The Linguistics Wars

When it was first published in 1957, Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures seemed to be just a logical expansion of the reigning approach to linguistics. Soon, however, there was talk from Chomsky and his associates about plumbing mental structure; and a new phonology; and a new set of goals for the field, cutting it off completely from its anthropological roots and hitching it to a new brand of psychology. Rapidly, all of Chomsky's ideas swept the field. While the entrenched linguists were not looking for a messiah, apparently many of their students were. There was a revolution, a revolution which has colored the field of linguistics ever since. Chomsky's assault on the mainstream and his development of transformational-generative grammar was promptly endorsed by new linguistics recruits swelling the discipline in the sixties. Everyone was talking of the revolution and major breakthroughs seemed imminent. But something unexpected happened - Chomsky and his followers had a vehement and public falling out. In The Linguistics Wars, Randy Allen Harris traces the origins of this revolution in linguistics and tells how Chomsky began reevaluating the field and rejecting the extensions his students and erstwhile followers were making. Those he rejected (the generative semanticists) reacted bitterly, while new students began to pursue Chomsky's updated vision of language. The result was several years of infighting against the backdrop of the notoriously prickly sixties. The outcome of the dispute, Harris shows, was not a simple linear matter of a good theory beating out a bad one. The debates followed the usual trajectory of most large-scale clashes, scientific or otherwise. Both positionschanged dramatically in the course of the dispute - the triumphant Chomskyan position was very different from the initial one; the defeated generative semantics position was even more transformed. Interestingly, important features of generative semantics have since made their way into