Linguistics, UW

Why Linguists Aren’t Postmodernists

The field of linguistics in the United States has been barely touched by the postmodernist turn that has swept the humanities and social sciences. Linguists reject the extreme relativism of postmodernism and believe that science provides an ideal means of understanding how the world works. They also tend to be highly skeptical of many of the political arguments that postmodernists put forward in support of their ideas. In this talk, Newmeyer explains and defends linguists’ opposition to postmodernism and presents evidence that innately-determined structural principles lie at the heart of language.

Newmeyer has just been elected president of the Linguistic Society of America. He is the author of six books covering topics as diverse as English grammar, the neurology of language, and the history and sociology of the field of linguistics.