Coming from an institution [Harvard University, where the author taught until 1995] whose linguistics department spent the last academic year trying to justify its existence, and as a member of a Slavic department with only two pre-ABD graduate students in Slavic linguistics, I have had plenty of opportunity to ponder the fate of linguistics in general and Slavic linguistics in particular. The field of Slavic linguistics is not exactly flourishing, and it can benefit first from facing this fact, and then from talking about it. My contribution will have been worthwhile if the ideas and proposals presented below--not all of which will be palatable to everyone--generate some useful discussion.
The presentation is divided into two parts: section 1 concerns Slavic linguistics as a scholarly discipline, and section 2 addresses Slavic linguistics as an occupation.
1996 will mark the centennial of Slavic studies in the United States,[fn 1] a scholarly discipline defined by Jagic to include language, literature, and national culture (Volkskultur) (Lunt 1987: 294). As is well known, the impact of Roman Jakobson on Slavic studies has been the single most important factor in the post-World War II years in this country: the field still bears his imprint, as it tries to address various dilemmas that might reasonably be termed "post-Jakobsonian". Not least among these for linguists is the tension between the Praguean structuralist approach, which was dominant in the training of most mid-career (and older) Slavic linguists, and the pressures experienced by linguists--especially younger ones--trying to define their position vis-à-vis more recent theoretical frameworks, in the development of which Slavic facts have often been ignored.[fn 2]
The post-Jakobsonian American Slavic linguistic scene is thus perhaps more variegated than in most other language-specific linguistic specialties ("Romance linguistics" and the like), where no such profound and long-standing impact of a single important school (apart from the traditional concerns of 19th-century "philology") has continued to be felt. More recently, the explosion of pragmatics on the international linguistic scene has broadened the boundaries of legitimate linguistic research, and pragmatics promises to be a growing area of scholarly pursuit among Slavic linguists as well. Scholarly activities by Slavic linguists in America today amply testify to a diversity of approaches and interests. With respect to publications, for example, Slavic linguistics, as practiced in the United States, is more "European" in scope than the rest of American linguistic scholarship.[fn 3] An embrace of the multiplicity of American Slavic linguistic approaches was reflected in the editorial manifesto of this very journal (1(1): 1, 1993), where the editors define theory as "anything from Eastern European pragmatics to Jakobsonian semantics to the current version of Chomsky's syntax". It is equally well reflected in Slavic and East European Journal (SEEJ), the most widely-read American professional journal of Slavistics, in which linguistic contributions tend to be characterized by their "orientation toward particular problems" (Klenin and Chvany 1987: 177) rather than towards the pursuit of theoretical issues (although theoretically oriented papers have since begun to appear). Professional conferences in America likewise encourage a variety of approaches, from the "non-denominational" American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) conference and the Georgetown University Roundtable on Language and Linguistics (GURT) presession[fn 4] to the generatively-oriented workshops on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics; it is not unusual for a Slavic linguist to participate in more than one of these conferences.
It is extraordinary, in view of this multiplicity of approaches, how few Slavic linguists in America closely follow linguistic developments in Slavic countries, even in search of data. To the best of my knowledge, no American Slavic linguists work mainly in the frameworks of such linguistic "schools" as Shcherba's school of phonology, Mel'chuk's Meaning-Text Model, or Bondarko's Functional Grammar (although the Prague School has fared somewhat better among scholars interested in Functional Sentence Perspective).
On the borderline between linguistics and literary analysis proper is one of the traditionally prominent areas of Slavic linguistics, i.e., poetics. In this country, structuralist poetics continues to be practiced by a number of Slavists of the older generation, but there is a conspicuous paucity of new faces among linguists interested in poetics, and little interest in incorporating recent advances in Western theories of text-linguistics, discourse, and pragmatics into literary analysis.
Cultural studies, particularly of the older period--another of the traditional foci of Slavic studies (cf. Jagic's classic definition of slavistika cited above)--is another area which, at least in this country, has been pursued only by a small group of historical linguists and traditional "philologists". Modern Slavic culture has been absorbed into literary studies, and research on folk culture has become highly specialized, conducted by scholars who for the most part would not consider themselves linguists.
The role of linguistics in language pedagogy has not diminished in the teaching of Slavic languages,[fn 5] despite the rise of the specialized field of L2 acquisition, and a number of Slavic linguists work mainly in this field. Nevertheless, actual linguistic contributions to the presentation of language material have lagged behind developments in linguistic theory, notably in the much-decried near-absence, in teaching materials, of insights that could be drawn from the results of research in discourse and pragmatics.
At the beginning of my graduate studies in Slavic linguistics twenty years ago, I had to face a vexing question: should I be in a Slavic department or in a linguistics department? The same question troubles my own graduate students even now, and troubles many Slavists around the country, students and faculty alike. Some would say that the time for language-family-based linguistics is over: linguists belong with other linguists, rather than with literature specialists of the same language family, whether Slavic, Germanic, or Arabic (cf. the Cornell model). Certain practical implications of this question will be considered below in section 2; here I would like to consider the question from the point of view of the training of Slavic linguists, and their potential to contribute to the advancement of knowledge.
The training of Slavic linguists in Slavic departments, which has undergone little change in the past several decades, generally aims at producing a scholar with a near-native command of at least one living Slavic language, considerable facility in one or two other modern Slavic languages, and knowledge of the structure and history of these two or three Slavic languages, in addition to Old Church Slavonic.[fn 6] The young scholar has spent at least several months in Russia and one or more other Slavic-speaking countries, is likely to have studied some Russian literature as a "minor", and is knowledgeable about the history, geography, and culture of the major Slavic-speaking countries. The scholar is unlikely to be au courant with most schools of theoretical linguistics, but is probably well-acquainted with at least one of them, often to the point of operating in that framework.[fn 7]
This training differs considerably from that of the growing body of linguists produced by general linguistics departments and specializing in one or more Slavic languages (usually among other languages). The critical difference in priorities translates into one of time investment: general linguists, as a rule, invest considerably less time in acquiring fluency in their Slavic languages, and in learning the history, literature, and culture of these languages. Instead, they invest in linguistic theory, usually in the framework of a single school and/or its more recent derivatives. Life is short, and institutional support for graduate students is even shorter, so in America, where granting the doctorate to fifty-year-olds is not practiced, one must make some choices.
It must be stressed, however, that the difference in training between these two kinds of linguists who work with Slavic is mainly a function of the time investments that result from the differing emphases chosen by the faculty of the respective departments, Slavic vs. general linguistics. It has nothing to do with intelligence, or with the quality of training, or with the relative degree of erudition or culture, as members of the two groups occasionally suggest, in their drive to assert their respective rights to exist or to survive in these difficult times. There is no reason why theoretical linguists, in general or as a group, should be smarter than Slavic linguists, any more than Slavic linguists should be more cultured or erudite than theoretical linguists. It would be a grave mistake to deny the need to obtain both kinds of training, or to pretend that the kind of training one does not get in one's own program is unnecessary or inferior to the kind one gets. There can be no linguistic theory without accurate data, and accurate data are impossible to obtain from field work alone, unless the researcher knows what semantic, cultural, or social factors affect language output, nuances, and native judgments in a given language; in this sense, an in-depth knowledge of the source language (including synchrony and diachrony, the literary language, social and regional dialects, etc.) is simply indispensable, even for theoretically-oriented linguists.[fn 8] A Slavic linguist, on the other hand, would not be a linguist if his or her training stopped at acquiring proficiency in several Slavic languages.[fn 9] Just as linguistic theory is impossible without accurate data, there can be no meaningful linguistic description of data without theoretical assumptions.[fn 10]
There is more to the "vexing question" noted at the beginning of this section than a simple career choice. Answering this question raises fundamental issues about how to define the field of linguistics, issues which in turn affect the structure of linguistics departments and the position of Slavic linguistics in academia. One cannot, however, attempt any sort of comprehensive response to such issues within the scope of an editorial such as this; it would be more realistic, for the present, simply to take the existing structures as our point of departure. And given the status quo, there is a solution of sorts that seems rather obvious. Whether we end up in a Slavic graduate program or a general linguistics one, and no matter how much we try to learn the languages and their structures and histories, or to study linguistic theory across departmental lines, we simply cannot realistically be expected to reach an equal level of competence in both sorts of areas, given the time pressures inherent in graduate programs; this is certainly true for the point of completion of graduate studies, and even, for most scholars, for a considerable time thereafter. Thus, in order to make progress in what should, after all, be the shared goal of all linguists, we need each other.[fn 11]
Slavic linguists, while remaining, so to speak, true to themselves, and as members of Slavic language and literature departments, can do much more than supply accurate data for the benefit of theoretical linguistics. The cruel historical experiment carried out by the Soviet Union has at least some redeeming value for linguistics, having provided us linguists with a remarkable wealth of language phenomena to study: language and nationalism, gender and other forms of social differentiation, language death, creolization, urbanization, ethnolinguistics, bilingualism and multilingualism, etc. Research in all these areas, which are now culturally, geographically and financially relatively accessible to American scholars, will have broad theoretical significance for the study of language both synchronically and diachronically. In generalizing about language, the field cannot ignore the language facts observable in the Slavic-speaking areas of the globe; and it is we Slavic linguists of the West who have been best prepared to delve into this new frontier made accessible to us for the first time since the rise of modern linguistics. Meanwhile, a wealth of Slavic data remains virtually unstudied in the rapidly growing fields of pragmatics, conversational analysis, gender linguistics, and sociolinguistics in general, while the number of American Slavists who have published on each of these topics can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Equally overdue are systematic applications of text linguistics, discourse, and pragmatics to literary analysis and to language teaching.
In the area of traditional Slavic philology, linguists can continue to do what they have been doing: the classical topics of diachronic linguistics, dialectology, the history of literary languages, and textual studies are unlikely to be rendered obsolete any time soon (certainly not by the next centennial). Indeed, the freedom of travel and the newly arisen freedom of access to archives provide additional impetus for renewing interest in these traditional pursuits. Cultural studies, especially of the older period (but to some extent even of our own times[fn 12]), require a solid knowledge of historical linguistics, as well as an understanding of linguistic structure and issues; Slavic linguists are therefore better equipped than other Slavists, within the framework of existing training programs in Slavic, to contribute to these areas as well.
In short, while Slavic linguists would do well to make extra efforts to acquire the maximum training in theoretical linguistics and to work towards establishing dialogue and cooperation with theoretical linguists, they also have plenty of work to do within more traditional spheres of Slavic philology, as well as in recently developing areas such as gender linguistics, or discourse and pragmatics. The other side of the coin is that general linguists specializing in Slavic languages would do well to respect the language facts, to learn them well, and to familiarize themselves with the concerns of more traditional philologically-oriented Slavic scholarship.
The number of doctoral students trained in Slavic linguistics has decreased from 228 dissertations defended in the period 1961-72 (Shane 1973: 185) to 81 dissertations in 1981-92.[fn 13] What are the job prospects for these new Ph.D.'s? A Slavic department often includes at least one Slavic linguist to coordinate language instruction. If there is a graduate program, s/he also has to teach the graduate service courses, such as "Structure of Russian" and Old Church Slavonic; where there is a graduate program in Slavic linguistics, there are usually at least two linguists teaching the standard set of courses. Given this departmental structure, let's examine the job announcements to which a Slavic linguist could conceivably have responded in the fall of 1993. The picture presented by the October and December, 1993 issues of the MLA Job List, which should be sufficiently representative for our purposes, was as follows.
In the fall/winter of 1993, five Slavic linguistics jobs were announced, of which four were seeking "Slavic linguists", with one specifying a South Slavic linguist.[fn 14] All five job descriptions mentioned the ability to teach Russian, as well as knowledge of at least one other Slavic language in addition to the one the job was advertised for; an interest in pedagogy was specifically mentioned in two of the five cases, and an interest in literature and culture in one. In addition, there were 12 jobs[fn 15] to which a Ph.D. in Slavic linguistics could apply, making it possible, at least in theory, for every one of the approximately 7-8 Ph.D's. graduating every year since 1989 in the United States to be employed.[fn 16] Since these additional 12 announcements make a critical difference for potential opportunities for Slavic linguists, they merit closer consideration. One of the 12 positions was for a pedagogy specialist and language coordinator, two were exclusively for Russian language teaching, and the remaining nine had a variety of specifications: seven of them mentioned culture, four literature, two linguistics, and one pedagogy.[fn 17]
The supply/demand correlation for Slavic linguistics positions just examined suggests that in order to guarantee the marketability of Slavic linguists receiving their degress in traditional Slavic linguistics programs, the emphasis on solid language training and the requirements in at least one other Slavic language area should be retained. Considering the fact that the ability to teach culture is mentioned in a number of otherwise potential linguistics positions (eight out of seventeen cases), it seems worthwhile for graduate students in Slavic linguistics to consider acquiring some expertise in Slavic culture as well. On the other hand, linguists with a Slavic specialization graduating from linguistics departments should at a minimum make some effort to develop some of the more narrowly "Slavic" skills, such as near-native proficiency in Russian and knowledge of another Slavic language, and should ideally acquire some language-teaching experience prior to their first appointment.[fn 18]
Once a position is found, it is time to consider the next set of goals. The career of a Slavic linguist depends on many factors besides research. No scholar, no matter how brilliant he or she may be, can expect to find a job or to hold on to it if his/her field of scholarship is unrecognized or unappreciated by immediate colleagues. For Slavic linguists employed in traditional "language and literature" departments, it is increasingly important to gain the professional appreciation of their literature colleagues, who constitute the majority in most departments. The best way to do this is by contributing directly both to literary studies, and to the training of literature students. To be sure, some literary scholars believe that linguists (and they generally mean "structuralists") have exhausted what they can offer to literary analysis; but recent developments in various areas of linguistics, such as discourse and pragmatics, show that this belief is mistaken. It is up to us Slavic linguists to demonstrate this to our literary colleagues (always keeping in mind that some of them will be predisposed to reject input from linguistics).
No field can survive without a support base in public perception. Immediate applications of linguistics (and of the humanities in general) are largely invisible; not surprisingly, the uninitiated often consider linguistics an academic "frill"; and yet, in a free society, it is precisely the uninitiated--in the form of government and private foundations, university and college deans and their committees, boards of trustees, parents, and alumni--who end up determining the level of support for a given academic field. Thus a discipline's capacity to appeal to the general public can be crucial for its survival and growth. The most visible and the most easily comprehensible aspect of our profession is language instruction, and all of the job descriptions make clear that the one thing all Slavic linguists are expected to do is to teach Russian to college undergraduates. Language courses, moreover, are likely to be the most heavily populated courses a Slavic linguist ever gets to teach, and so they present him or her with the best opportunity to convey to students some basic facts about language. We can safely assume that most first-year students have an imperfect understanding, at best, of such a fundamental linguistic perspective as the difference between language and a writing system, and have little or no knowledge about most linguistic concepts (historical change, implicature, etc.), not to mention those particularly relevant for Slavic (such as palatalization, case, aspect, or morphophonemic changes in word formation).[fn 19] Only a small fraction of our language students become teachers of Slavic studies,[fn 20] and many students who took a year or two of Russian never use it again. For most students, a foreign language course at the college level is first and foremost a mind-opening intellectual enterprise (as opposed to a focused attempt to acquire and develop a usable skill). This being the case, who better than linguists can illuminate, through the use of concrete language material, the diverse cognitive, social, cultural, psychological and historical aspects of Language (with a capital L)? My own language teaching experience shows that a former A student of Russian, who comes to visit his or her alma mater after working in a bank for several years, has probably lost the ability to form grammatical Russian sentences, but is likely to remember a few interesting semantic facts, such as the existence of two ways of 'wanting' in Russian: one when an intention to do something is being stated (Ja xochu), and the other when the speaker merely conveys a wish or a desire to do it (Mne xochetsja). The existence of two different words and two different syntactic structures encoding this distinction might have made him or her aware of a similar distinction in the real world, overriding the convergence of these two meanings inherent in English want. Perhaps the most valuable and long-lived effect of foreign language teaching in a liberal arts program is precisely this opening of the mind, with the respect for different verbal cultures it engenders, and broadly speaking, an appreciation of language as a marvelous system of communcation that encodes in an interesting way the most intricate semantic and pragmatic meanings, both objective and subjective. As linguists, we cannot afford to ignore the opportunity of creating this effect in the minds of our students, some of whom will not only attend the cocktail parties ("So you're a [Slavic] linguist..."), but write the checks or make the decisions that make or break the field.
We must also seek out opportunities of conveying to language teachers the results of our research (to the extent that they are relevant to language teaching). This accomplishes at least two things: it makes for more accurate and effective pedagogical generalizations that directly benefit language learners, and, no less important, it reminds the world and our colleagues of our existence. Particularly promising in this respect, as I have said, are current advances in discourse and pragmatics, which answer many of the concerns of the Communicative Competence movement. These advances show that much of what used to be considered sophisticated "optional" knowledge to be inculcated only at a very advanced level is actually highly relevant at all levels, and can be effectively introduced at the very beginning of foreign language instruction.
There are various steps that can be taken at the college level to help maintain professional cooperation with language teachers at one's own institution. These range from day-to-day informal professional contact, to the regular inclusion of lectures by resident linguists into the training of language instructors. At the national level, this is properly a task for AATSEEL, which still has a considerable non-research membership (including secondary school teachers), and which, one hopes, will one day overcome the existing rift that separates its three components one from another: language teachers, literary scholars, and linguists. Slavic linguistics cannot afford to repeat the mistake made by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), whose failure to respond to the needs and interests of language teachers resulted in the large-scale resignation of that component of its original membership. The recent vulnerability of linguistics in the U.S., as evidenced in the closing or near-closing of a number of linguistics departments over the past few years, is traceable at least in part to the LSA's failure to appeal to a broad base, the exclusion of language teachers being one clear manifestation of this failure.[fn 21]
Only 17,856 pre-college level students in America took Russian in 1990 (Shaw 1991: 147). A marketing specialist, wishing to market a new product to a population of 200 million, would set about calculating the marketing potential and determining how to develop it. We scholars, needless to say, are less practical. Perkins and Chvany (1987: 197) attribute the paucity of Slavic pedagogical articles in Slavic and East European Journal to a lack of scholarly effort towards examining problems in the acquisition of Russian as a foreign language, which in turn is attributed to "the decline in pre-college Russian programs, which reduced the demand for teacher-training". They go on to say (1987: 222) that "In retrospect it seems tragic that pre-college Russian received so little encouragement from college programs"; now, seven years later, it begins to look suicidal. Um--xorosho, a dva--luchshe ('Two heads are better than one'): we must put our heads together and figure out ways in which we Slavic linguists, of whatever stripe and background, can turn the situation around, by boosting pre-college programs, increasing the demand for teachers and for teacher training, and thereby increasing the demand for Slavic linguists in college and graduate schools. If we reflexively donate money to charitable organizations, why should we not make a professional yearly "donation" to contribute several hours to a local pre-college Slavic program? Among pre-college teachers there have always been first-rate linguists and others with good linguistic training, as well as those who could be brought to appreciate linguistics if only we are willing to share with them.[fn 22] In the long run, the benefits of this sort of cooperation should be immeasurable.
In section 1.2, I suggested that scholarly cooperation would benefit both Slavic and theoretical linguists. The interests of all linguists converge in a more practical sphere as well, namely in bringing more linguistics to pre-college students, all the way down to grade school. There is no reason why we cannot enhance students' understanding of language in a non-normative way: it is surely not too abstract or technical to explain to children that languages change, that they can share a parent language, that they can be entirely different in sound and sentence structure (but still share certain common features), or even to introduce such concepts as phonemes and implicature. No one questions, after all, the validity of these same children learning such abstract mathematical concepts as negative numbers, common denominators, infinity, and complementary angles. Why should fourth- or fifth- or sixth-graders learn about Socrates and Benjamin Franklin but not about Panini and Saussure? Only linguists can accomplish the task of making the results of linguistic research accessible to primary and secondary students, and of establishing in young minds the validity of the discipline and its concerns. New grade-school textbooks should be written by linguists--not only by those specializing in English, but in collaboration with specialists in other languages. It is a truism that the in-fighting among various linguistic schools has seemed to outsiders one of the most unsavory features of the field, when they notice the field at all. The mutual denigration of other linguists and linguistic approaches that seems to pervade much of our work can only reinforce the public's impression that linguistics is not a science (or one not worthy of support), since no one seems to agree on anything. We could certainly mitigate this problem by finding enough theoretical common ground to enable the writing and the broad acceptance of elementary-level textbooks. By now there is surely a sufficient number of uncontroversial assumptions shared by linguists of all creeds to produce materials that would raise the legitimacy of linguistics in the eyes of Americans of the next generation.[fn 23]
Most of the above proposals to improve the status of Slavic linguistics as an occupation involve long-range cooperative projects. Gathering support for such large projects is never easy, and the requisite commitment, enthusiasm, energy, and initiative are hard to come by. But the time has come to take a hard look at the future of our field as an occupation, and to acknowledge our own responsibility for convincing society of the field's value as a discipline. If we do not do this soon, Slavic linguists--already an endangered species--stand a good chance of becoming extinct within the next generation. Slavic literary scholars will eventually follow suit, leaving nothing but a skeleton crew in Modern Language and Literature departments to teach undergraduate courses in Russian language, culture, and literature in translation, thereby returning Slavic studies to where they began a hundred years ago.
Digest of Education Statistics 1993. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Education.
Dossick, Jesse H. (1981-92) "Dissertations". Slavic review, vols. 40-51.
Fajn, A. and V. Lur'e. (1991) Vse v kajf. Moskva: Lena Production.
Falk, Julia S. (1994) "The women foundation members of the Linguistic Society of America". Language 70(3): 455-90.
Flynn, Suzanne. (1986) A parameter-setting model of L2 acquisition. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Fradkin, Robert. (1994) "Watch your metalanguage". ADFL bulletin 25(2): 30-36.
Klenin, Emily and Catherine V. Chvany. (1987) "East Slavic linguistics". Slavic and East European journal 31 (Anniversary Issue): 176-85.
Lapidus, Gail. (1993) "State of the field". Presidential address at American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies annual meeting, Honolulu, Hawaii (AAASS newsletter, January 1994, 1).
Lunt, Horace G. (1987) "On the history of Slavic studies in the United States". Slavic review 46: 294-301.
Panov, M. V., ed. (1994) Russkij jazyk: uchebnik dlja srednej shkoly, 5 klass. Moskva: Gumanitarnoe znanie.
Perkins, Ann Weiler and Catherine V. Chvany. (1987) "Language pedagogy: The teaching of Russian". Slavic and East European journal 31 (Anniversary Issue): 196-225.
Pinker, Steven. (1994) The language instinct. New York: Morrow.
Scherr, Barry. (1987) "Formalism, structuralism, semiotics, poetics". Slavic and East European journal 31 (Anniversary Issue): 127-40.
Shane, Alex M. (1973) "American and Canadian doctoral dissertations in Slavic and East European languages and literatures, 1961-72". Slavic and East European journal 17(2): 184-216.
Shaw, J. Thomas. (1991) "AATSEEL: The first fifty years". Slavic and East European journal 35 (Golden Jubilee Issue).
Copyright 1994 Olga T. Yokoyama. All rights reserved
Received: 20 September 1994
Department of Slavic Languages
University of California, Los Angeles
405 Hilgard Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90024
olga@humnet.ucla.edu
[fn 6] Reading knowledge of French and German is normally required as well.
[fn 14] Compare this figure to 26 advertised jobs for Slavic (mostly Russian) literature.
[fn 15] I exclude one administrative job.
[fn 16] This figure is based on Dossick's dissertation surveys; cf. fn. 13 above.