There are those academics housed in English Departments who are called linguists and who maintain a staunchly scientific view of language that is often as rigid as the rabidly anti-intelligent design folks over in the Science Building. They’re not much interested in the Philosophy of Language (which is relegated to increasingly rare departments of philosophy), have little to no interest in literature as art (or in philology; e.g., Tolkien), except insofar as it provides opportunities to accumulate more data on evolutionary syntax or diction. Semantics is an interesting area, in that it provides so much opportunity for sociolinguists to extrapolate politically correct findings from exhaustive studies of the effects of colonialism on native cultures. They operate pretty much on the definitive formula language=communication, which places parameters around the field, protecting it from contamination by logos while opening up a world of dissertation possibilities along political/economic/sociological/anthropological lines, providing yet another chance of “proving” absolutely anything you want to prove via “data.”

Linguistics is a fascinating field that, owing to the politicization of academia, has fallen into the hands of the wrong people. Tolkien suffered much consternation over this subject, which, in his day at Oxford, appeared as an estrangement, often hostile, between “language” and “literature.” (His fame as a writer of mythopoeic fiction is so great that we forget he was, first and foremost, a philologist.)

I’m one of those people who believe we are on the cusp of an intellectual revolution which will involve (possibly among other effects) the passing of “science,” or at least of “the scientific method.” What has happened to linguistics is a serious case in point. It has, so ironically, collapsed into Babel, a mere mass of meaningless sounds. Linguistics is one of several fields that have lost either credibility or value or both. 

The other day I read a minor news piece about a linguist who declared that language is changing (surprise). Without naming parts of speech, she noted that we now use many more progressive verb forms because we have exchanged infinitives for gerunds. No mention of what this change might “mean,” of course. This constitutes news from linguistics.

What I noticed in decades of teaching English and evaluating texts, etc., is the loss of logic. Related to logos (in fact, its offspring), that should be no surprise.