IL SOFTWARE DEL LINGUAGGIO 

IN DISCUSSIONE A ROMA TRE

L'amico e collega Sergio Scalise mi dà una mano a presentare, nell'ambito dei seminari Linguaggio a Roma tre (nati quasi quarant'anni fa per iniziativa di Tullio de Mauro, allora direttore del Dipartimento di linguistica, e via via cresciuti di importanza e di reputazione) il mio libro Il Software del linguaggio, uscito due mesi fa (Raffaello Cortina, Milano 2020). 

Anna Pompei, che coordina oggi i seminari, dirige la discussione.

28 gennaio 2021

https://youtu.be/dw4PYdecKAM

UN ANTITRUST PER I LIBRI

Da anni, in questa stagione, sotto Natale un maturo, instancabile e potente giornalista RAI si rende autore di un librone di facile lettura su temi più o meno attuali, e per pubblicizzarlo fa il giro di tutte le reti tv nazionali, pubbliche e private, ma proprio tutte, a tutte le ore per settimane, e di tutti i giornali possibili, con una tenacia che ha del mostruoso, fino a dare l'estenuazione a chi, senza sua colpa, accende e se lo trova dinanzi. Lo stesso fanno, anche se senza la stessa protervia, altri personaggi della sfera mediatico-editoriale: abbiamo un libro su Dante scritto da un cronista politico (la sua opera precedente si intitolava: Metti giù quel telefono...), il cui autore è da due mesi ovunque: basti dire che il libro è stato recensito sul suo stesso giornale forse quattro volte, due delle quali nella medesima giornata di domenica. Il giornale gli ha fatto anche una finestra video: il dantista per caso racconta col suo faccione in primo piano frammenti e episodi del suo libretto, sostenendo cose che -- a sentirle -- fanno sobbalzare (per esempio, che Dante descrive l'Italia di oggi). 

La lista delle madonne pellegrine del libro sotto Natale è lunga: c'è un libro della Dandini, uno di Saviano, uno di Corrado, uno di Paolo storico, uno di Veltroni (in grandissima inspiegabile auge mediatica, da qualche mese) e tanti altri, che girano vorticosamente da una look fino allo sfinimento (loro e qlnostro). Cito questi fatti ben noti per sottolineare che troppo poca attenzione istituzionale è dedicata al mercato librario (un tema che appassionava molto Carlo Cattaneo, ma che a Franceschini , che pure è un ... romanziere, non interessa neanche un po'): siccome è un campo dove si svolgono giochi economici non da poco, sarebbe utile stabilire qualche regola. Stabilire per esempio il concetto di concorrenza sleale. Non è altro che questo il fatto che nessuno possa contare su una promozione organizzata con geometrica potenza come quella di Bruno Vespa e di Cazzullo e ottenere accesso a tutte le trasmissioni e i media che vuole, a tutte le ore, più volte. Magari l'Italia pullula di grandi scrittori e scrittrici che non riescono a farsi conoscere, mentre questi due instancabili dilettanti sono su tutti gli schermi. 

Non potrebbero, la SIAE o l'Antitrust stabilire qualche regola? Non potrebbe, un sindacato degli scrittori, segnalare questo sconcio e studiare il modo di creare condizioni di parità? Non potrebbe, l'associazione degli editori, rivendicare uguaglianza di accessi per i propri autori? Di qualche regola di decenza commerciale si avvantaggerebbero i lettori (che non sarebbero indotti a leggere queste porcheriole), l'editoria (che sarebbe costretta a fare meglio) e gli autori (che si impegnerebbero a scrivere solo cose di cui sono esperti). 

Troppo intelligenti per fare politica?

Capita a tutti di chiedersi chi possa essere attratto dalla carriera e dall'attività politica, in generale e specialmente in Italia. E' un lavoro molto particolare, esposto all'alea perpetua di perdere il posto, all'obbligo tassativo di distribuire favori (quasi tutti i sostenitori, prima o poi, presentano il conto), di non ignorare le opinioni e le pressioni di mille persone e entità. Dopo, solo dopo, vengono i problemi reali degli elettori, dei cittadini, insomma della gente. 

I testi di analisi politica (a partire dai classici, come La politica come professione di Max Weber [Politik als Beruf 1919] o I partiti politici di Roberto Michels [1912]) propongono qualche risposta, diretta e indiretta. Il povero Max - che non era certamente un ingenuo - sosteneva che le doti principali dell'uomo politico (e della donna politica) sono passione, senso di responsabilità e lungimiranza. Si suppone che chi tende all'attività politica dovrebbe avere una certa dose di almeno una di queste propensioni. Michels, nello stesso giro di anni, osservava che le organizzazioni politiche non hanno come interesse primario il bene del cittadino, ma la propria autoperpetuazione, e che l'attività politica consiste largamente nello sforzo per ottenerla. 

Quale risposta vi pare più adatta ai tempi? Le elezioni europee che si avvicinano offrono buoni argomenti per orientarsi, perlomeno per quanto attiene all'Italia. Non sembra che nella scelta dei candidati le segreterie dei partiti si siano preoccupati  molto delle doti indicate dal grande Max Weber. Non voglio commentare le scelte fatte o approvate dal Cavalier Berlusconi, che sta creando un caso politico e non è escluso che generi una valanga. Guardiamo invece a quel che ha fatto il centro-sinistra, dove parecchi di  noi (e -- ne sono certo -- tutti i lettori di questo blog) sperano che si nasconda il germe della rinascita. Scorrendo le liste dei prescelti (senza che gli elettori e gli iscritti ne sapessero niente) si rimane desolati.

Writers of smuts: so candidly identifiable, a godsend for courses

It is well known that anonymity encourages to produce vulgarity and obscenity. The internet and the web in general foster such tendencies, that can definitely be seen as pathological. Profiting from the alleged impossibility of retrieving the real identity of anyone, invisible writers infest blogs of social forum sites of variously decent people. 

As for your RS, his own blog (the present one), as well as his FB site, are frequently contaminated by "smut writers", who secrete obscene or insulting sentences, absurd judgments and insinuations: anyone of us may be one, since anyone hosts in him/herself heaps of resentment, spirit of protest, desires of revenge for real or fanciful injustice, supposed incomprehension, etc. The catalogue of such writers is always the same: it includes former students, current or former colleagues, former disciples and assistants, unknown readers or curious people who run into you accidentally, and in general pople who want to "give you a lesson". Accordingly, covered by the web, they may vomit incredible masses of vulgarities, oddities and bullshit.

This flood cannot be stopped, unfortunately, given the relative undefendedness of the web. But smut writers don't realize that they can be reasonably identified: anyone with a philological background is able to grasp cues, hints, signals, elements of knowledge, etc., that just certain persons can share! Moreover, for a linguist, insults and similar things are a real godsend for his/her own courses, especially in pragmatics: so much authentic material documenting the immense sadness of the human hodgepodge!

Per Claire

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Non ho foto da pubblicare, stavolta, e in più scrivo in italiano. Claire, intendo Claire Blanche-Benveniste, è scomparsa due settimane fa, dopo una lunga e terribile malattia, a Aix-en-Provence, la sua città (che divideva questo ruolo con Parigi). Non ho, purtroppo, nessuna sua fotografia. Inoltre, non le piaceva che si scrivesse tutti in inglese, e si è battuta finché ha potuto perché in Europa si ristabilisse la circolazione di lingue (ciascuno la sua, qualcosa sarebbe passato) che vigeva all'epoca dell'Impero Romano.

Ma Claire non ci manca solamente per questa idea, che aveva genialmente materializzato nel progetto EuRom4. Ci manca anche perché era una linguista penetrante e geniale, una donna lucida, intelligente, preparatissima e sensibile: curiosa del mondo, partecipe dei destini della gente, attaccata alla tradizione ebraica alla quale apparteneva in modo vivo e energico, appassionata d'arte (era stata moglie di un pittore notevolissimo), amante dell'Italia, e ancor più di alcuni italiani e italiane che le erano prossimi e le somigliavano. Inoltre, pur essendo una donna audace per coraggio intellettuale e civile, era una persona riservatissima e affettuosa.

La ricordo a chi l'ha conosciuta: conoscerla senza volerle bene era -- credo -- impossibile.

Is the American Century

(in linguistics) coming to an end?

After almost one hundred years, things begin to change

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Dear blog-friends,

I beg your pardon for disappearing for such a long time! My blog was left unmanned for months, in so far as it raised in someone the suspicion that its author had vanished! Nothing awful happened, fortunately. It was because of a terrific accumulation of things to do, overdue work et similia. Now, as the New Year approaches and I am gradually freeing myself from my things to do, I am back: my intention and hope is to be more present and to try to stimulate your reactions more frequently.

One idea that bothers my mind over these days is the following. The past one has been the American Century in Linguistics—undoubtedly. The first half of it, in reality, was marked by a strong Swiss, French, British, Russian and German presence (Saussure, Meillet, Firth, Vendryes, Jakobson, Trubeckoj, Benveniste [in the picture], Halliday…) with the addition of some other smaller “national representations” (several Danish, few Swedish, rare Italians and Spaniards…), but the bulk of it (from the Thirties on) has unquestionably been formed by US people. Various factors fostered such a situation, not excluded Second World War, which made recourse to linguists and linguistics to a previously unforeseen extent!

My friend Edward Stankiewicz (photo above), a superb specialist in Slavic linguistics, himself a Pole flown to US before the outburst of Nazi racial persecution and settled down at Yale, familiar (among other things) with Italy and Italian and provided like many Poles with an astonishing sense of humour, used to devote part of his Yale courses to subjects as “From Bloch to Bloomfield”. There he traced back with some joking the origins of the linguistic institutio in US as the starting point of the dissemination of it over the entire world. Nowadays the title of such a course should be integrated and form a long chain: “from Bloomfield to Chomsky and Langacker and Givón and Postal and Talmy and Bresnan and…” since the chain of American novelties in linguistics has been and still is never-ending.

This is not a complaint, but a mere matter-of-fact remark. In part, American linguistics has had better ideas than ours (I mean—of us non-US, Europeans and other), in part they devised and spread new forms of cultural marketing to which we weren’t able to oppose anything, in part and finally the world submissiveness to any type of American stuff in any fields (from Coke to pop music through rollerblade, mountain bike and so on) facilitated the job enormously.

As a consequence of such diabolic ingredients, Europe and the whole planet got submerged by every kind of US made linguistics. Various of such “packs” were palatable, some of good quality; but—one can’t deny—an important part of such “commodities” were and are sheer gimmick or even hot air. In spite of this, almost everyone here stooped and paid homage, even if one after the other many novelties passed away.

Does any of us remember something called Stratificational Linguistics? It had some fortune in the Sixties, then faded away. Various non US linguists found good reasons to join it. And what about Relational Grammar? Some get converted to it, some still are. What about Generative Semantics (also dubbed “post-Chomskyan linguistics”)? It had course in the Seventies, some joined, a bulk of associated publications saw the light, many changed their mind quickly; then it disappeared, silently… Does some of us remember the earliest Generative, also called Transformational, Grammar? It was rejected after some years by its very supporters, who switched to the Extended Theory… Then, various other trappings: GB, UG, the Barrier-Phase, the X-bar phase, the Minimalist phase, the Phase-phase, and so on and so forth. And what about Formal Semantics? Or OT? And about Auto-segmental Phonology? Or the various forms of LFG (including the incomparable Stochastic LFG)?

The list of new brands and formulas, new recipes and trends, new directions and sub-directions, alas provided with a poor duration and lesser plausibility, could be longer than this. Meanwhile, on the other side of the street, functional linguistics, in its various forms, gave its own contribution to the multiplication of inventions, devices, publications—and chairs.

As a mirror of such a dependency there remain the huge heap of books translated over the past forty years: every type of American production, including opera minora, textbooks (as Bloomfield’s Language is), notes, interim reports, etc. Suffice it to remember that even the PhD thesis of Chomsky wife was translated into various languages, the classroom notes by Z. S. Harris in France, Labov’s opera minora and so on.

Meanwhile, new marketing forms were experimented from and by US colleagues. The main one is the annual or bi-annual road show: conferences, workshops and congresses centered on, dominated by or devoted to, such or such “starring figure”, which can this way disseminate world-wide its own ideas. No European scholar used this system ever: it is a pure US invention, many people swallowed…

Nothing was requested as a sign of reciprocity ever. Europe lifted her hands and surrendered. History turns, however, and the cultural destiny of the various parts of the world too. Various interesting enterprises are Europe-based; typology is giving a big contribution to this (although it has its own risks too…), several remarkable orientations of scholarship and research seem to be based in Europe or in other areas of the world: Central Europe, Far East, etc…

Will what remains of this century be a non-American epoch in linguistics (and in other fields)?

Thick clouds over linguistics

The technological pattern internationally imposed on research funding threatens linguistics as well as other domains of humanities

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In the globalized world, the directions of research to be practiced in the future are determined – with the sole exception of strictly individual research— not by researchers and scientists themselves who design their working plans but by other entities. Most Big Research, in fact, both in hard sciences and elsewhere, depends on road maps worked out in the arcane cabinets of decision makers. Year by year or with other intervals, they decide which fields of investigation are to be encouraged by financial support and which, on the other hand, must be left to individual cultivation or to virtual extinction.

Historically, such a pitiable, schematic, even brutal, mentality, generated in the US after the II World War, percolated in the whole world so as to become the overarching attitude in the financial supporting of science. It started fromthose field (as physics, biology, engineering, etc.) which demanded and keep demanding huge capital investments and a strong political consensus. Subsequently, it gradually spread on virtually every domain, as far as public and private funding institutions are concerned.The associated mentality is perceived of, and presented as, modern, up to date, efficient, and so on. In reality it ends up through identifying every field of investigation with technology or, rather, it uses technology as a filter to set apart what deserves to be supported from what does not.

At a certain moment this attitude also affected humanities. It is well known that humanities at large form a multifaceted domain, where the common product is made not of easily storable solid things or of numbers and calculations or formulas – but just by words. Accordingly, they include without any clear-cut division really rich areas (as law, architecture, etc.), relatively rich others (archaeology, history of art) and really poor others (philology, philosophy, linguistics, history, literature, and so on).Now, in such an areait is not easy to impose an etero-directed administration as far as research is concerned. Due to the multifarious variety of specializations many factors intrinsically prevent it: the high ideological vibrancy of some of its fields (philosophy, history, anthropology, etc.), the difficulty for researchers to work in big-size coordinated groups, the peculiar nature of the research being done (which implies more reflection, hesitation and inspiration than efficiency, immediate productivity and demonstrability), etc. Ignoring or dismissing all such properties, however, the industrial-technological bias in research funding affected also humanities. Big foundations, national endowments for research, international organizations – all define which are the domains and sub-domains of humanities to be made eligible for funding.

An unavoidable consequence of such a policy is that among humanities just some privileged areas are liable to got funded: prima facie they are the ones most close to society at large, and to its major current troubles in particular – in sum, mainly topics having to do with social infelicity. In practice, the areas which may feel secure from the pattern just discussed includes a variety of legal subjects, a part of sociology, some psychological topics, and so on – but, as regards linguistics, almost nothing. Linguists, who may also be cunning, have invented as a response a couple of makeshift systems: they invest on endangered languages (they have to do with discrimination), typology (it has to do with people at risk) and other apparently Zeitgeist-inspired topics and fields. Another clever response is to insist on the computerization of language and linguistic analysis and in general on what the French call industrie de la langue. No matter if the objects brought about as a product of such research prove to be of no use (as many corpuses definitely are). What matters is the product to be concrete, solid, storable, saleable.

That’s almost all, however! If you are interested in abstract and unsaleable topics such as general theory of language, description of individual languages, language reconstruction, contacts between linguistics and philology and other poor disciplines, etc., you don’t have almost any hope to get anything whatsoever. Government does not need you!

Any country gradually accommodated to this system. The European Foundation of Science, for instance, publishes any two or three years a call for funding called Framework Program, which contains the list of the scientific domain which will be admitted to funding over the subsequent years. It is an interesting document indeed, since it testifies both the heavy dirigisme of those international organizations, and more in particular it reveals how largely language and the associated sciences are insignificant as regards their eligibility for funding. Italy, for its part, as a traditionally imitative country, has followed that model: the PRIN (acronym for research projects of national interest), which are expected to be financed, with an infuriating temporal irregularity, by the University and Research Ministry, reserve a ridiculously modest amount of money to humanities and to language & linguistics as such.

As a general consequence of such processes, linguistics is today definitely on the way to become a poor (financially, I mean) science. Its specific goals (describing languages, reconstructing old and fragmentary languages, formulating interpretive hypotheses on language) seem to be of lesser and lesser interest to public and private funding institutions. In International organizations a pretty cynical label is already available to describe those forms of scholarship and investigation which are practiced without any formal financial basis: they term them “curiosity-driven research”.

My own prediction is that, at this rate, linguistics will suffer from deep alterations, bound to affect even its inner nature. One form of this process may be its reduction to curiosity-driven research, another one its merging in, or its melting into, computer science.