I‘ve been adding more to my ongoing Fedwren Project than Matthew Oliver’s piece or the work of Busse and Farley–albeit slowly, the demands of daily life outside academe being what they are. Most recently (to this writing), I read Benjamin Bruening’s “Word Formation Is Syntactic: Adjectival Passives in English,” which I entered into the Fedwren Project here. (It is the fiftieth entry in the project, although I am listing alphabetically rather than when I encounter and annotate the pieces.) There’s a summary of the article there, and Bruening himself provides an abstract, so I don’t feel any need to give another one here. I do, however, think I need to offer some response to the article here–not one in which I point out what I see as problems with the piece, but one that leads me to some reflection on what I see as a tendency in scholarship involving Robin Hobb–now that I feel I’ve got enough material described that I can speak with some certainty about such things.

As might be guessed from the title, Bruening’s article is a linguistics argument. I’ve got some training in linguistics; it’s effectively a requirement for working as a medievalist, and, as I noted long ago, my own graduate training had specific guidelines about it. (It’s been a while since I was there; things might’ve changed in the interim.) Too, my wife’s formal academic training is as a linguist, and, as might be expected, many of her friends from her adventures in New York City–on which I joined her for many years–were in similar training. I can safely claim, therefore, to have some familiarity with the discipline, although I am not a specialist in it by any means (insofar as I am a specialist in any academic field at this point in my life). Even so, Bruening’s article was…challenging…to read–but then, academic wok is written by specialists to other specialists, and I am, again, not a specialist.

(I do wonder what reaction Bruening has faced in challenging the orthodoxies he does in the article, however. He does seem to say he thinks a lot of people are wrong, and it’s possible they might be, or that he’s right–which isn’t the same thing. But it’s also the case that academics are all too human, and there’s no shortage of ongoing grudges attested in the literature of several disciplines. [I point at a small example here.] There are stories of fistfights, even–some of which are true; I saw one. It’s a personal curiosity, but one I’d not mind having indulged.)

Despite the challenge, however, I did manage to make my way through the piece. And I noted in it the use of Hobb’s work as an example of natural English language text, a use that follows the same pattern a number of other works I’ve annotated for the Fedwren Project display. It seems that several social scientists read Hobb; they make use of her work as examples of community formation, word formation, and the like. I suppose it suggests her appeal beyond “the usual suspects” (people like me who get accused of not being part of “the real world” or of doing work that has any utility or sense behind it), since it’s not likely the researchers in question would have recoursed to her without being familiar with her work already. I suppose, too, that it suggests Hobb’s writing style as a model worth mimicking, since it does seem to be accessible to non-literary types and even to machine learning. Certainly, there are worse examples for such to follow, although I have to wonder about issues of consent and compensation.

There is, of course, more work for me to do on the Fedwren Project. I have other articles printed out and ready for me to read and remark upon, as well as others in PDF waiting for similar attention. There’s a dissertation waiting for me to read, too, and I am certain there is other work out in the world that I don’t know about quite yet. How much, if any, of it falls into this same pattern, and what other patterns of research are out there, I look forward to seeing.

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