During my doctoral studies, I registered for two advanced seminars on History of American Linguistics and Linguistics Categorization. Professor Silverstein was often in a very good mood, talking about various issues (from the nineteenth century, the age of scientific induction, to the 1960s, linguistics wars) without stopping for approx. 2.5 hours every week. As I recall, I was the sole graduate student from linguistics. I felt a bit intimidated, being surrounded by his (that is, University's) best graduate students from anthropology. Despite that, he was extremely attentive and a lot of fun to listen to, and I learned a great deal from him, as I did from many other great scholars with UChicago. Towards the end of a Spring Quarter, I had a chance to give a paper in front of him. My designated theme concerned a model of formalizing gradience between linguistic categories. After my 2 hour long presentation, he made me some very kind compliments, as well as extensive comments, for which I was (and still am) very grateful. They boosted my confidence in myself, which I tended to lose among the remarkable assemblage of teachers and students in the graduate school.
Incidentally, he may be recognized as a functionalist or cognitivist due to his earlier works on animacy (Silverstein 1976a) and/or indexicality (Silverstein 1976b). If I understand him correctly (with anti-passive, split ergative, and so on), his linguistic thinking was of an astute formalist. Perhaps, "functionalist" and "formalist" are a false dichotomy.
