A post-Bloomfieldian’s last stand: Charles Hockett’s attempt to resign from the LSA in 1982

ABSTRACT

Charles Hockett had been one of the leading American linguists in the period between Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky, that is, throughout much of the 1940s and 1950s. His empiricist outlook on linguistic theorising led him to principled disagreements with Chomsky’s generative grammar, which by the mid-1960s he saw as dominating American linguistics and its principal organisation, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). In 1982, spurred by the announcement of a fund drive in support of the Society’s activities, he sent LSA Secretary-Treasurer Victoria Fromkin a letter of resignation. This paper documents the reaction of some of the leading members of the Society to Hockett’s letter, availing itself of previously unpublished correspondence.

KEYWORDS:

• Bright, William A.
• Fromkin, Victoria
• Generative grammar
• History of linguistics, American
• Hockett, Charles
• Hymes, Dell
• Linguistic Society of America (LSA)
• Structural linguistics, post-Bloomfieldian

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ I would like to thank D. Robert Ladd and an anonymous referee for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

² An anonymous referee, however, suggests that ‘Hockett may have gained the position as “most prominent” later by his continued and vociferous resistance to the rise of generative linguistics, but that was (in my opinion) because other main figures had lost interest in resistance by the late 1960s (or, as in Bloch’s case, because they had died by then)’.

³ For discussion of Hockett’s early reaction to Chomsky’s theorising, see Falk (2003) and Radick (2016).

⁴ The letter can be found in the Martin Joos Archive at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

⁵ This letter and all of the following ones are located in the Linguistic Society of America Archive at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.

⁶ An anonymous referee would appreciate more detail on the ‘difficulty’ of the three named linguists. A full account would require an article with a length of the present one, though a few remarks might prove interesting. Harris’s ‘difficulty’ stemmed from his general uncolleagiality: he was famous for not replying to correspondence and for shunning collaborative work (p. c., Noam Chomsky, 12 December 1978). Trager was the bane of university administrators and of his own colleagues, leading him to drift from job to job throughout his career. Hockett was considered ‘difficult’ because of his intellectual intransigence. By way of example, J Milton Cowan recalls a very young Hockett admonishing his mentor Leonard Bloomfield by telling him, ‘The trouble with you Mr. Bloomfield, is that you don’t believe in the phonemic principle’ (Cowan 1991, 70).

⁷ Koerner published a revised version of paper successfully the following year in a different journal (Koerner 1983). He published it two more times after that, each revised from the time before (Koerner 1989, 2002).

⁸ A propos of Hockett’s ‘three best students’, D. Robert Ladd, a 1978 Cornell Ph. D. who maintained a correspondence with Hockett well into the 1980s, has the following to say: ‘Doing a little triangulating between the preface to Refurbishing our Foundations and what I know independently and/or can infer from drawing a blank on Google, it turns out I can make an educated guess about who the three students in question are. If I’m right, I can tell you that one of them did in fact have an academic career in linguistics, but at the price of leaving the US (I’m not talking about myself!). The other two apparently set out for alternative careers; in one case the Google trail goes cold in the early 1980s, but the other one seems to have ended up as a lawyer. I can’t speculate about the one whose trail goes cold, but the other two I’m thinking of were thoughtful solid scholars who were decidedly not trendy and worked on non-trendy topics. Obviously, it wasn’t just non-generative scholars who got squeezed out of careers due to bad luck, bad timing, lack of trendiness, lack of charisma, and so on, but I think that in a different time and place both of the two I’m thinking of would have had decent academic careers (and as I said, one of them did, just not in the US). If I’m wrong about those being the three, there’s at least one other person who doesn’t appear in the preface to Refurbishing that he might have been referring to, who also had an academic career, in the US, but not exactly in linguistics’ (p. c., 26 May 2020).

⁹ Koerner (2002) included a footnote on the rejection of his submission by Language. In his take on the situation, Dell Hymes’s principal complaint was that he ‘had not sufficiently considered his [i.e. Hymes’s] work on the subject’ (p. 196).

¹⁰ Hymes is referring to a review of Smith and Wilson (1979) by Robert Binnick. Criticising the book’s failing to cite Chomsky’s predecessors, Binnick noted that ‘even Stalin’s sycophants admitted the existence of Lenin’ (Binnick 1981, 183).

¹¹ Moulton ended up phoning J Milton Cowan (‘Will contribute’), Henry M. Hoenigswald (‘Will contribute’), Henry Allen Gleason (‘Will NOT contribute’), Paul Garvin (‘his wife, Madeline Mathiot, felt sure that Paul would contribute’), D. Terence Langendoen (‘he had ALREADY contributed’), Ernst Pulgram (‘Will contribute’), James Sledd (‘Will contribute’), Rudolph Troike (Will contribute’), and Ralph Ward (‘temporarily unreachable’) (Moulton to Nida, 30 November 1982).

¹² A propos of Pike’s exclusion from Joos’s volume, D. Robert Ladd has written: ‘It seems likely that Pike was marginalised in part because of his commitment to Christian missionary work (Murray 1994, 174, 189 f), but comments I heard as a student suggest that he was also regarded as rather unsophisticated. His prose was inelegant and prone to occasional malapropisms’ (Ladd in press, fn., 11). George Trager, another of Hockett’s intellectual allies, might well have been one of the objecting individuals. His evaluation of Pike (1947b) was scathing, writing that he ‘condemn[ed] the book as a theoretical work, and even more as a text-book – since as the latter it will lead astray many who might otherwise be valuable workers in linguistic science’ (Trager 1950, 158).

¹³ What is more, Hockett published four items in Language after his resignation attempt: two obituaries (Hockett 1993a, 1995), a book review (Hockett 1997), and a book notice (Hockett 1993b).

¹⁴ The material in the following paragraphs is elaborated in much greater detail in Newmeyer (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frederick Newmeyer

Frederick J. Newmeyer is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington and Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. He is the author or editor of 12 books, including Linguistic Theory in America, Language Form and Language Function, and Possible and Probable Languages. In 2002 Newmeyer was President of the Linguistic Society of America.