William Frawley University of Delaware Several years ago, I performed a
kind of perverse experiment. I showed, to several linguistic colleagues,
the following comment made by Walker Percy (in The Message in the
Bottle): language is too important a problem to be left only to
linguists. The linguists' responses were peculiarly predictable: "What
does Percy know? He's a mercenary outsider, a novelist, a psychiatrist!
How can he say something like that?" Now, it should be known that the
linguists who said such things in response were ardent followers of the
linguistic vogue: to cross disciplines at whim for the sake of
explanation---any explanation. It was odd, to say the least: Percy was
damned by the very people who agreed with him! Fortunately, the papers
in this book, though radically interdisciplinary, do not fall prey to
the kind of hypocrisy described above. The papers (from the Third
Delaware Symposium on Language Studies) address the question of
literacy---a linguistic problem too important to be left only to
linguists--but many of the authors are not linguists at all, and those
who are linguists have taken the care to see beyond the parochialism of
a single discipline. The subsequent papers have been written by
psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, computer scientists, and
language teachers to explain the problem of how humans develop,
comprehend, and produce extended pieces of informa- tion (discourses and
texts).