LANGUAGE QUESTIONS

Geoffrey Nunberg
Stanford University
nunberg@csli.stanford.edu

Sunday, March 23, 2003, 5:30-6:30 PM plenary
Room: Commonwealth South

Abstract
"Language questions" is a term borrowed from the Italian "questione della lingua," which people sometimes use to describe the controversies about language standards that assume a greater social significance. In some nations, like France and Italy, these issues have been perennial features of public life. In the United States, they usually rumble along in the Sunday-supplement features and the books in the language ghetto at the back of the bookstore, and erupt into wider public debates every generation or so. This has happened three or four times over the last half century: in the furor over the publication of Merriam-Webster's Third International Dictionary in the early 1960's, the disputes over feminist concerns and PC language that began in the 1980's, the "Ebonics" controversy of the late 1990's, and arguably -- though the issues were somewhat different -- in recent controversies over "English Only."

These controversies are always the source of enormous frustration for linguists and other language professionals, since the public seems invariably to ignore their expertise, and carries on the discussions in terms that plainly show they have not understood some basic facts about human language -- this despite five or six decades' worth of earnest efforts at public education. What's the problem? Is what we have here just a failure to communicate? Or have linguists misunderstood the larger significance of these questions? How can we as language professionals play a more effective role in these controversies?

Biography
Geoffrey Nunberg is a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University and a Consulting Full Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. He is spending the current academic year as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. He is a member of the board of trustees of the Center for Applied Linguistics and of the steering committee of the Coalition for Networked Information. During his years at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, he worked on linguistic classification technologies, and holds a number of patents in this area.

Nunberg has written books and scholarly articles on a range of topics, including semantics and pragmatics, information access, written language structure, multilingualism and language policy, and the cultural implications of digital technologies. He is usage editor and chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and his general articles on language and other topics have appeared in The Atlantic, The American Prospect, Forbes ASAP, Fortune, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, American Lawyer, and the Washington Post. He does a regular language feature on the NPR program "Fresh Air," for which he was awarded the Linguistic Society of America's Language and the Public Interest Award in 2001. A collection of these pieces was published in 2001 by Houghton Mifflin as The Way We Talk Now.