There is not much new to report, actually. I am about to write my book, Vowels in an Elevator, which I will explain in a minute. I will give a brief overview of the book. I have written about a third of it and just have to fill out the details, or rather, the meat of it. It is not simple. It will take a lot of concentration on my part and time to myself is not something I've had in recent years. Even now, I am finishing a book about Puritan New England and have had trouble getting hours to click together to work on it.
So here is the gist of the book: Chomsky has been wrong. From the beginning we linguists have been looking for the science that is the foundation of language, and Chomsky claimed to have found "universals," and his universalist doctrine has prevailed in the field of linguistics for as long as I have been studying it. But what he has come up with after all these years is that human language has recursion, while animal language does not. Well, this may be true, but it doesn't give us the scientific underpinning we need to make generalizations about all languages. My book will begin by showing how Chomsky's theories have not panned out nor allowed us to have a satisfactory explanation of what languages have in common.
The science of self-organizing systems, however, does give us that explanation, so the book will ultimately go into the relationship between symbols and language, and the science behind understanding the behavior of human perception of symbols. The problem with language is that it is so bound up in perception that one must be able to scientifically explain perception in order to scientifically explain language. But it can be done.
This site has within it most of the links I need to finish the work. I have not done much searching in recent years but I know from what limited contact I have with the linguistics world that there is very little meaningful work being done on language as a self-organizing system. What work has been done is back in my notes somewhere and will have to be pulled out, aired out, investigated, etc. Work on behavior of self-organizing systems is mostly scattered in other fields. But a well-written work will connect language with other scientific systems in such a way that there will be no doubt that linguistics can be a science of language production.
I am sorry to let this site die away a little as I've been preoccupied with other things. I have ten children, the last three adopted (three others step), but the last ones have somewhat filled my plate, and made my retirement a little busier than I had planned. At the same time I have twenty-seven other books on the market, and every time I try to do something esl/linguistics oriented I get a slight back-to-work headache whereas in the process of marketing my books (haiku/short stories/novel/historical biography) I get rushes of egomaniacal self-satisfaction. So I've put a stall on Vowels in an Elevator for way too long.
Finally, let me explain the title. If you were to have a seat at the top of an elevator which had a glass ceiling, and watched as a number of people got in the elevator, you would notice a perfect kind of pattern-making where every person makes as much space as possible between himself/herself and every other person, thus making the entire elevator take on the image of a perfect mandala or a perfect pattern. You would conjure up a rule of mandala-creation that said that there is a rule that people must create a perfect mandala pattern. The same thing happens with vowels in our mouths. Is there a rule that says vowels have to make as much space between them as possible? Well, you would think so, because they do. And they do because that is easier for people's perceptions. People do it naturally, because they are acting in their own best interest.
Case closed. Stay in touch.
