bertvaux

That's a big, tough question! There seem to be a number of factors involved, but in my opinion the main ones are: i. the challenge and indeterminacy of language acquisition. We don't learn language by plugging in a cable to our parents' heads and transferring their linguistic knowledge directly into our brains; we have to infer how the language works from a combination of sound waves and/or visual images that highly underdetermine what the actual message intended is. To take a simple example, when a kid first hears the word "dog" s/he doesn't know if it refers specifically to the family dog, or to labradors in general, or all dogs, or all quadrupeds, or all animals, etc. And the people in the room virtually never provide any further clues as to what these words mean--the kid has to figure out the answer for itself. Kids clearly come up with different hypotheses, and this appears to yield a lot of the linguistic variation we find, even within a single family. ii. social differentiation Despite all the rhetoric about humans wanting to be equal, most of them seem to find equality/identicalness profoundly disturbing. Your average human actually wants to be LIKE some people (in the case of kids, it's typically a subset of the kids of their age or a bit older), and NOT LIKE some other people. It's this latter force that can lead to further linguistic differentiation. Say you have a kid learning English who is exposed to the English of their little friends, their parents, and their grandparents. They typically will (subconsciously) opt for the forms used by their little friends, some of whom may have non-standard forms resulting from factor (i) discussed above. This is another way that social group differentiation (including regional variation) can arise and spread.

I do! Even before I became a linguist I could never understand why people were so biased against forms of behavior (be the linguistic, or culinary, or whatever) different than their own. When I first started taking linguistics classes at the U of C in 1985 I was very pleased to see that linguists generally believed that all languages/varieties and peoples are equal. Despite all this, though, for some reason I have a mental block with Estuary English! I know that it's just as interesting linguistically as any other variety of English, but it still gets me for some reason--even though more stigmatized varieties of British English such as Brummie, Glaswegian, etc. I greatly enjoy. I have a theory about why this is, but won't get into it in this public forum.

Back in 1993, when McCarthy gave a version of his "look at my new theory" talk at Harvard, I predicted to my advisor Andrea Calabrese that phonologists would eventually abandon all of the central tenets of OT--they'd have to, because they're so obviously falsified by the facts--but that this wouldn't take the form of an overt paradigm shift as it did with the sea change from RBP to OT. Instead, the tenets of OT would gradually be replaced by components claimed to be innovated by clever optimologists, but that were actually just versions of pre-OT derivational mechanisms. This has already come to pass with process ordering, local iteration, (for some) levels, and so on. As for the next big thing: I fear that the next two steps in the field are (i) shift to intellectually-uninteresting money-generating number crunching followed by (ii) death of the field, which may or may not coincide with death of the humanities/universities/western civilization. But in an IDEAL world, I think the next big growth areas would be sign language systems, nanovariation (especially with twin/sibling languages), renewed study of deeper principles of L1 and L2 acquisition (as opposed to the superficial phoneticky and/or functionalist stuff that currently dominates), design features of phonology and their connections to evolutionary theory, information theory, and so on, and analytic biases.

Very interesting! I personally prefer to study languages that develop naturally/organically, but there's plenty of interest in conlangs.

That's a great question! Part of the problem is that linguistics generally isn't proselytized very well--very few people have Pinker's ability to present sophisticated and interesting linguistic concepts clearly and compellingly, and most profs either can't see how to make their subject matter interesting to uninitiated students or don't want to (thinking that this is simplistic, or selling out, or what have you). But I think that's just a tiny part of the problem. (Though we saw at Harvard in my day that if you taught good classes students would come in droves, and the university was then willing to give us new teaching lines, teaching assistantships, etc. Something similar seems to be happening right now at Queen Mary in London.) Another part of the problem I think can be connected to the rise of chomskyan linguistics. When it first surfaced in the 50s, its affinities with the nascent computer science made it the equivalent of neuroscience and big data today--things that universities thought sounded impressive and able to generate lots of money. But now academia has shifted in two directions hostile to chomskyan linguistics: (i) almost every university has now switched to a business/profit model, wherein there is no place for fields that don't generate reams of income (read: arts/sciences/humanities, including linguistics); (ii) behaviorism (to which chomsky's rationalism is diametrically opposed) with its obsession with blind/shallow number crunching has returned with a vengeance. In Britain there are other factors as well, or at least other factors that are invoked as disguises for what I think are actually financial motivations of the sort mentioned above. Linguistics is typically linked to the learning/study/appreciation of languages, but these things are in the West perceived as idle pursuits of the wealthy. British people (especially in upper middle class havens like Cambridge, ironically) are hyper-sensitive about class and privilege, and don't want to be seen as supporting anything connected with the privileged upper echelons of society, so things connected with the posho study of languages are a soft target. (One problem for this analysis is the survival/thriving of Classics at Cambridge, but that's a topic for another day.)