(Interview conducted by Camiel Hamans)
‘I’ve had a somewhat unusual career,’ explains Frederick (Fritz) J. Newmeyer (1944). ‘In fact, I’ve had only one job: at the University of Washington (Seattle). After I got my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1969, I was appointed at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Washington and stayed there till my retirement in 2006. Then we emigrated to Canada, where I am now adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. That is why I could become the delegate of the Canadian Linguistic Association to CIPL, although I had been president of the LSA in 2002. I am still active in the LSA, where I resumed the position of secretary-treasurer, a position I had previously held from 1989 to 1994.’
‘Another unusual aspect of my career is that I never aspired to administrative positions. That makes me different. Quite a few colleagues want to move up, want to become university administrators, dean or vice-chancellor. I had no interest in university politics. My commitment is to the field of linguistics as a whole. That is why I spend so much of my time and energy to linguistic organisations such as the LSA and CIPL.‘
Summer Institute
‘I never knew about the field of linguistics when I was a young student. It was the early 1960s and linguistics wasn’t widely known at that time. I enrolled at University of Rochester (NY), not far from where I grew up and chose chemistry. I took my BA in geology in 1965 and then saw that there was a class offered in linguistics, which I signed up for. This turned out to be the ideal combination for someone like me who loves languages and science. And so I graduated from Rochester with a MA degree in linguistics in 1967. It was all structural linguistics at Rochester then and I liked the way problems were solved within this approach, collecting data and looking for patterns.
At the 1966 LSA Summer Institute at UCLA I first met Noam Chomsky and learned about generative grammar, which opened my eyes. I decided I had to study generative grammar. My grades weren’t good enough for MIT, I thought, and thus I looked for another university where generative grammar was taught. So I went to Illinois, where Robert B. Lees, Chomsky’s first doctoral student and a staunch generativist, had taken up the chair of linguistics in 1965. All key professors at the University of Illinois came from MIT. For example, Arnold Zwicky was hired by Lees immediately after his MIT dissertation. The program that I could follow at Illinois consisted of generative syntax and phonology. I focused on syntax; phonology never interested me. I was the last American student of Lees, writing a dissertation under him entitled English Aspectual Verbs in 1969, which was published by Mouton in 1975.’
First Quarter
‘ I was always interested in history and since I had the privilege of working with Lees, who had been around at MIT from the earliest days of generative grammar, and later at University of Washington with Sol Saporta, one of the first psycholinguists, who was a post-Bloomfieldian structuralist with a keen interest in generative grammar, I gained first-hand information about the beginning of what was then called transformational generative grammar. That made me write my 1980 book Linguistic Theory in America: The First Quarter of Transformational Generative Grammar. A terrible title, I now think. The reception of this book was very positive. I received more attention for it than for my work in syntax. That is why I specialized in the history of linguistics. I still continued research in syntax and I am one of the few generativists who also developed an interest in functional linguistics and investigated whether their findings can be linked to generative insights. I tried to do the same with the outcome of the work of typologists. My work on the history of linguistics, however, is most appreciated. The community of historians of linguistics is very small. NAAHOLS, the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences, founded in 1987 by Konrad Koerner, is a very small organization. I only taught a course in the history of linguistics every other year at Washington. Most of my teaching was about syntax.’
Bilingual
‘I have lived in Canada for years now and I also feel more Canadian than American. Politically for instance. For someone on the left it is much easier to live in Canada. The government of British Columbia, where we live, is socialist, at least on paper. However, the linguistic world in Canada is much smaller. The Canadian Linguistic Association has only a few hundred members. We don’t have an office, no full-time staff. It is a small group, in which everybody knows each other. We have annual meetings, which are organized and hosted by the different linguistic departments in the country. Another big difference between the American and the Canadian linguistic society is that the Canadian linguistic world is completely bilingual, English and French. The French-Canadian linguistic research may be less known internationally but that is a shame and wrong. The colleagues from Quebec do a good job. Bilingualism is no longer exclusively for French-speaking linguists. At French-speaking universities everyone is bilingual, but even here at the University of British Columbia, 50% are bilingual. At McGill, an originally exclusively English-speaking university in Montreal, French is now accepted as an exam language and you can ask questions in French. I’ve given quite a few lectures in French, but I’ve never been as nervous as when I had to give one in Montreal. I can’t speak French with the accent of Quebec, which, I think, is a nice accent. In addition, I felt an outsider to the francophone linguistic world.
Fortunately, I have seen one thing change in recent years. In the past, just like in Australia, you almost always had to have an American or British degree to be appointed in Canada. Now more and more of Canada’s own degrees are being accepted. That’s certainly changed.’
Politics
‘I was politically active during my student years and beyond. That has diminished somewhat over the years. As old people often do, I’ve become more skeptical, but that doesn’t mean I’ve given up my left-wing ideas. You cannot express your political commitment in theoretical linguistics, but anyone who is interested in politics is also interested in history. Perhaps my focus on the history of linguistics can be explained in this way.
In addition, there is a direct connection between politics and linguistic subdisciplines like sociolinguistics and language revitalization. The staff of the linguistic department at the University of British Columbia consists of generativists, but most of them also work on at least one indigenous language. So they deal with very political issues.’
North America
‘Since this is an interview for the Newsletter of CIPL, I want to say a few words about CIPL’s reputation in North America. I’m happy to be part of CIPL, but I must admit that in the 1970s and ’80s CIPL was barely known in the US. As far as people had heard of CIPL, it had the atmosphere of being an European organization. That changed somehow when CIPL elected vice-presidents from Nigeria and South-Korea. However, CIPL and its commitment for endangered languages is far too unknown. CIPL is not on the radar of North American linguists. There are many linguistic organizations in the US, there are so many regional groups and the distance is so great that it is difficult to interest people in a continent so far away. Maybe that is the same in Latin America. I think that the lesson from this is that CIPL must manifest itself better and more in the Americas.’
