When I was thinking about writing a PhD thesis, I began to muse about a literary analysis of the Swiss-German writer Max Frisch who fascinated me at that time (and still does to-day). My brother in law, the late English linguist, Julian Dakin (here is some information about him, for the interested:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collect/elt_archive/dakin_collection/), asked me why on earth I was going to write a thesis on literature. I said that as a "humanist", I was interested in the human soul in its best clothing, namely art, and specially, Literature with a big
L.
Being British, Julian agreed by saying: "Oh? How interesting!" adding: "And why is Literature a piece of human soul for you?". Well, I gave him all sorts of reasons; however, like Cory, he wouldn't care less about the words I said, but went on along his idea: "Don't you think that Literature would be impossible without words?". "Well, obviously", I said. "So", he went on, "perhaps, to study the way words are organized in human minds would be a better move to find out about the human soul, don't you think?". I didn't know what to say, but I had hated the prescriptive and the structuralist philology/linguistics I had done at school, and the idea of writing a thesis on that awful material did not look very attractive to me.
Seeing my reluctance, Julian gave me a book by one Japanese named American Hayakawa,
Language in Thought and Action (
http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/dp/0156482401), and recommended me to read it. I liked it so much, that I passed it on to my sister and brother ... and to my mother who was also enthralled by it. We began talking about this book among ourselves for a couple of months and Julian acted as a webmaster without a web, solving all our problems, extending some points, etc.
He was the first to make me like Linguistics (
Semantics, it was). I used the book as obligatory assignment in my first classes at the University, when I was teaching English language, instead of literary works, and slowly by slowly got the idea to write perhaps a linguistic thesis. In the meantime, Julian died of heart attack, and i went to Edinburgh where my sister lived, etc.
I have never re-read Hayakawa's book again. I am sure that I would not like it half as much today. But it is still, for me
THE most important linguistics book in my life. I wish that as a Linguistics instructor, I should have had the same success that Julian had wit me with at least one of my students!
