The Linguistics Wars

"This book chronicles the history of linguistics from the 1950s rise of Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar, in alliance with cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence, to the current day. It centers on a highly consequential dispute at a key moment of that rise, the relative importance of structure and meaning. The dispute marks a rupture between what looked to be an approaching Chomskyan hegemony in theory and a flowering of alternate approaches that complement but do not replace his approach, as well as some that advance it in various ways. The rupture was between the theory of Generative Semantics, pushing to include more and more meaning into linguistic theory, and Interpretive Semantics, which resisted that push, putting more and more focus on linguistic structure. But in many ways the dispute can be reduced to George Lakoff, the most prominent voice on the more-meaning side, and Noam Chomsky on the more-structure side. Chomsky is a big personality, quiet and understated but always gesturing at monumental and revolutionary implications for his ideas, never failing to mobilize great numbers of linguists, often with large contingents of psychologists, philosophers, computer scientists, or biologists sharing the enthusiasm as well. Lakoff is also big personality, anything but quiet or understated, equally comfortable gesturing at grand revolutions. So, personalities are central to the dispute and its aftermath, alongside the theories, the data, and the technical developments, with other social currents playing various additional roles, from military and educational funding to the counter-culture movement of the 1960s to the growth of computational technologies, and all of these factors show up in the chronicle, along with a cast of other remarkable and influential characters. Noam Chomsky is unquestionably the most influential linguist of the twentieth century-many people claim of any century-whose work and personal imprint remains powerfully relevant today, so the book ends by an analysis of Chomsky's influence and legacy"--