*Note: this paper is part of the FLA Proceedings and has been accepted in revised and expanded form for inclusion in the 2017 FLA Journal of Language. Paper was presented: March 13, 2016. Gainesville, Florida, USA

I’ve been straddling the fence between creative writing (publishing poetry mainly, also short fiction) and linguistics for awhile now. I published my first book of poetry before I ever heard of “linguistics,” or at least before I understood what it was—I probably would have answered “stuff to do with language” as an answer to the question “What is linguistics?” (Sound familiar?)  Or, perish the though, I might have even said “A linguist is a person who speaks a bunch of languages.”  My second collection of poetry was released in 2013, just as I was finishing my Ph.D. in the Linguistics Department at the University of Florida.  I had come a long way in my understanding of linguistics as an academic field, and my love of literature, creative writing, fiction, and poetry in particular, hadn’t waned—though it probably had changed in some ways, due at least in part no doubt to my newly gained scientific view of language.

I graduated from college with a BA in English Literature and a BFA in Creative Writing, after gearing up to be a medical doctor for most of my life, including my first 2-3 years as an undergraduate. With linguistics, I thought I had found a fresh, new, scientific way to play with language, one that allowed me to mesh my love of the beauty of language with my desire to discover, model, and analyze things in the natural world. Actually, I sometimes view the rift as being between Creative Writing (artistic production) and English Literature (criticism and analysis), rather than creative language (creative writing and literature appreciation together) and the scientific study of language (linguistics)—including theoretical modeling of sound and grammatical structure, anthropology of language, neurological, psychological, and pathological aspects of speech production, and other aspects that are encompassed in the scientific approach to language that “linguistics” represents as a field. Literature studies are typically seeking to open the box of creative literary work and examine the parts. Literary criticism and linguistics are not all that far apart on that point–looking to dissect the patient, just that literary studies are breaking down the works as a whole and linguistics is at the communicative language level—a bottom-up approach to the same task. The divide that I see is between creatives who want to leave the mystery of beauty through language intact, since that’s usually how it arrived to their pen, rather than considering the “colorless green ideas” as a Chomskian lab rat for syntax class–and worse, concluding that it is “semantically nonsensical, though grammatically correct.” Ditto on considering a novel as a ‘paradigm of post-colonial ambitions’ or the like, rather than an artistic work with only two primary, inherent phases to its biology—production and appreciation/consumption.

At the University of Florida, the English Department was just down the hall in the same building from the Linguistics Department (keep in mind this is on a gigantic campus with 9 libraries, multiple gyms, multiple Starbucks, museums, you name it). And not too far down the hall from there, with a little turn and a twist from English, was Creative Writing. Those two departments shared some faculty, no doubt—they likely shared a good bit of curriculum as well. Down the elevator from the 4^th Floor of our large building and just across the street was a building with Asian languages inside, and next to that was a building that housed European and other languages.  And in the basement of that building were sound laboratories and speech pathology, including the laboratory where I did my doctoral thesis experimentation on vocal typology, while a student completing the requirements of the Linguistics Department, not Speech Pathology. None of this geographical proximity on our large campus was a coincidence of course.  The geography represents how the university community currently views the academic proximity of these fields. But yet, I had to slog my way well across to the other side of campus to Shands (the massive university hospital system) to get to the Rhoton Brain Laboratory (sadly Dr. Rhoton, a giant in his field, passed away recently) to participate in human brain dissection with brain surgeons from around the world. All this is probably why some linguistics programs around the country prefer to remain “programs,” rather than transitioning to formal “departments,” regardless of how big they become. When I was presenting at Purdue University as a graduate student, I was told that their Linguistics Program even encompassed the speech pathology folks. For many at University of Florida (which did transition from a program to a department some time ago, as an acknowledgment of its largess in faculty and student enrollment numbers) this academic inclusion would have been too broad of a definition of “linguistics.” Still, there were many speech pathology graduate students in my phonetics and phonology classes, and I eventually found myself in their laboratories, doing experiments on voice types. I was told once by my advisor that I had essentially strayed outside of “linguistics” as such with my research—though my committee was stilled packed with linguistics professors at my defense.

So, what does all this mean? Let’s return to the 4^th Floor, where the Linguistics and English Departments shared the same hall. Despite the proximity, we couldn’t have been further apart. The difference was something akin to the difference of majoring in “English” in the United States and majoring in “English” in Europe or Asia, for example. An English major in the United States is typically assumed to be continuing the studies that they began in elementary school or junior high school—that is to say after “English” class stopped meaning prescriptive grammar and mechanics and started to mean the study of literature.  So “English” is shorthand for “English Literature,” while “English” as a major in Asia, for example, continues to largely mean prescriptive grammar, usage, competence, communication, etc.—as opposed to reading and analyzing literature as a specialization. The second example (focus on language competency) is actually closer to “Linguistics” in nature and relevance than the first (literary criticism). In fact, the sole faculty member who was briefly shared between our two departments at UF, before he retired, was an EFL specialist. These days, second language acquisition forays outside our department are limited to another slog across campus to the Education Department, in which is housed the English Language Institute—where Linguistics Department graduate students can go for non-departmental Teaching Assistantships, field work, and classroom observation of practitioners for requirements related to SLA and ESL graduate certificates issued by the university. ESL, EFL, and SLA now have nothing at all to do with the English Department. That association retired along with the last faculty member who represented it. So the ties are severed completely now, though the geographical proximity remains. It might be easier to find animosity than kinship in that hallway. In the Linguistics Department, you might find, often self-unaware, dismissive attitudes towards literature—as happened to me in my first Syntax class, when I suggested that I found “colorless green ideas sleeping furiously” to be beautiful and that perhaps there was another layer to language that represented indefinable beauty, even a metaphysical layer. I was roundly slapped down by the professor, who suggested that I was “in the right field if I was looking for a fight.” I was too bewildered to respond, because it truly hadn’t been my intention to pick an intellectual “fight” with the professor. I honestly thought I was taking class discussion in an obvious direction that the instructor would appreciate and might have planned to address anyway. In the same way that two competing syntactic theories, after being judged to be equally sufficient in their ability to render consistently correct outcomes, can then be judged against each other on the criteria of “elegance”—which usually implies simplicity, but often involve an aesthetic evaluation as well, which is not always strictly scientific in nature. I think this concept of elegance of theory is a tip of the hat toward the limitations of science in language analysis. This was the answer I suspected I might receive in class. Not only was it not the one I received, it’s one I’ve never received from a theoretical syntactician or any other linguist in my graduate studies. Perhaps if there were a bridge between the departments intellectually, an outreached hand from one side of the hall to the other in ideology, it could be there. Sadly, even from the English Department, my old undergraduate academic home territory, there was on occasion a complete dismissal of linguistics. Perhaps not dismissed on its merit, but on its relevance. It was difficult to find a faculty member in the English Department over 40 who had taken even an introductory level undergraduate class in linguistics. This was disheartening, in no small part because second language English instructors and first language English mechanics instructors continue to be recruited from English departments in native speaking countries, not from the far smaller pool of linguistics departments. This means that language instruction, no matter how effective, talented, or passionate the instructor, continues to be taught with a strict prescriptive perspective and with a general unawareness of the scientific aspects of language that allow instructors to handle a host of questions and issues that arise while teaching students striving for basic competence in either their second of even first languages. This includes everything form accent correction to imparting a perspective that allows students to compare their own native language to others and understand the universal and non-universal aspects of human language and the linguistic limitations and uniting features of the human mind. This perspective is invaluable in a student’s strive toward competence in a language and an instructor’s ability to teach with maximum efficiency. The idea that many English departments in universities, English departments in high schools, and ESL programs are populated sometimes exclusively with people who have up to Ph.D. levels of education in the target language, but lack the background of even a single undergraduate class in linguistics is a travesty and an embarrassment. Most are even unaware that this is the case, as they don’t really know what linguistics is exactly.  This could and should be corrected by requiring every undergraduate at every  university to take at least an introductory level linguistics class as a requirement of any language major, even if it makes older faculty in English departments and elsewhere uncomfortable in becoming self-aware of their own hither-to-for intellectual deficits. This is harsh and comes across as self-righteous I’m sure, but I’m a person who came out of those shadows. I always thought I might continue on to a Ph.D. in English, and I believe I might have continued all the way through to a faculty posting without ever realizing what I was missing. For me, it is that important, and I’m confident that English Departments could retrain faculty who might have deficiencies in the new requirements and curriculum. Where should the growing number of Linguistics Ph.D.s find employment in academia?  For one, in English Departments across the United States, and not just as ESL specialists. Every department needs at least one linguist to offer all of the undergrads a taste of the scientific side of language. Professors of literary theory and appreciation teaching mechanics and English as a second language, under the moniker of “English” is not cutting it.

Having said all that, back to the question at hand: Are linguistics and literature in conflict?

Of course, if one were just talking about appreciating literature as a reader, not as a literary criticism specialized academic or even as a creator of literary works per se, then there are other (though I think surmountable) challenges. The biggest is that linguistics training can lead to a kind of conscious attentiveness to the structure of language that is hard to switch off when it’s time to actually enjoy language holistically. On the extreme side, it can be hard to converse verbally at times without analyzing every sound and morphosyntactic structure that comes out of your ones mouth. It’s akin to talking on the phone or on Skype with a bad connection, where you hear your own voice repeated back to you on a one to two second delay while talking. Difficult to compose under those kind of conditions, difficult even to appreciate and savor. I suspect the same would be true of a linguist, in the analytical throws of composing a complex scientific paper, who takes a break to appreciate the musical flow of Steinbeck’s prose, or the verse of Wordsworth.. that’s a hard square to circle. I’ve chosen to explore this point of conflict as a research question—friction or symmetry? Optimistic minds like mine hope for the later, but that sure was a long few steps down the hall from my old Linguistics Department to the English Department at the University of Florida. Those few steps were longer in intellectual bridging than the slog across campus to the neurosurgery laboratories on campus, because in fact we had a neurolinguistics specialist in our department and many more that were interested in the field. While research and collaborative forays into neuroscience and neurosurgery were far from required of graduate students in our department, they were far more welcome than collaboration with the literati and creative writing types down the hall.

In some of my classes, students tell me that their professors in non-linguistics classes often wax-philosophical about the inevitability of Chinese as the next global lingua franca.  Sometimes they even present it as an imminent development that has already started to take a foothold, due to the rising economic power of the PRC and the increasing frequency of successful Mandarin speaking students matriculating in American and other Western universities.

I’ve been troubled by this assumption, and its lack of scientific grounding.  In fact, it reminds me very much of other non-scientifically-based assertions about language that were profligate in years gone by, such as the “Eskimos having a hundred words for ‘snow’ in their language” as evidence for how ones environment and culture shapes ones perspective on the world.  Language scientists, namely Geoffrey Pullum, have been crusading ever since, in vein, to try and dispel this fallacy about West Greenlandic Eskimo (which in fact has only 2 root words for the “snow”) ever since.  Still, non-linguistically trained academics of otherwise excellent intellectual quality continue to profligate the fallacy, as it makes for a nice opener to a lecture, talk, or speech.

There is little evidence to indicate that Mandarin Chinese is spreading around the world as a candidate for global lingua franca status as either a second or first language.  In fact, the Chinese government has had its hands full with roping in all of the mutually unintelligible languages, or “dialects” as the one-China policy motivated government likes to call them, and their speakers into adopting Mandarin as a national lingua franca at the second language level.  This has not stopped entities from journalists to professors to science fiction writers from making the claim, however, that Chinese is becoming the new global lingua franca.  Not even the most ardent Chinese nationalists themselves or other of the most enthusiastic promoters of the idea that China is the next, obvious, and inevitable super power of the globalized world argue that Chinese is going to be a lingua franca of such a theoretical Chinese-dominated world of the future.  There are many reasons, pointed out by level-headed linguistic realists, like John McWhorter and others, indicate that this is in fact not the likely scenario.  Nearly all of Asia, with China leading the pack, is increasing their English mandatory and voluntary education at a clip that is even faster than the growth of their economies in recent years.  People all over the world are giving up minority and even widely-spoken first languages in favor of the “killer language” suspect number one, English.  Globalization is a one time phenomenon (barring nuclear holocaust or some other catastrophic global tragedy that results in a reset to medieval times and a cessation of global connectivity).  English is the language, for better or worse; fairly or unfairly; through pure incidence of circumstance perhaps, that is carrying us through this warp speed transition from unconnected world to globalized, connected, united world status.  Internet, academic publication, road sign standards, public safety announcements, the global trade language, scientific standards and collaborative organizations, international language of air traffic control, and on and on—all English!

Friends and colleagues, I say this not out of self interest or linguistic pride, though I am a native speaker of Standard American English: English is here to stay.  All scientific evidence points to such a conclusion, and we are obligated as language scientists to proffer hypotheses and theories about our linguistic futures that are based on data analysis and application of the scientific method.  English is the communication tool, for the foreseeable future, of this new, emerging globalized world.  We have been assured in the not too distant past of the near-future global dominance rise of Russia, then Japan, as well as the continued dominance of America.  We are now assured by the popular media and pop-anthropologists of the day of the inevitability of the Chinese global super power.  They may well be right or wrong in this most recent assertion.  If that is the case, or if through twist of fate China stumbles as others did and Africa or some other struggling developer emerges as the new contender for replacement of American economic hegemony, we need to heed what history has taught us about government or other powerful entities’ attempts to assert control over natural language change—namely, it cannot be controlled, but instead is governed by natural forces.  These forces, when studied objectively, indicate that the English infrastructure currently being put in place for global communication into the future will be the tool of any future super power—whether it be China, the EU, Africa, the United Nations, or even a new Latino ethnic majority United States of America.  Any power that assumes the economic and military power mantel of this newly minted globalized world will use English as the language of government, to pass on their marching orders and profligate their “soft power,” whether it be their first or second language, by choice of planning or no.  English (in whatever form it exists by that time) will be the coded language of this new shining or tarnished world of the future, and the new leaders will be forced to use this code to propel and churn this new mechanism effectively.

For awhile now, I’ve been working on a site that deals with issues related to Japan, Japanology, and the Japanese language.  What originally started as a kind of “Japan Fan” site, assisting and entertaining people who study Japanese, enjoy “things Japanese,” have lived in Japan, or hope to live in Japan, took on new meaning for me when I started studying linguistics.  I realized that I was doing a disservice to my visitors, especially those who are studying the Japanese language, if I don’t provide a scientific view of the Japanese language that is geared to the mainstream and literary student of Japanese.  In fact, the mainstreaming of the linguistics discipline for literature and foreign language discipline-based students of language generally has become a very important issue and goal for me.
When talking to a friend from Taiwan, I was somewhat surprised to hear that Taiwan has not a single undergraduate linguistics department, although they do have graduate programs.  What was even more surprising was the fact that all students of English, and presumably other foreign languages, in Taiwan are required to take at least an intro course in linguistics.  So, while the Taiwanese do not have any universities who have reached the level of offering an undergraduate program in linguistics, they appear to understand the importance of linguistics and the scientific study of language to the average language learner better than Americans, though we have many undergraduate programs in the US.  We are missing something important here in The Sates.  Our view of “language” seems incomplete somehow.
My TenColors.com site now contains a “Japanese Linguistics” section, which, to my amazement, appears to be the first of its kind to appear in a non-linguistics-geared language and culture site.  I have been trying to impress upon my site visitors and Japanese language-studying friends the importance of gaining a scientific appreciation for the language you are studying.  Japanese language sites are littered with blog posts and questions, where advanced Japanese L2 language learners (and sadly, even native and second language instructors of Japanese) are puzzling over questions that are fairly easily answered by students of Japanese Linguistics.  The only way to Japanese Linguistics is through Linguistics departments, not through Japanese Language or Literature departments.  Fellow linguists, this can’t be the way.. and this situation is not unique to Japanese, unfortunately.
There have been some strides though.  We can see that the scientific and theory driven field of SLA has started to show practical linkages to and appear in required course lists for students of ESL/EFL/TESL.  We can expect, or hope at least, to see more and more linkages between the science of language and the application of language.  This is not simply the old “theory vs. applied” rivalry, it’s deeper.  What we are talking about is the mainstreaming of linguistic basics outside of linguistics departments.  The rift is not between applied and theoretical experts within linguistics departments, it is between the literati and the linguists.  This is the rift that we need to bridge.  At least the basics of linguistics should be a set of courses that cross departments and are equally important to all, not simply a set of teaser courses for linguistics departments to recruit more linguistics majors form the liberal arts colleges.  I teach one of these course, and in my view, the strategy is misguided.  Likewise, “Structure of Japanese,” “Structure of English” and the like should be required courses not only for foreign language students and student teachers, but even for English Literature majors who are native English speakers.  These students have the need for a scientific perspective on their own languages, perhaps more than anyone.  Certainly it must seem strange to linguists to hear that someone who has a PhD in “English” from a major US, UK, or Commonwealth university doesn’t know what the aspiration rule of English is—though it’s one of the most basic phonological rules of the English language, and highly systematic and predictable.  Sadly, this is the norm.  I feel a sense of this mission, perhaps not least because I come from a literary, creative writing, business, and EFL background and am now studying linguistics.  I plan to devote a lot of my future efforts to building bridges from linguistics to the world of business communication, literature, technical writing, and foreign language learning and teaching.  www.tencolors.com is one of those efforts, and the marketing of linguistics to the generalist that you see taking place on Florida Linguistics is another avenue.  I hope others will join me.
And let’s not fool ourselves, fellow students, about the rift between so-called “prescriptivists” and “descriptivists” in this infant discipline of ours.  It is no less erroneous than that between “applied” (the so called applied linguistic sciences, which have their own theory and need theory to apply in any case) and “theoretical.”  It is yet just another manifestation of our (thus far) failure to market our field to academics of other departments.  The grammarians and prescriptivists of secondary schooling that we have been told are the enemies and villains of language science are just other teachers of language that have not been given the motivation or training to apply a scientific perspective to either English or “foreign” language instruction.  The threshold is high for acceptance of such a radical injection into traditional language teaching to be sure, but isn’t it our responsibility to market our theory as accessible, significant, and relevant at a basic and non-threatening or intimidating level?  And if this is so, then so called “prescriptivists” are really just pre-Chomskyan language professionals and experts who haven’t received the “good news” of modern language science.  People, linguists, let us set the record straight.  It is the so-called “descriptivists,” not the “prescriptivists” that are to blame for this oversight.

The very existence of this book can be both a convenient text selection for grad research class professors in linguistics departments and an encouragement and a comfort for anyone working in the field.  It is the only book of its kind and therefore not facing any competition.  In our department, every student received a copy as part of their graduate research class.  It’s a thin reader that is meant to serve as a kind of training manual for the linguistics graduate student.  The section “How to Write Like a Linguist” is useful and prudent.  Many of the sections could really appeal to any graduate student of the liberal arts or social sciences.  The sections that are specific to linguistics student face two primary challenges.  There are two challenges that a printed book of this kind faces.  The first is that the material goes out of date quickly.  Most of the resources mentioned in the book are online and the links and resources change so quickly that one is left to wonder if most of the information in this book wouldn’t better be presented online as well, where it could be updated frequently, with clickable links to outside resources, rather than having links to websites (some of which have changed their address, content, or simply don’t exist anymore) printed on the page in this traditional book form.  The second challenge for a book like this is that most of the really important hurdles that one faces in trying to make their way through a linguistics program are more department-specific than they are field-specific.  So, in terms of “surviving” the program, this is more about getting useful information from the senior students in your program and learning how to navigate successfully through your particular department and its unique challenges and faculty, than it is about “surviving” linguistics as a discipline.  Having said that, most all of us face the same job market after graduation, and this book provides useful information things to keep in mind as you navigate through your program to ensure that you will have the best chance of finding a good job after you graduate.  All in all, I would say that one would do better on a site like this one (FloridaLinguistics.com) than they would with this book for links to outside resources for linguists.  On the other hand, for information about general graduate research methods and advice on writing and preparing yourself for the job market, I would say that a current version of this book would be a good choice.  A book like this could be written many ways, and though I would have done it differently (by including more information about the discipline in context and different types of programs in the United States and internationally, for example), I think Macaulay did a decent job of providing a linguistics-specific manual for a required graduate research class in the United States.

Last year I had a chance to visit the McKnight Brain Institute Lab at UF.  I was at a formal dinner event and made the acquaintance of a Japanese brain surgeon who was studying for one year with other brain surgeons at the institute.  He was a young guy, and Japanese being my second language, we started chatting away in Japanese about different places we had both lived in back in Japan, as well as our experiences and studies at universities both here in the US and back in Japan.
After that, I would sometimes meet him and some other doctors for coffee or drinks and discuss various issues.  I had originally been a pre-med student and spent countless hours in labs doing animal dissections and the like as an undergraduate, and felt somewhat at home with this group.  The Japanese surgeon gave me an open invitation to the brain lab, and I eventually went around to observe and take part in the lab studies.  I don’t want to make anyone lose their lunch here, except to say that, for me, it was a fascinating experience to dissect and study human brains and cadaver heads.
This led me to think about the merits of having an elective course (or possibly even a required course) listed in our University of Florida Linguistics Department course catalogue.  It is one thing to contemplate the ramifications of Chomsky’s and other’s ideas that the brain is hard-wired for language, and to read about different types of aphasias and their implications for the fields of neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and others.  It is quite another perspective to actually touch, study in-person, and have these parts of a human brain under your scalpel in a laboratory setting.  Regardless of catalogue listings, I would like to strongly recommend a neuroscience or brain anatomy lab class to my colleagues here at UF and at other universities.  It is truly a worthwhile experience.