradigm shift in the discipline, Yale didn’t jump on the Chomskian bandwagon,” says Horn, a specialist in understanding meaning and context in language. “Linguistics changed, but Yale didn’t change with it.”
As a result, the focus of the discipline shifted to MIT and other schools such as Ohio State, the University of Texas, and UCLA, where a more theoretical approach held sway. In addition, deaths, retirements, defections, and what Horn now calls “questionable appointments” left the once-powerful Yale department marginalized and, in time, an inviting target for the budget cutters.
Linguistics may have been down, but it was hardly out. “By the early 1980s, the tide had turned,” said Horn. “We'd made some key appointments and morale was up. So when we were informed that the department might be eliminated, we felt that the restructuring committee was actually addressing old, rather than current, conditions.”
Horn was not alone. There was an outpouring of support from linguistics researchers around the country and abroad, and at Yale a majority of faculty members greeted the idea of eliminating linguistics with spirited opposition.
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“Languages are organisms. They’re born, they change—and often, they sicken and die.”
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What emerged from the debate was a new approach to the goal of a balanced budget. All departments previously under siege would be spared, and the required cost-savings would be achieved by University-wide restraints on spending. (The plan has succeeded; after several years of steadily declining deficits, Yale’s budget is now firmly in the black.)
The entire restructuring episode had its costs, however. The primary supporters of the initial plan—Schmidt, Turner, and former Yale College Dean Donald Kagan—left the administration. (Schmidt became head of the Edison Project, a New York City-based effort to build a nationwide network of private schools; Turner and Kagan returned to fulltime teaching at Yale.) Stephen Anderson recalls that when he surveyed the linguistics department in 1993 in response to Yale’s offer to join the faculty, “I saw a lot of scar tissue.”
Anderson also saw a lot of opportunities. One of the biggest was a chance to cement Yale’s relationship with the Haskins Laboratories, an independent center for speech and hearing research that is located on Crown Street. Started by Caryl P. Haskins '30PhD in 1935, the laboratory moved to New Haven in the mid-1960s to take advantage of Yale’s linguistic resources. One of the laboratory’s top investigators is Louis Goldstein, who was recently granted tenure in the Yale department.
Goldstein is, first and foremost, an experimentalist. His scientific papers have appeared in journals more likely to be read by physicists and physiologists than by humanists. But the department’s new direction made him an obvious choice for the permanent faculty. He explains that his past work, done at Has kins with long-time collaborator Catherine P. Browman, was about the mechanics of speech. “If you were to observe, using x-rays and other tools, what someone’s mouth is doing when the person talks,” says Goldstein, “you'd see that the structures in the mouth are involved in a kind of dance. What we are trying to do is to disassemble the dance into a series of steps, or, what we call gestures, of the vocal tract.”
Understanding vocal choreography is important, Goldstein continues, because “these gestures are the means by which units of information are conveyed from one person to another.” To determine the dance steps, Haskins researchers use a machine with the tongue-twisting name of electromagnetic midsagittal articulometer, or EMMA. The device allows investigators to record the motions of such “articulators” as the lips and the tongue, and build models of how various languages form the components of sounds, and then words. “Gestures are the atoms of phonological structure, and words are the molecules,” says Goldstein. “By studying different languages, we’re not only developing a taxonomy of sounds, we’re also trying to figure out the appropriate 'chemical laws' that govern the production of the informational units of speech.”
The researchers have examined languages as diverse as Russian, Catalan, Japanese, Berber (which has vowelless syllables), Spanish, French, and English. “Each one uses different combinations of gestures,” says Goldstein, “but none use the full range of gestural possibilities.”
The result of this selectivity is, over time, the development of a unique family of sounds that we call a language, and while no one knows precisely why the Zulus adopted the vocal click, the French the “eu,” or the Semites the “ch,” linguistic research has shown that the failure to communicate some of the sounds that the vocal palette makes possible has anatomical consequences. “Children the world over are born pre-programmed to extract any human sound from the environment,” says Sergey Avrutin, an assistant professor of linguistics. “But investigators have found that the ability to distinguish certain sounds from one another dies out if it isn’t used within a certain time.”
Consider, for example, the phonemes “ga” and “ka.” Adults can easily tell these apart, but when researchers used a computer to generate subtle shades of difference between the two, older listeners still heard just “ga” and “ka.” Infants less than 12 weeks old, however, could detect an intermediate category of sound—but not for long. Early in life the rapidly developing brain makes an inventory of relevant phonemes, and then it stops hearing the rest.
More than enough sounds remain so that this initial pruning does not affect a youngster’s ability to learn languages, a trait Avrutin and others believe is unique to humans. “But there’s also a critical period for language acquisition,” he says, “and sometime before puberty, the window closes. After that, while you can still develop a skill in a language, you’ll never be a native speaker.”
Avrutin, who came to the United States from Russia when he was 27 and spoke little English, knows this first-hand. “It’s more than a little irritating,” he admits in heavily accented but highly competent English. “I’m smarter than a 4-year-old kid, so how come he can do this better and more easily than I can? What is there in the brain that allows children, but not adults, to extract, in the absence of formal teaching, the rules that govern language just from the sounds and words they hear?”
A clue comes from studies Avrutin and others are conducting on aphasics—adults who have lost some of their ability to speak as a result of stroke. Neurophysiologists have shown that one of the primary speech centers in the brain is located in the left hemisphere in a spot called Broca’s Area. In recent work, Avrutin compared the results of a test in which people who'd had strokes in that area and 5-year-old children were shown pictures and asked to determine the antecedents of pronouns in sentences describing the depicted situation. “Both groups made the same kinds of random errors,” says Avrutin.
The problem is not, however, that aphasics have lost the knowledge of how to handle shifts in pronoun emphasis. Rather, says Avrutin, “some linguistic operations, such as the one we’re testing, are apparently more energy-consuming than others. I liken Broca’s Area to a battery that, in aphasics, is drained, and in children has not yet reached full capacity.”
Because of low energy levels, Avrutin explains, neither group can access features of what linguists call the “universal grammar” that make languages “more similar to each other than we'd like to think.”
Taking a page from computer science, a number of modern linguistics researchers are attempting to break languages down into fundamental algorithms. Abigail Kaun, another of the department’s recent hires, does this by taking advantage of some local conditions. “Yale is a wonderfully international community,” she says, “so I strike up relationships with speakers of different languages and ask them, ‘How would you say the English word bug?’”
According to Kaun, the way this particular word is pronounced is instructive, especially when uttered by a native speaker of, say, Tamil, who will pronounce the word “bug-ge”—as if it had two syllables. “A law of Tamil is that you can only end a word in certain kinds of consonants, one of which is not the long g,” says Kaun, who works with researchers at Haskins and at the AT&T labs in New Jersey. The investigators are examining how speakers react to “loanwords” borrowed from other languages because, Kaun notes, “loanwords can tell you about the constraints that operate within a language.” Some of these appear to be universal, while others are specific to particular languages. And while researchers are now able to rank constraints in order of their importance, Kaun is quick to point out that these laws are definitely not inviolable. “Languages change,” she says, “by reranking constraints.”
Sometimes the change is slow; sometimes it is rapid. In the Faroe Islands, an archipelago located between Norway and Iceland, both patterns are evident, notes Dianne Jonas, an assistant professor of linguistics. For the past few years, Jonas has conducted field studies with native speakers of Faroese, which has roots in Old Norse. Part of her work involves investigating the speech of young children as they acquire the language. This pursuit helps document the current state of Faroese, and it sometimes involves, she says,”a lot of crawling around with a tape recorder” as she pursues toddlers.
In addition, Jonas seeks out speakers of the regional dialects that are spoken on some of the more isolated islands. “Dialects, which often contain interesting word-order patterns, can be very useful for developing syntactic theory,” says Jonas. “They retain features that may be bleached out of the standard language, such as the one that’s taught in schools.”
For that reason alone, documenting these quirky regional idiosyncrasies, is critical, says Jonas. In many places around the world, dialects are becoming “endangered linguistic species,” she explains, “and once younger speakers stop using the dialect, its very existence is threatened.”
School, however, is not the only danger to linguistic diversity. Like most parts of the planet, the Faroes, notes Jonas, are “no longer isolated linguistically from the outside world.” There’s the ubiquitous influence of television, and there’s the Internet, both of which can level the syntactic playing field. Then, there are computer games, which, for teens at least, have become a kind of universal language.
Perhaps in very ancient days the world’s people spoke with one tongue; perhaps the world is again heading in this direction. But Stanley Insler, the Edward E. Salisbury Professor of Sanskrit, doubts there’ll ever be a return to pre-Babel times. “Languages are organisms,” says Insler, who came to Yale in 1963 and whose tenure spans the department’s glory years, its near-demise, and its recent revival. “They’re born, they change—either in isolation or when speakers of other languages come in contact with each other—and often, they sicken and die.”
Fortunately for Insler and his colleagues, the science of studying such phenomena has demonstrated its own powers of regeneration.  |
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