Ross Clark
2024-11-29 09:12:46 UTC
Another linguist. Professor at the University of Michigan 1920-1958. He
died in 1967, when I was just beginning linguistics. I heard of him, as
a structuralist of an earlier generation (a contemporary of Bloomfield),
but he didn't arouse much interest. His importance was greater in
applied linguistics, as a founder of the Oral-Aural method of teaching
foreign languages. (Through hearing this term I came to realize that for
some people "oral" and "aural" are not homophones.)
But he also wrote _The Structure of English_ (1952). Crystal quotes from
his opening chapter:
"With the recent development of mechanical devices for the easy
recording of the speech of persons in all types of situations there
seems to be little excuse for the use of linguistic material not taken
from actual communicative practice when one attempts to deal with a
living language. Even though the investigator is himself a native
speaker of the language and a sophisticated and trained observer he
cannot depend completely on himself as an informant and use
introspection as his sole source of material."
He goes on to envision what we would now call linguistic corpora.
Little did he know that Noam Chomsky would spend years flatly denying
what he said, and making self-as-informant the normal method for his
followers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Carpenter_Fries
died in 1967, when I was just beginning linguistics. I heard of him, as
a structuralist of an earlier generation (a contemporary of Bloomfield),
but he didn't arouse much interest. His importance was greater in
applied linguistics, as a founder of the Oral-Aural method of teaching
foreign languages. (Through hearing this term I came to realize that for
some people "oral" and "aural" are not homophones.)
But he also wrote _The Structure of English_ (1952). Crystal quotes from
his opening chapter:
"With the recent development of mechanical devices for the easy
recording of the speech of persons in all types of situations there
seems to be little excuse for the use of linguistic material not taken
from actual communicative practice when one attempts to deal with a
living language. Even though the investigator is himself a native
speaker of the language and a sophisticated and trained observer he
cannot depend completely on himself as an informant and use
introspection as his sole source of material."
He goes on to envision what we would now call linguistic corpora.
Little did he know that Noam Chomsky would spend years flatly denying
what he said, and making self-as-informant the normal method for his
followers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Carpenter_Fries