Aaaanyway. Hit Hillman again. Current reading: (1) "Language Universals and Linguistic Typology", Comrie; (2) "Typology and Universals", Croft; (3) "Hero with a Thousand Faces" and (4) "Masks of God", Joseph Campbell. I'm 50 pages into (3), which is extremely wacky and Freudian and Jungian all at once. I wasn't surprised about the Jungian bits; it's sort of what I was expecting from what little I knew about Campbell, but sheesh, the guy takes the Oedipus complex as gospel fact (all the while smugly picking apart the Gospel, capital-G) about the human condition, and mentions some guy's dream about accidentally dropping a hammer on his father, killing him, and how his mother thereafter comforts him, as if this were conclusive (rather than anecdotal, hello textbook-example-of) evidence.
Also 15 pages into (1), which has a bit of a bone to pick over Greenberg-vs.-Chomsky in the arena of what sort of universals are to be expected in language (more or less concrete vs. syntactically abstract) and how they are to be discovered (study of many languages vs. intense analysis of one). Fairly even-handed, despite the author's obvious preference (he was a student of Greenberg's) and I like his emphasis on falsifiability.
