Is philosophy of language obsolete?

I'm preparing my notes for a seminar I'm teaching this fall on philosophy of language--which I've taught a number of times in the past, and which I very much enjoy. But I realize I have little idea of what someone aspiring to contribute to the field needs to know.

There's the central-papers-by-central-figures approach (Martinich's volume, say). But what do you know when you know all of that? Could you have a productive conversation with a working linguist? Try it--not easy. They'll think you're a quaint relic, still worrying about whether the present King of France is bald.

Forget the two-or-three-books-by-famous-philosophers (Searle, Grice, Quine, Kripke--anything like that) approach--same as the central-papers approach. Fine for the history of philosophy, not so useful to the working language scientist.

There's the review-of-recent-work approach (Ostertag's MIT volume on descriptions, or Reimer and Bezuidenhout's collection, for instance). Good, I think, but now the conversation-with-the-linguist test depends on whether that linguist works in a field related to the problem delved into (most likely semantics or pragmatics). Syntacticians won't have much to talk about with you.

I think the litmus test for what a philosopher needs to know (and do) is the same one we philosophers always ought to take: is what we know general (so that any working scientist in the relevant field can find a way to use it) and is it data-driven (so that any working scientist in the relevant field can find a way to use it)?

Philosophers of language have got to start doing work that linguists across the board (especially syntacticians, I think) can get interested in and use. Otherwise we run the risk of generating a lot of work that doesn't advance the science of language.