Wallace Chafe
The following was published in the journal Historiographia Linguistica 29: 245-261 (2002).
© 2002 John Benjamins Publishing Company. Reproduced with permission.
http://www.benjamins.nl/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=HL
SEARCHING FOR MEANING IN LANGUAGE
A MEMOIR
WALLACE CHAFE
University of California, Santa Barbara
In the fall of 2004, counting from the year I entered graduate school, I will have participated in the field of linguistics for half a century. Perhaps that earns me the right to reflect a little on my involvement in this field, but more importantly to say a few things about trying to understand the nature of language and how it relates to the totality of human experience, even making a few suggestions about lines of research that might be worth pursuing in the years to come.
[......]
The other orientation at Yale was what later came to be called American structuralism, although at the time we just thought of it as the right way to do linguistics. Yale was the strongest of strongholds of Post-Bloomfieldian thinking, and as long as I was there I accepted it as the only proper mindset. I assimilated the view that Sapir was a genius but Bloomfield was right. Bloch was our theoretical anchor, and his influence extended well beyond Yale through his editing of the journal Language and his contacts with the big names in the field. Bloomfield had died while I was still an undergraduate, but his ghost was a constant presence. Language was the bible that guided our thoughts and deeds, and it never occurred to me then to see things differently.
[......]
During my last year at Yale I heard a talk by someone named Noam Chomsky on something he called transformational grammar, in which Bloch had taken an interest. Thus began my acquaintance with a way of thinking about language that left me forever working on the margins of the discipline. I think I know what it was like to be an atheist in medieval Europe, or a believer in the importance of consciousness and mental imagery in the heyday of behaviorist psychology. Chomsky’s vision of language struck me as curiously superficial, and I didn’t think it would win any wide acceptance, hardly expecting the accelerating pace with which it captured the field during the 1960s. Because everyone else was doing it I even tried it on for size myself, but soon decided that my initial instincts had been correct.
Sometime in the early 1960s it became clear to me that meanings were as important to the structure of language as sounds, and perhaps more important―that language was fundamentally a way of associating meanings with sounds, the meanings determining in the first instance the shape that language took. To make this association with sounds possible, and to promote communication, it was necessary for each language to have its own way of organizing meanings, just as each language has its own way of organizing sounds. I first tried to articulate that view as early as Chafe (1962), and ever since then I have been trying to expand on it.
There was one respect in which I was able to connect with the generative movement: I found validity in the notion of a deep structure underlying the surface structure of a language. I differed in seeing this distinction in the context of idioms, with their deep meanings expressed in surface forms. I tried to show how idioms proved the dependence of syntax on semantics (Chafe 1968). Much later, influenced by more recent studies of idioms, I recognized what I have come to call shadow meanings―the literal meanings of at least some idioms that remain lurking in the shadows, influencing to some degree the way people think when idioms are used. Later, too, I realized the importance of relating idiom formation to the grammaticization of inflectional meanings (Chafe in press a). But in the 1960s I focused on the notion that if deep structure were to make any sense, it would have to be equated with semantic structure, and that was the perspective I tried to develop in Chafe (1970a).
[......]
From time to time someone has spoken to me of what he or she has called “your theory”, a phrase that has always made me uncomfortable. I have no wish to think of myself as the promoter of some theory, preferring the role of someone who has made various suggestions derived from various things I have been able to observe, and who has tried to place them within larger frames of reference I have hoped will increase our understanding of language and the mind.
[......]
全文见：
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/chafe/memoir.htm
The following was published in the journal Historiographia Linguistica 29: 245-261 (2002).
© 2002 John Benjamins Publishing Company. Reproduced with permission.
http://www.benjamins.nl/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=HL
SEARCHING FOR MEANING IN LANGUAGE
A MEMOIR
WALLACE CHAFE
University of California, Santa Barbara
In the fall of 2004, counting from the year I entered graduate school, I will have participated in the field of linguistics for half a century. Perhaps that earns me the right to reflect a little on my involvement in this field, but more importantly to say a few things about trying to understand the nature of language and how it relates to the totality of human experience, even making a few suggestions about lines of research that might be worth pursuing in the years to come.
[......]
The other orientation at Yale was what later came to be called American structuralism, although at the time we just thought of it as the right way to do linguistics. Yale was the strongest of strongholds of Post-Bloomfieldian thinking, and as long as I was there I accepted it as the only proper mindset. I assimilated the view that Sapir was a genius but Bloomfield was right. Bloch was our theoretical anchor, and his influence extended well beyond Yale through his editing of the journal Language and his contacts with the big names in the field. Bloomfield had died while I was still an undergraduate, but his ghost was a constant presence. Language was the bible that guided our thoughts and deeds, and it never occurred to me then to see things differently.
[......]
During my last year at Yale I heard a talk by someone named Noam Chomsky on something he called transformational grammar, in which Bloch had taken an interest. Thus began my acquaintance with a way of thinking about language that left me forever working on the margins of the discipline. I think I know what it was like to be an atheist in medieval Europe, or a believer in the importance of consciousness and mental imagery in the heyday of behaviorist psychology. Chomsky’s vision of language struck me as curiously superficial, and I didn’t think it would win any wide acceptance, hardly expecting the accelerating pace with which it captured the field during the 1960s. Because everyone else was doing it I even tried it on for size myself, but soon decided that my initial instincts had been correct.
Sometime in the early 1960s it became clear to me that meanings were as important to the structure of language as sounds, and perhaps more important―that language was fundamentally a way of associating meanings with sounds, the meanings determining in the first instance the shape that language took. To make this association with sounds possible, and to promote communication, it was necessary for each language to have its own way of organizing meanings, just as each language has its own way of organizing sounds. I first tried to articulate that view as early as Chafe (1962), and ever since then I have been trying to expand on it.
There was one respect in which I was able to connect with the generative movement: I found validity in the notion of a deep structure underlying the surface structure of a language. I differed in seeing this distinction in the context of idioms, with their deep meanings expressed in surface forms. I tried to show how idioms proved the dependence of syntax on semantics (Chafe 1968). Much later, influenced by more recent studies of idioms, I recognized what I have come to call shadow meanings―the literal meanings of at least some idioms that remain lurking in the shadows, influencing to some degree the way people think when idioms are used. Later, too, I realized the importance of relating idiom formation to the grammaticization of inflectional meanings (Chafe in press a). But in the 1960s I focused on the notion that if deep structure were to make any sense, it would have to be equated with semantic structure, and that was the perspective I tried to develop in Chafe (1970a).
[......]
From time to time someone has spoken to me of what he or she has called “your theory”, a phrase that has always made me uncomfortable. I have no wish to think of myself as the promoter of some theory, preferring the role of someone who has made various suggestions derived from various things I have been able to observe, and who has tried to place them within larger frames of reference I have hoped will increase our understanding of language and the mind.
[......]
全文见：
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/chafe/memoir.htm
