Linguistics, strangely, did not stand still after this book first came out. Much has happened in the field, so much has changed with this new edition. But most of those linguistic happenings have direct, if not exactly smooth, trajectories out from the battle over Deep Structure that sparks this story. They follow a clear and coherent narrative; in fact, two clear and coherent and mutually informing narratives, each of them international in scope, though each radiating from one of the two American coasts.
From the one coast, with Noam Chomsky’s MIT-rooted programme of generative grammar, the story grows through multiple, somewhat looping iterations of a framework with an atomistic picture of meaning, a procedural ethos, and the computational allegiance that has always been Chomsky’s, and MIT’s, calling card. It grows toward an evolutionary framework of the sort many people thought it should have had all along, all the while somehow maintaining its fundamental idealism, and has now adopted the label Biolinguistics. From the other coast, out of a Berkeley hot house teeming with figurative, encyclopaedic, latticed approaches to meaning based in the moment-to-moment creativity of everyday speakers, grows a narrative arc that flourished into a framework known as Cognitive Linguistics. In most of these overlapping developments, one finds a guy with perhaps the greenest thumb in linguistics, George Lakoff.
While these two trajectories might still look like the two solitudes suggested by the acrimony from which they sprung, I am hopeful. “Every discourse on metaphor,” Umberto Eco has said, perhaps thinking mostly of the arguments that could be heard around Berkeley, against the backdrop of MIT,
originates in a radical choice: either (a) language is by nature, and originally, metaphorical, and the mechanism of metaphor establishes linguistic activity . . . or (b) language (and every other semiotic system) is a rule-governed mechanism, a predictive machine that says which phrases can be generated and which not, and which from those able to be generated are ‘good’ or ‘correct’, or endowed with sense; a machine with regard to which the metaphor constitutes a breakdown, a malfunction, an unaccountable outcome. (Eco 1983: 218)
But there is a plot development shared by our two narratives that indicates theories of language may not have to live always and exclusively either in Eco’s (a)-world or Eco’s (b)-world: the long, slow, attenuation of hostilities. The productivity of our two stories, and the great energy that linguists have poured into each of them, and the (alas, not universal) decline of antagonism in linguistics bodes promisingly for the Chomskyan and Lakovian frameworks to become as mutually informing as their narratives. Languages are creative junctions of our personal and cultural lives, rich with figures and lattices of meaning, under daily renewal. They are also systematic and predictive instruments. It’s time the twain shook hands.
So, the book has changed a good deal. The reception the first edition got has been wonderfully valuable in making these changes. Uniformly, on a personal level, the reception has been encouraging. I can’t go to a linguistics conference without a handful or so of kind strangers asking me if I am the author of The Linguistic Wars and then telling me how much they enjoyed it. Often in recent years they have also taken to asking about whether I plan to write about Minimalism or Biolinguistics or Frame Semantics or Construction Grammar or the Cognitive Linguistics program more generally, because of their perceptions that these developments are natural outgrowths of the wars. (I have also been asked if I will write about Chomsky’s and/or Lakoff’s politics. No.)
On a scholarly level, there have been two phases of the book’s reception, the initial reviews and its uptake into academic and journalistic accounts of Chomsky, Lakoff, and linguistics. I have to say that my favourite example of its uptake in the academic literature is “Idiostylistic Peculiarities of Fabricated Knowledge in the Monograph The Linguistics Wars by R.A. Harris” in the Russian Linguistic Bulletin, with its irresistible compliment, “The author makes the most use of fantastical knowledge in these spheres to create a persuasive system of images to realize his cognitive and communicative intention” (Menshakova 2016:1). But my love of that article does not diminish my appreciation of the others, even the ones that have used swear words like post-modern and Foucauldian of my work. I am especially grateful to the comments that have provided correctives to the book or pushed me into fuller perspectives of the history. I have responded to them as best I can, often quietly incorporating them but sometimes taking them up in the text or its notes.
One especially good thing in the Linguistics Wars literature is that Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff (who did not like my book much at all the first-time round, and who I have no reason to believe will have any more affection for it this time) have each now published a few accounts of the Deep Structure battles and their fallout. The reasons for their disagreement with my telling of those developments, therefore, is now public; Chomsky has also commented in a few places directly on the book itself. I have incorporated their accounts, though not uncritically, and they can be checked out independently. The three versions, Chomsky’s, Lakoff’s, and mine are all quite discrepant. They are likely all true (mine certainly is, to the best of my ability, and I give them both the benefit of the doubt). I will only plead that their truths are personal. Mine is historical.
The book has changed, but in some senses not enough. The major regret I have with this edition is that the scholarship on the history of linguistics has grown impressively in the decades after the first edition, giving a much rounder picture of both the Bloomfieldians, whom I largely caricatured in that edition, even more than I realized at the time, and also of Chomsky’s rise. In an early draft of this edition I incorporated the insights and findings of that scholarship, but the manuscript ballooned up so alarmingly (to the publisher) that I had to trim it way back, and all of that material ended up on the cutting-room floor, along with some bits and pieces from the post-bellum coverage.
I know there are people who may feel an apology is due to them with my rewriting of The Linguistic Wars, some for neglecting what may have been better advice than I thought it to be at the time, some for overlooking or forgetting their critiques, but some also for my being ‘hard’ on them in the text. It is a solid bet that I have offended at least one particular person. But it is a tough business being responsible to facts and conclusions that may be inconvenient to some people without being unkind, which I have tried very hard to do. If I have not always succeeded it was not for lack of effort. It was, rather, that the scales pulled too completely toward accuracy, clarity, and the strength of the interpretation that emerged from those facts and conclusions. For anyone who feels ill-treated, I offer a blanket, sincere, but rather shapeless apology that the record, as I saw it, got in the way your sense of self. But I also want to offer one highly specific apology as well: sorry, Jamin, Ms. Piggy did not make the final cut.
I also apologize to the many people who have helped me with this project who I am now slighting in this preface. There are just far too many of you to name, or even remember, but I am grateful for our discussions and correspondence. There are a few, however, whom it would be criminal to omit. I repeat my profound thanks to Haj Ross, Paul Postal, George Lakoff, Noam Chomsky, Ray Jackendoff, and the lamentably late Jim McCawley, as well as the many others catalogued in the first-edition preface, listed at the head of the Works Cited list, or scattered among the pages of the book, who gave me so much support when I was finding my way into this story. I thank my Oxford referees for their generosity in giving me such extensive and detailed suggestions on a swollen and lumpy earlier draft of this edition, including the one who seems to have been very angry with it. I thank the lamentably late John Ohala, and Manjari Ohala, for the wonderful photograph on the cover. It may not go especially well with the “edgy” and “confrontational” design that OUP hopes will give the book more shelf appeal, but it is such a perfect image of Chomsky in the period it had to be included. Among my many interlocutors on these topics over the years, I need to single out Noam Chomsky (again), John Goldsmith, John Joseph, Robin Lakoff, Paul Postal (again), and Geoff Pullum, and to single out from among those singulars Frederick J. Newmeyer. Beyond all his specific, individualized help, Fritz’s continually inspiring scholarship has set the bar in this field for rigour and lucidity.
The first printing of this edition contained an error concerning claims in Noam Chomsky’s Undergraduate Thesis. I would like to thank Bruce Nevin and Geoffrey Pullum for pointing that error out to me, and Peter Daniels (2010) for the scholarship I overlooked when reproducing that error, which Oxford University Press has promptly corrected.
Much has happened in linguistics since the first edition of this book; so, too, in my rather smaller corner of the cosmos, life-shaking and life-making happenings. Their names are Galen and Oriana, the bright one and the golden one, though both are golden, both brighter than bright.
It all starts, and will never end, with Indira.
Milton, Ontario
R.A.H