How to do things with words

One reason I didn't spend my bright college years at Princeton is that it didn't have a department of linguistics. We still don't, which is naturally troubling to someone who thinks of himself as a linguist — in brief, someone who studies language — and who thought it worth his while to earn some degrees in the subject. So why don't we? Why is Princeton the only Ivy aside from Columbia not to offer a concentration in linguistics? (Never mind that many large state schools have distinguished departments and that you can even be a linguistics major at a little college like Swarthmore.) And what, if anything, should be done about it?

These are big questions and answering them properly would take many pages of forthright analysis: of the history of linguistics as a self-standing discipline; of the current state of the field, at Princeton and elsewhere; and of the good and not-so-good things the future might hold. But there is space here for a few observations.

First, the history. As a subject in its own right, linguistics is young (the first American department, at Penn, celebrates its 60th anniversary this year), and institutions of Princeton's size (small) and caliber (large) are always having to try to make the right moves on a very tricky tightrope: on the one hand, you want to be the bandwagon before everyone else jumps on it; on the other, you do not want to make a significant investment in what turns out to be a flash-in-the-pan fad. Basically, Princeton didn't see linguistics coming, didn't try to seize it as it went by and hasn't done a whole lot since to try to catch up.

Second, how things are. Not great. Princeton offers an increasingly popular Certificate in Linguistics, but there are major branches of inquiry that no one here specializes in and that almost never get taught: phonetics and phonology, for example. As for the classes that are given — often by professors who, unlike nearly everyone else on the faculty, are not formal members of any department — it is no secret that linguistics at Princeton has an uneven reputation, which my talented colleagues and I in the program are actively trying to do something about. Furthermore, the larger academic infrastructure at Princeton isn't especially friendly to linguistics either: To take just one example of what I mean, Princeton teaches fewer foreign languages and employs fewer specialists in individual philological areas than the peer institutions against which we regularly measure ourselves.

And yet there is very good news, too. Just look at the last two undergraduates who have been Independent Concentrators specializing in linguistics: Jon Sprouse '03 and Josh Goldsmith '07. Sprouse is back at his alma mater this semester, co-teaching with Bob Freidin a class on experimental syntax while finishing up a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Maryland; Goldsmith, who is writing a senior thesis on third-language acquisition, is one of the two winners of this year's Sachs Scholarship and will be studying language pedagogy next year in Strasbourg, France. And then there's Emma Shoucair '07, a classics major specializing in Indo-European studies who has been accepted into every Ph.D. program in linguistics to which she applied.

Third, what lies ahead. Unclear, but I'm going to be uncharacteristically optimistic. After all, people are fascinated by language — what it is, where it's come from and where it's going, how it should and shouldn't be used — and introductory courses really ought to attract large numbers of enthusiastic students. (Fall enrollment is right around the corner, and I recommend LIN 201 and the other linguistics classes.) Since language has a lot to do with the brain, appears to be a uniquely human capacity and is open to productive introspection, there's something in linguistics for everyone —scientist, social scientist or humanist — whether your main interest is Akkadian literature, Broca's aphasia or college slang. But this intellectually exciting breadth is also an administrative curse, for any university that wishes to make or reaffirm a commitment to linguistics needs to have a careful plan for how to hire versatile, forward-looking people who, when brought together, will add up to something much greater than the individual parts. It simply will not do to bring in, unthinkingly, a world-class phonologist who specializes in Finnish and an expert in natural language processing. Our new faculty — if Nassau Hall heeds this column and can come up with the funds and space that will be necessary for us to think about new faculty — will have to be leading scholars, of course, and they had better be excellent teachers and administrators as well, for they will have a lot of work to do.

So how should we proceed? As the Romans said, "Quot homines tot sententiae" — There are as many opinions as there are people. Let's start collecting them. Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics, Senior Fellow of Forbes College and the John Witherspoon Bicentennial Preceptor. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.