Response by Keith Brown

to Dick Hudson's exaugural lecture

In his opening slide, Dick offers us several descriptions of the event we have just participated in - a valedictory talk, a farewell do, Uninaugural, Unaugural or exaugural.

In another slide he tells us that descriptive linguistics is flourishing – as indeed it is. UCL has played a prominent role in descriptive linguistics for many years and Dick has played his part in it from the time when he first came to UCL in the 60s and worked with Rodney Huddlestone on analysing scientific English, to the present where he is becoming what one might describe as the grammar Czar for the DfEE.

I thought I might do my bit by offering you a tiny bit of descriptive lexicography using the Web as a corpus

Well Google offers 3 hits for Uninaugural , all relating to US republicans and an UnInaugural Committee to work for the downfall of President Clinton. Part of their effort parodies a poem written my Maya Angelou to celebrate Clinton’s inaugural and parodies it by the simple expedient of replacing every noun with another noun three or four dictionaries headwords distant – so you get a nonsense poem and further evidence of what Dick has referred to as the triumph of the noun - from child’s play to adult information writing and then on to adult’s play.

There are 104 hits for unaugural,

and there are 308 hits for Exaugural, clearly the noun of choice – Websters Online dictionary defines exaugural as an event “occurring at or marking the close of a term of office”, which seems spot on, and reflecting this the hits are mostly of exaugural lectures, messages, events and the like from Universities and other institutions in Britain and elsewhere in the English speaking world, many illustrated with photographs of the ceremony and the attendant jollifications –perhaps Dick’s farewell do, and the folder of congratulatory messages, anecdotes, pictures, and reminiscences, will join them on the web and perhaps the next revision of the OED will have this event in a citation, a happy thought.

Entertainingly there is also this – exaugural in a variety of communicative systems

[SLIDE]

To celebrate British linguistics at the Millenium The Philological Society published a book of autobiographical essays by British Linguists. In his contribution, Dick emboldens three phrases to characterise his academic achievement - grammatical theory , sociolinguistics and educational linguistics. He could also have emboldened others - descriptive linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive science for instance – since he has wide interests which interestingly intertwine and fructify each other, as has been apparent this evening

Dick has a long pedigree in grammatical theory –. He came to UCL as a researcher in one of Hallidays research projects to apply linguistics to the teaching of English as a native language in schools. His interest in theory was initially inspired by Halliday. His first published book on a theory he came to call “Daughter Dependency Grammar” started as an attempt to formalise Halliday’s grammatical system into a generative grammar (inspired by, inter alia, Chomsky). Its lineal descendents, incidentally, are still alive and well and living in Cardiff. In the 1980’s he started developing his current model, Word Grammar, of which we have heard something this evening. He claims it as an example of Cognitive Linguistics – a movement which is unified by the belief that language is part of general cognition rather than a distinct module. He has written “non-modular cognitive networks are important for me because they provides the main link between grammatical theory and the other strands of my work. … As far as sociolinguistics is concerned they open up the possibility of integrating social categories with linguistic ones because no boundary is assumed between the two” In this lecture we have seen networks illustrating both grammar and the family.

This brings us neatly to sociolinguistics – another Hallidayean influence, since Dick first got interested in sociolinguistics when Halliday asked him to teach a course in UCL. He soon became an enthusiast. It led to his widely used textbook on Sociolinguistics but ,more radically, as he writes, “One of the attractions of sociolinguistics was the links that it provided between language structure and education. One link is the question of the nature of linguistic differences between social groups: are they profound enough to explain the well-documented educational differences between these groups … Another link to education lies in the study of language attitudes”. These issues - linguistic differences between social groups, language attitudes, language prejudice – led in the early 1980s to a series meetings, the immediate outcome of which was the Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLIE), which was sponsored jointly by the LAGB and BAAL and which is still active and of which Dick is still a member.

All paths in this story lead us to educational linguistics. I have already mentioned that Dick came to UCL to work on a project to apply linguistics to the teaching of English as a native language throughout the school system, from initial literacy to the end of secondary school. In the last few years the National Literacy Strategy led by the Teacher Training Agency and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has provoked a revolution in the UK’s schools as far as the teaching of language has been concerned and Dick has been in there fighting to ensure that at least some of those who control our education system accept the need for academic linguists to contribute to school education. Through the subject centre I have been impressed by Dick’s wide and influential networking with the various stakeholders in this enterprise – government, teachers and teacher trainers, university linguistics and the ultimate consumers, the pupils themselves.

How do we sum this up? Dick’s interests in linguistics are intelligent, original and wide-ranging. We started with three academic areas that he integrates - grammatical theory , sociolinguistics and educational linguistics.

Grammatical theory –Dick sums up his achievement in this areas himself in this lecture as “seed sowing” - many clearly fall on fertile soil.

Sociolinguistics - is pervasive in Dick’s work

The greatest of these is it seems to me educational linguistics. I suspect that Dicks most enduring contribution will be in this area and I salute him for it.

We Started with various words to describe this event – exaugural etc. One further synonymn Dick offered was “uninstall”. Websters Online dictionary defines this as “To remove an application from a computer. Uninstalling removes all files that were added to the computer when the application was initially installed. In addition, it might also remove files that were subsequently generated by the application. Frequently, however, uninstalling is not 100% effective”. So, it seems that things get dug deep into the system so that it is eventually impossible to totally remove them. I suspect that we shall not be able to totally uninstall Dick, and I am pleased that this is so..

I hope you will join with me in wishing him a long, happy, active and influential retirement.

The slide

Familiar Quotations: Grammar