Talk given at Literature, Art and Other Disciplines: Internrelationships seminar 25 th March 2010 at MIL, DU. 1 Cartography of Disciplines: De-centring Knowledge Tanmoy Bhattacharya Department of Linguistics tanmoy1@gmail.com Most modern sociological theories about the world erect grand narratives of universals, unconcerned with time and place. In different ways, such theories deny the specificity of their ground of knowing, they emerge from the centre, marked by exclusion and erasures. Dislodging the Grand Narratives It’s little wonder then that such narratives, not only in sociology but in other social science disciplines and humanities, came under attack from various forces – the account of which is well know to all. Through that blitzkrieg of the 60s, there is one discipline that however emerged stronger and in fact came to define much of how science is to perceived thereafter. Although the easy, Saussurian binaries came under attack, the dominant Panian tradition in formal Linguistics marched ahead with little change in its view of the world. This more or less unchallenged tradition from Panini to Chomsky established one of the strongest citadels in language studies. The reason for this relatively unscathed existence is no different from unchallenged existence of much of pure sciences – by their very ‘nature’, subjectivity – and therefore, locality, -- cannot find any place in the practice of these branches of knowledge. Grand Narrative of Formal Linguistics However, the global, grand narrative of formal linguistics is a little different from the ones in pure sciences, a difference in fact that makes this narrative even more grander. The undeniable, egalitarian, democratic claim that we are all born equal adds that extra dose of credibility to Chomskyian formal linguistics missing in pure sciences. This has been a clever move, formal linguistics is so much rooted in this concept of equality that it immediately demands a re-thinking whenever it’s usurpation is threatened. The facts too stand by the hypothesis fairly convincingly that languages (and therefore by extension, people) are more similar than different. It becomes that much more difficult to dislodge a narrative that is tinged with such noble notions of equality of people. It becomes that much more difficult to take the opposing stand that we are more different than similar and even harder to demonstrate that fact empirically in terms of languages. Centre-Periphery Discourse in Formal Linguistics What we little soldiers do, therefore, is to chisel away, sometimes in a miniscule fashion and sometimes not in so miniscule a fashion, at the grand narrative; it is not worth one’s while to overthrow or dislodge the grand narrative. Within formal linguistics, the logic of the study of syntax and semantics depends on constructing the skeleton and head, respectively, of the language body as a universal. Morphology, and to some extent phonology, is part of the language body where variation is inscribed --- a site where you are free to misbehave. For good reasons, therefore, ‘narrow syntax’ is that ever erect spine of the architecture of language where the idea of a sentence starts and ends its journey from numeration to interpretation ({N} LF). We are led then to conclude, by implication, since it’s never explicitly admitted, that it is in fact syntax that drives much of the computation toward a possible interpretation, the rest of even