DR. JACOB CAFLISCH, SR.
Professor
Linguistic Theory, Slavic Linguistics,
and Honors Eurasian-Altaic Geographic Perspectives



The Division of  World Languages Education
The College of Arts & Sciences
The University of South Florida
Tampa, FL 33620-5550

Office: The Russell M. Cooper (CPR) Building 440 v: (813) 974.2548
FAX: (813) 974.1718 [WLE]
FAX: (813) 974-4613
(813) 974.2769 [ELI]
WATTS PSI LINE: (800) 673-5599

Hrs.: B.A.O.
caflisch@lang.usf.edu
 

   I. Training & education:

Duke University; Institute of Critical Languages, Putney, VT, summers, 1962, 1963, intensive advanced Russian, intensive beginning Mandarin (63); BA cum laude in English language & literature, with dual minors in religion & education; MA in general & linguistic theory, & Slavic linguistics; PH.D. (1974) in linguistic theory & Slavic linguistics, with some associated courses in English, psychology, and mathematics, Indiana University., Bloomington, IN.My doctoral major professor was
Dr. Fred Walter Householder, Jr. Literature courses were taken with Dr. Bernard Spolsky, and Mathematical linguistics
with Dr. Robert Wall.

   II. Associated training & experience:

The Hilton Leech Art Institute, Sarasota, FL. Training in watercolors & oils; pictures on display at the Ringling Art Museum, Sarasota; Music scholarship in clarinet & music theory to the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua Lake, NY. Studied under Walter Thalen (soloist with the Minneapolis SO, 1956, Robert Schaller (soloist with the Pittsburgh SO), 1957, and music theory under Dr. David Holden (Columbia University). Played clarinet for the Florida West Coast SO; played oboe & English horn for the Duke University Concert SO & Concert Band. Took part in the 1975 Summer Language Institute of the LSA, hosted by USF: taught my course in English generative models, and took a course in abstracted I.E. phonology under Dr. T.V. Gamkrelidze (Tbilisi, Georgia), and participated in the Polish Semiotics Seminars under Drs. Edward Stankiewicz (Chicago) & Jerzy Pelc (Uniwersytet Warszawski).
 

   III. Specialties & some current interests:

Abstracted linguistics & theory of syntax, phonology, semantics (Initiated & taught at USF, henceforth abbreviated to I/T); The interface hypothesis which results from the models constructed dealing with the macrocomponents of language; pragmatosemantic continua; the Slavic languages and their contributions to theory (mostly Russian & Polish); The Slavic contribution to the issues over the pro-drop parameter (current interest & work);  Interface with Biblical linguistics (origins & models, e.g. what likely happened to 1L/1D at Babel?); psycholinguistics, cognitive architectures & the feasibility of neurophysiological linguistics; Mind/brain neurological studies; Contact linguistics (CA, EA, IH, & their models (I/T)); History of linguistic thought & models (I/T); Mathematical linguistics (I/T); Russian linguistics (I/T); Polish language (I/T); Directed reading in Czech language (I/T); Linguistic structures of English (I/T); Phonology & phonological science laboratory & practicum (I/T); Issues of L-isolates; The Nostratic Hypothesis controversy; Jakobsonia (his life exposed to so many different experiences parallels mine); Choresky & his personna (we share three items in common: Theory of Language; birthday date; birth in Pennsylvania); Directed 12 MA theses & served as reader for 10 since 1970; served on two doctoral committees since 1995 (USF Psychology & Applied SLA-Education).
 

   IV. Current research concerns:

Researching possible Netcourses for Polish grammar, Russian culture & civilization (especially my interest in the Honors Program course IDH HON 4200 over Eurasian Perspectives, and my own work on the Four Pillars of Russian Culture: Religion, Architecture, Art, & Music ( currently a worktext for the course. I have a special component on authors' techniques for dissension in both art and music); Early Eurasian civilization interfacing with the newly-arrived Indo-European civilization (as promoted by, among others, Maria Gimbutas's works) and their fundamental differences of culture & contributions to macrostratum effects (leading to the entire dynamics of super-, ad-, & substrate models. These changes in & concerns over cultural contact are fascinating & have overriding importance in the models of mass social behaviors & social "hysteria." Indeed, there are some awakenings in scholarship just now concerning Language and Social Inhumanities, including Politics.); In my Honors course (Eurasian perspectives), I am developing materials for showing how artists choose to reveal their dissent through feelings and social commitments/beliefs within the crushing aura of Stalin's kul't lichnosti (Cult of Personality), which I treat as a kind of Command art/music/literature whose raison d'être was to serve--supposedly--the ultimate good of the masses--treating people as if they were a huge bloc of likeminded serfs and zombies. Thus, we have a kind of "command-performance" mentality. The separate palettes of both artist and musician fuse together in this private world of dissent. The methods are varied and clever, open to self-examination & use. I share some of these techniques with my classes (from my old days in art & music) so that they can see the oppressive nature that so often accompanies life under the guise of progress in Human "betterment."

In my research of parameter theory & models, I am coming to accept two issues that seem to overarch the nature of pro-drop studies: (1) continuum analyses, and (2) pragmatosemantic enforcers, including various nuances of what R. O. Jakobson has called "emotive" systems in communication. These ideas have not yet appeared in published studies (page sites for these shall remain "under construction" until I can get these concepts more widely published for willing readers. Some of these ideas should be forthcoming.
 

   V. Honors & specialized societies:

Phi Kappa Phi (Executive Committee, USF; Scholarship Committee for National and Areal Phi Kappa Phi applicants); Omicron Delta Kappa (Executive Committee & Faculty Secretary, USF);
Sigma Tau Delta (English, V-President, FSC);
Phi Sigma Iota (Foreign Languages, charter member, USF; International Executive Secretary, USF, 2000--);
Alpha Epsilon Lambda (Graduate school scholarship & leadership, Univ. of Florida chapter);
Kappa Delta Pi (Education Honor Society);
TIP (Teaching Incentive Program) award, $5,000, USF;
Dobro Slovo (National Slavic Honor Society, Charter Chapter President, January 16, 2001, USF)

Some interesting sites for these societies follow:

Dobro Slovo
Phi Kappa Phi
Omicron Delta Kappa
Sigma Tau Delta
Phi Sigma Iota
Alpha Epsilon Lambda
Kappa Delta Pi


 

Listings in biographies, include:

Faculty White Pages
Personalities of the South
Who's Who in the Southeast.

Current or past assignments and honors include:

Deputy Governor to the ABI Board of Governors
Recipient of the Silver Medallion for Achievement, International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, UK
Honorary appointment to the ABI (American Biographical Institute)
Research Board of Advisors, Raleigh, NC
Member: Centrum im. Jana Pawla ii, Clearwater, FL.
Member: Congress of Russian-Americans, Nyack, NY
New York Academy of Sciences
AAAS
LSA
AATSEEL
PMLA.
 

   VI. Committee service (partial listing):

USF Faculty Senate; Executive Council of the Faculty Senate, Sergeant-at-Arms; Undergraduate Committee; Graduate Committee & Subcommittee for Academic Curricula; Committee for the Hiring & Retention of Deans & Chairs; Service on various local & national search committees; Student Grievance Committee; College STP ( Salary Tenure Promotion) Committee; Faculty Juror, Judicial Services, USF; UFF (United Faculty of Florida).
 

   VII. Sample papers, symposia presentations, or articles:

    VIII. Print media:

Issues in Russian linguistics. UPA, 1995.

"Methodology for teaching pronunciation," in Carol Cargill (ed.). A TESOL Professional Anthology: Listening, Speaking, & Reading. Voluntad, 1986.

"Putting fun into phonology." Sunshine State TESOL Journal. Nov., 1996.

"Some issues in cognitive architecture: Domain hypotheses." Language Quarterly 33:3-4 (1996).

"Prague phonology, vector typology, & Jacob Grimm," JIES 21.1-2 (1993).

"Grimm's law revisited: a case for natural, typological phonology." LQ (1990).

"The Russian sentence: modalities in a performative perspective." Russian Linguistics 12 (1988).

"A typology of numerical cycles: Kartvelian." LQ. 23 (1984).

"A pedagogical assessment of palatalized segments in Slavic systems." Proceedings of the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference 1 (1983).

"Cycles in linguistics & mathematics." Papers in Linguistics 7 (1979).

"Cycles in linguistics & mathematics." Reprinted in: International Review of Slavic Linguistics 4 (1979).

"Toward an étalon module: 'Supine'-like structures in OCS, Lithuanian, & Finnish." JIES 5 (1977).

"Theory reduction & syntactic metatypology." PIL 5 (1977).

"The direct method." LQ 13 (1974).

" 'Budto° ' as carrier of disclaimer function in contemporary Russian." LQ 12 (1973).
 

    IX. Some favorite landing sites for "relaxation."  My R & R Sites.

Depending on one's definition of what constitutes relaxation, some of the sites listed below are extremely useful for cross-references in matters linguistic. I trust that most of the readers of this section will also find these gems useful as well.

In the world of ongoing work in comparative & historical linguistics, I find great comfort in several sites over the Net. One of these is the massive Cyril Babaev Net. Here we have ongoing research into all manners of ideas concerning I.E. language        formats, ideas, scholarship, and interesting connections. Try: The Indoeuropean Languages Database. Some other very nice sites are Fritz Newmeyer's site for linguistics at: Syntax and Linguistics and Alan R. King's Euzkara website.
 

If one wants to get hold of a major college or university of the world, then there is a special treat from Christina De Mello (at MIT). Her magnum opus is a gigantic website collection of "all major colleges and universities of the world." The HTMs are not given directly in the listing, however.  You will need to click on the letters of your requests and open each site to get the codes  Go to: http://web.mit.edu/cdemello/www/A.html and put the whole thing on your favorites storage.  I recommend that you make a hard copy of it all (A thru Z) and store in a three-ring binder. My colleagues here in the division of World Languages Education use it constantly. Perhaps a secretary can be hired to open each individual site and copy the HTMs directly on the hard copy! That would be a job for a team of people.

If one wants to check out great cognitive materials, one can hit Brown University and head for linguistics. The site is large and some very interesting ideas are seen here. I also am very happy with the sites at University of Pennsylvania. Then for the latest in theory, go to the Harvard and MIT sites. If one happens to be into Euzkara, then the website at the University of Nevada at Reno is a hot location with the doctoral program in the Basque studies. Of course, it goes without saying that a very fine site is Dr. Alan R. King's site (vide supra). A comprehensive companion site for Euzkara. Here major grammar notes for sentence architectures, NP, VP, case analyses, morphology, inflection hardware, and references can be checked via extensive cross-clicking. The site is quite handsome in its design since one can note several examples for each point under discussion. One valuable addition is the inclusion of "but-nots"  (asterisked * forms in the data to show what constructions are judged to be bad or fuzzy by native speakers). As a linguist, I learned very early that the but-nots were more valuable than the clean strings. These always highlight the "limits" (in the mathematical sense) faced by users of a language to which the data pertain.

Of course, speaking about grammaticality, the separation of syntax from semantics and other related notions concerning markedness phenomena, we can since its popularity has been so widespread, A. Noam Chomsky's sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"  is probably a clean sentence, to a limited extent.  Actually, when I illustrate this particular sentence, I remove the oxymoron condition by elininating the term "furiously."  This gives me, "Colorless green ideas sleep."  Now, if we substitute a marked [m] form from a good roster of synonyms, we can make a highly marked sentence, but one that of which even e. e. cummings or any good poet could be proud: "Plain, untried notions lie dormant."  Yhus, it is possible that the original Chomsky sentence "makes perfect sense."

Turning to another favorite area of introspection ( a.k.a. relaxation), I suggest the following website as introduction to Russian Orthodoxy in the history of Russian and other nationalist groups. This is an informative collection of Orthodox sites which can supply professors of culture many excellent pointers of similarity and difference among major Christian denominations. In this connection, I have been laboring over an attempt to put together some notes for teaching a course on Russian and Eurasian influences in four pillars of culture: Religion, Art, Architecture, and Music. To be sure, I do have such rough notes in this connection already at hand; however, they are precisely that---rough notes. The notes are bound in a notebook (USF Quick Copy Services) and have undergone several "editions" since the first, around 1981 when I was profoundly impressed with James H. Billington's magnum opus, The Icon and the Axe and decided to make some comments on the text in terms of my own impressions of the materials being presented. Thus the first edition of my work was somewhat reactionary as well as informative. Since I have offered the course at USF concerned with The Four Pillars of Russian Culture: Religion, Art, Architecture, and Music over several years, I have only over the past three years been engaged in expanding the materials to include a pan-Eurasian panorama of events that have shaped such pillars. With the help of the JVC Videotapes concerned with Song and Dance (some 30 volumes), I have been able to videotape a good portion of my course, RUS 3500 (Russian Culture sans politics) and the Honors course, HON IDH 4200 (for Dr. Stuart Silverman's USF Honors Program). It was the latter course that introduced me to the concept of offering a pan-Eurasian connection to the Russian Pillars. The classic novel, Tale of Two Cities first caused me to consider the precarious changes in languages as a result of contact (or contamination as used among some linguists). Thus, I began to teach dialects & dialect geography subjects as a Tale of Two Languages. Indeed, perhaps we can set up a generalized template roughly as follows: The Tale of Two X, where the variable, X, can be replaced by just about any term that may be appropriate in the sense that such two (or more) entities can be susceptible to change. Thus, when I began to teach my spring term in French Linguistics, I began to explain superstratum, adstratum, and substratum phenomena as contamination phenomena due to various factors---social, elitist, and others. If there is any difference X from Y, then there is potential for the Tale situation. One can, therefore, gain many interesting impressions (that is what they really are) of interdisciplinary possibilities by roaming around the websites having to do with historic subjects in linguistics, both in terms of professors dealing with these issues, or going to the programs that are subsumed under that rubric. Either way one does the search, many interesting ideas will pop into one's head.  In fact it is so fast in coming that one needs a notebook for jotting down the connections.
 

X. Some of my course offerings: Why I am interested in Interdisciplinary Concerns.

LIN 3010 INTRODUCTION TO DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS (3)

One course that I have taught over many years is the offering called LIN 3010.  Some professors believe that it is "beneath themselves" to offer such a course, but in fact this course in the Linguistics curriculum is the kind any new professor ought to be expected to begin their career teaching. Not only does such a course present a sweep of all the major traditional facets of linguistics, but such a course also gives students the precise idea of what linguistics "is about." On the other hand, such a course is a responsible one since it is a feeder of potential bodies in linguistics. Thus, only the brave in heart need offer it. The syllabus for such a course can be composed of the following generic topics:

Introduction to linguistics" What is it and what do linguists do?
Morphology: The idea that "words" are not necessarily the smallest meaningful units.
Phonology: The wonder that the brain does not seem to be in synch with ear and mouth.
    Sub components: Phonemics & Phonetics.
Syntax: That wonder of Man in terms of the intermediary role for thoughts and phonations.
Semantics: The idea that significance can be important to sanity.
Pragmatics: What makes people really tick.
The Brain: The unexplored "inner" space.

I have always desired for such a course to last for two semesters. Certainly the materials here ought to keep people busy for that long.
*The courses below with asterisk (*) prefixed are those that I initiated and taught when I came to USF in 1970.

*LIN 4040 DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS (3)

This courrse is the logical one to follow LIN 3010. Students examine a whole series of typical data in various languages and attempt to describe what is going on both in terms of generalities and what must happen for the data to be right. The issue is that whatever school of thought is to be followed, students may not at first be able to use the formulae correctly. So, is there only one way?  If 50 linguists got together looking at the same data, there still would be 50 solutions. In my teaching of the course, morphology and syntax came early since phonology (working with the miutiae of language) tends to get students in a tizzy. So, I save the meat until later. At long last, students are introduced to the idea that shorthand symbols can expedite explanations better. They also are more fun and cause passersby at a student cafeteria to wonder what the linguistics student is doing.
 

*LIN 5700 APPLIED LINGUISTICS (3)

This is a course in practical linguistics training and as such has some pedagogical concerns. The WLE Division  has decided to offer this course for phonological training, including phonemic & phonetic transcriptions and their applications to data. Another, independent course, offers the syntactic and semantic levels of training to our Graduate students. Many of these may become our Doctoral candidates for whom such courses can be seen as a boon to their training, boosting marketability.

*LIN 6018 ISSUES IN THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS (3)

This course has in mind the idea that topics can reveal interest in varied subjects in linguistics. My aim for this course has been to offer likely topics at the start, cull those that appeal the most; then proceed to formulate a "ground plan" for study. If the class is large enough, a topic can be distributed to each student for a term project paper with sizeable research base. Meanwhile, students attend lecture-demonstrations over these topics in seminaria.Some past topics have included: The Panini method vs. Greco-Roman plans; How the Greek schools examined data; The Port Royale School; The Kazan' School and offshoots leading to Prague; The power of Trees; How deep does Phonology Go?; What is exactly the "Science" of Interface Reasoning? The course has traditionally been offered in the evening, one night a week, from 6.00p. to 9.00 p. Such a plan encourages attendance by teachers from the school systems near campus and gives them time to collect their thoughts over dinner before attending class. Many are standing graduate students in our programs and take advantage of furthering their education since USF is basically a commuting university. We also offer an extremely wide array of courses via electronic distance methods.

*LIN 6117 HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC THINKING (3)

My own personal joy has been the times I have been able to offer this subject. Like LIN 6018 (supra), this course is interested in how people thought about language at various times. My text has varied from the Robins Short History of Linguistics to Seuren's History of Western Linguistics. The latter is my choice since there is a very large array of topics including mathematical logic, Boolean reasoning, older western semantics vs. Generative solutions and their "demise." Since, unfortunately, the Indian treatments of data are not given, I have had to offer these ideas myself with some prepared lectures over Panini's [ put a macron over the  a  and a dot under the first  n  since the  a   sounds like "aw" of awful and the  dotted-n  is retroflex nasal] method of analysis of Sanskrit, including the panca-panca [put a tilde ~ over the two palatal  nasals]. This translates roughly 'five-by-five' and concerns the science of the consonant matrix of  p,   t,   t-retroflex,   c-palatal,  and   k along one direction and the  aspirated-p,  plain-p, aspirated-b, plain-b, and nasal  along the other of a biaxial (x  vs.  y)  matrix.  I show students that the Panini rules resemble Chomsky's formalisms better than do the formal arguments of the Greek Stoa and others from southern or Mediterranean Europe. In fact, Mediterranean linguistics may have put the brakes on the quick development of linguistic thinking in the direction it took in America. Fritz Newmeyer's text on Linguistic Theory in America is a fine textbook in terms of presenting cogent, readings of important developments in a way that highlights these developments. Moreover, there is a wide array of more "private" works, or those that tackle more narrow problems and issues.

*LIN 6748 CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS (3)

This is a graduate MA course whose title I prefer is CONTACT LINGUISTICS since it involves so many different aspects
of internalization procedure: Contrastice linguistics, Error linguistics, and Interlanguage Hypothesis, to name three. In a way the entire experience of contact affects just about everything and I see an interdisciplinary application of this idea in nearly all my courses, if not all. Culture is under constant contact apparati, and so are languages.  I use a drawing of a hand holding an eye-dropper filled with a dye.  The dropper is held over a Petri dish and the liquid dye is dropped on the agar in the dish. In a matter of a few days, spores can be noted, showing the spread of a colony across the agar.  Languages are like that concerning dialects and other trace elements. This is a large part of the social nature of language.  The course, however, dwells mainly on theoretical applications (I hope that is not an oxymoron) of ideas to aquisition, storage-retrieval systems, avoidance procedure, and other ideas. Students offer a term project paper on CA, EA, or Interlanguage Hypothesis, as they so choose.

*LIN 6520 SYNTACTIC DESCRIPTION (3)

In this course students are introduced to basic descriptions of syntax. We devote some time to a basic ontogeny of Generative analysis so that students have a basis of reference; then move into pertinent current theory. One of the vital ideas is the notion
of matrix since this idea spawns entire thought patterns concerning relations and dependencies. In fact, dependency theory could not go far without the idea of matrix (biaxial relations or even triaxial relations---or 3-D effect). I like to use Tinker Toys and labeled wire coat-hangars to show how entire axis-space can be gathered into one rubric that, in turn, obeys the same syntactic principles that lesser strings commanded in the same way must behave. A. N. Chomsky's basic  XP  plan is most ingenious because it offers a master-rubric for anything that is of a phrasal nature: NP, VP, AP, PP, INFLP, CP. Perhaps more that today are not fully examined will be forthcoming. The course looks at  a situ  and  in situ  relationships in languages while, at the same time, seeking to find interconnections so that one can establish possible  before-after relations.  The ideas of "feeding" and "bleeding" in phonology can find some currency in syntax thereby.

*LIN 6322 PHONOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION (3)

This course, current with ongoing research in phonology, also must have a basic ontogeny to "fill in" for student experiences.
The course looks at basic 70s type works such as the MIT School of thought with Sandy Schane's work in French Phonology,
Morris Halle's works and notions of grammatical expression of morphophonology. The ideas of tier phonology are presented
and data are analyzed with ideas of comparison and accuracy of description. Nearly every aspect of linguistic training these days is rapidly becoming a two-semester subject since the presentation of linguistic ontogeny needs to be seen before some of the more recent ideas can be shared and appreciated.

*LIN 6351 THE SOUND SYSTEM OF ENGLISH (3)

This course offers a detailed presentation of phonological systems in Standardized (note the form I use) English as well as some of the other "Englishes" found today. The course begins with anatomy: the thorax, neck, laryngeal and supralaryngeal anatomies.
The idea of breathing is covered in which I explain diaphragmatic air supply (something I was trained to do as a musician playing woodwinds---oboe, English horn, and clarinets). I demonstrate the vocal bands (as if the head were missing) by blowing through an oboe reed (without the rest of the instrument). This supplies the "fundamental" sound of the basic quality a "voice" has prior to upper partials and voice qualifiers that the head supplies. Then when the rest of the instrument is attached, the oboe quality or timbre can be identified immediately.  Just as the number of reeds and whether the bore of the instrument is conical or cylindrical are enough to make the clarinet differ from the oboe. Exactly parallel to this, we have the size of vocal bands, head size, whether we have a serious cold or stuffy sinuses, and other matters that "shape" the timbre of the voice. Because when a person sings in a foreign language and thus warps time, suprasegmentals, and certain other voice qualifiers, the singer can fool a native speaker into thinking that this singer is also a native speaker.  I have experienced that countless times
on the concert stage.  It can be embarrassing---somewhat.  At the same time this is what the singer hopes to hear.  The issue is a wonderful paradox.

The course also looks at dialectology & linguistic geography.  The old Hans Kurath and Raven McDavid PEAS (Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States) contains vocalic matrix charts of F-1 and F-2 formant readings and plots. Students can examine these from overhead projections and comment on overlapping any two of these at a time. Students then are asked to construct a dialect map of a typical town, given some features in a key to the map. I tell my students that it is like a weather map with fronts and their symbols.

*LIN 6571 STRUCTURE OF A SPECIFIC LANGUAGE (3)

This offering for me has been one of the most pleasant because under this rubric at USF I have been able to teach subjects not given in the university catalogue. Although the LIN 6571 was in place in a general way, I was able over the years to offer many topics. Some of the most enjoyable experiences include the following offerings: Egyptian hieroglyphic issues, included a basic grammar study such as roots, affixes and their government procedures in a basic sweep of syntax. Together with that, we prepared some basic texts from Sir Wallis Budge's books on the language. Included were selections from The Book of Ani. Other courses (under the rubric of Directed Readings) included: Old Church Slav(on)ic grammar and text (at the time Lunt's grammar and Auty's texts); Japanese Field Methods (We had a native speaker on campus to serve as informant. The project was: to attempt to find pragmatosemantic controls on 'honorifics' in Japanese); Polish Verb Morphophonology (this one drew 12 participants "in the old days"---mostly army veterans) and the text was Alexander Schenker's two volumes of Polish grammar; two courses in Beginning Czech (Harkins's textbook); Russian Linguistics (when it was under this course system); Quichua syntax (my native Quichua student twice traveled to Ayacuzco to gather data in lexis and syntax).
 
 





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