Pitkin Harvey. Method and Theory in the Perspective of Anthropological Linguistics

Method and Theory in Linguistics, Edited by Paul L. Garvin. — Mouton, 1970. — pp. 27 – 41.Events in the recent history of the field of linguistics have emphasized the autonomy of the discipline. New boundaries have been created by the extraordinary attention paid to theory, models and the form of rules for presenting the statement of an analysis.We use the term anthropological linguistics, in the sense that it applies to 1966. We do not use it in terms of the type of field work done in the year, say, 1945. This was the time when a person would go out and maybe spend eight weeks on some Indian reservation in the Southwest and then would come back and write a grammar of the language based upon eight weeks of field work.It seems that we do need to spend more time than eight weeks or three months with a language if we are to make an adequate study of it. However, we don't have to go to the extremes of those who insist that only the native speaker analyst can write a description. It seems, though, that if possible we should stay with a language long enough to gain some sort of a speaking knowledge of it because in this way we program our brains with all sorts of bits and pieces of information which attain something similar to the intuitions of the native speaker. The term anthropological linguistics today is uttered against the background of the work done since 1957, and we don't want to return to the period prior to 1957.